George Orwell For Today: Part One

 

After three years of being a parish councillor, I had good reason to revisit George Orwell.  Not his fiction but his philosophy which had been created not by sitting around drinking and pontificating in a local pub (although he might have done on occasion when he had the money to spare) but by hard graft at the grass roots level of rubbing shoulders with the poor and the dispossessed, by working in the police force and as a tutor and civil servant, and being intelligent and self aware enough to perceive accurately in order to assess what was going on around him.   

His philosophy became enshrined in his most well known books particularly Animal Farm and 1984, which demonstrated that Totalitarianism existed in all political persuasions seeking ultimate control and power over its populations, usually to assuage and fulfil self-interested egos.

So what had he learned from his wide experiences and what was he seeking to convey in his novels which soon captured the imagination?  He was of the view that the  very groups, individuals and regimes - voted or co-opted into authority and given power to act - became the very agents undermining common decency, a vital ingredient necessary for a civil society.  

So what is common decency?  Does it exist anymore in the 21^st Century?

George Orwell thought that it began with knowing what the truth was and how that is created and interpreted for public consumption.  Having participated in the Spanish Civil War he formed a view that since newspapers were a primary source of information generation and dissemination at the time, newspapers had a responsibility to adhere to notions of common decency, one of which was to accurately report ’the news’ (social media and Television did not emerge in UK until 1932.  What did exist at the time was political propaganda).

Unfortunately, with first hand experience of reported events, he found that truth was being sacrificed so that fiction posed as fact and that reality in the hands of the unscrupulous was being manipulated.  Facts were being politicised and although this had always been the case where power and authority were concerned, Orwell created the vocabulary with which to analyse the phenomenon.  He called it Double Speak.  This was spelled out in his books by labelling  the Ministry of Peace - which really concerned itself with war;  the Ministry of Truth - which  rolled out and disseminated lies; the Ministry of Love - which was actually about torture; and the Ministry of Plenty which glossed over and even caused starvation, via their adopted policies. 

From Orwell's observed experience at home and abroad, he deduced, that political language was designed to make lies sound truthful, and murder respectable and to give 'an appearance of solidity to pure wind'.

Listening to today’s politicians and reading and/or listening to the news, we could deduce that we are living in the fictional world of 1984 which is fast becoming  present day reality.  A sobering thought indeed. ....