Today in History, July 17, 1918- Czar of Russia and Family Executed

Today in History, June 25,1903-
Birthday of Eric Blair, aka George Orwell

The British Author of "1984" and "Animal Farm" was born on this day in Motihari, Bihar, then British India.

Blair was a Middle class son of a British Civil Servant in India, who worked in the Opium Department of the Government. Britain was in the Opium Business for over 100 years, and its export to China in particular was both their leading generator of income, but also the cause of two seperate Wars with China which rebelled against the destructive effects of that traffic in the mid 19th Century.

Young Blair was sent back to England for his education and eventually went to Eton. He became childhood friends with Cyril Connelly, who later in life first published Blair in his magazine Horizons. His early writing was, according to Blair, inflenced by H. G. Wells, about whom I will write more on another day.

After graduation, he chose a Civil Service posting in Burma, then still a Province of British India, and entered the Police training School at Mandalay. He became eventually the adiminstrator of the second largest Prison in Burma. He became fluent in Burmese, and spent much of his free time enjoying social and religious life with the "Karen" people of Burma, immersing in their culture.(today, the Karen people have been subject to ethnic cleansing and mass murder by the Myanmar Military, for which they are indicted by the World Court)

He went back to London in 1927 after a bout with Dengue Fever, and began writing. He found himself interested in the world of poverty in London, ventured into the poorest areas and began to write the stories of some of the "down and outers" he came into contact with. It was during this time he adopted Democratic Socialism as a political view. Much of his writing was in the style of Jack London, whom he greatly admired, as he dressed like a tramp and adopted a pseudonym, P.S. Burton. 

His first published essay on his experiences was called "The Spike", about the low life. His second essay on the same theme was called "Down and Out in Paris and London", (1933) By this time, he had decided not to go back to Burma, resigned from the Police, and moved to Paris to write, beginning a travelogue on his prior experieces in Burma. It was around this time he adopted his famous pseudonym, George Orwell.

In December 1936, Blair travelled to Spain, and against the advice of friends like writer Henry Miller, got involved in the Spanish Civil War against the Fascist government there. During this time, he became affiliated with a Communist group which was later exposed as secretly being in collaboration with the Fascist government, which was a valuable lesson for him that is reflected in 1984. 

He returned to the fighting front and was shot in the throat by a sniper, survived miraculously, and was declared medically unfit for further service. Still under threat because of accusations of collaborating with Fascists because of his prior affiliation, he and his wife Eileen, who was with him working as a volunteer behind the lines, escaped Spain and made their way back to London in June 1937. There, he took up writing again, and had to recover further from a bout of Tuberculosis in a London Sanitarium.

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Due to his Medical history he was unfit for service when WWII started, but joined the Home Guard. His wife Eileen was working for the Government for the Department of Censorship during Wartime, which for Blair became a source of great insights for him to draw upon, also in writing 1984. Unfortunately, his Wife had severe depression and never really pulled out of it.

Blair's concept of the Home Guard was that it should be seen as a Revolutionary People's Militia, which might be called upon to conduct Partisan street warfare against the Fascists if there were a takeover or occupation of England. He gave lectures and wrote about street fighting, field fortifications, and the use of mortars. 

During this time he kept a Wartime Diary, and adjusted to life in London during the Blitz. He continued writing, doing Book Reviews, and writing for the American "Partisan Review", a New York group of Intellectuals who like him were Socialists. Blair, like many others at the time was shocked and horrified by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Hitler and Stalin, and became a profoundly committed anti-Stalinist going forward, a seminal event in his and the lives of other socially conscious intellectuals of that era. 

Then, after Hitler invaded Russia he wrote;
"One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc, are suddenly forgotten". --War Time Diary"

Finally he was accepted for War work in August 1941, working for BBC. When interviewed, he indicated that he accepted "absolutely the need for government propaganda to be directed by the government and stressed the view that, in wartime, discipline in the execution of government policy was essential". So, he wrote anti-Nazi propaganda which was broadcast into India to counter Nazi propaganda there. 

Remember that there was immense anti-British sentiment in India which made them extremely vulnerable to Nazi influence. He resigned in 1943 due to the fact his broadcasts were having little or no influence. Also, he wanted to concentrate on his book "Animal Farm". 

He and his wife adopted a child at this time, but they were forced to move after a German V-1 rocket destroyed their home. Blair had to scrabble through the rubble for days trying to rescue his books. An additional blow was the British Ministry of Information blocked the publication of his book, Animal Farm before he finished it, due to a decision by the Head of the Ministry, Peter Smollett. Smollett was later exposed as a Soviet Spy!

Eventually, Blair finished Animal Farm and 1984, and both became extremely popular as exposes or warnings about the creeping threat of Totalitarian leaders and States. People had many theories about who were the targets of these novels, Stalin, the Soviet Union, etc. In fact, he was warning Democracies such as the USA and UK about the threat of Dictatorship through media propaganda, since this was something he had seen close up in England and India. He was warning as well about the use of ideological brainwashing to induce populations to go along with Geopolitics. Meaning, the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" in which the enemy can change from year to year.

He was warning against the technological advance of the surveillance and propaganda State which he had seen up close in both Fascist and Communnist Systems. He warned against those governments which faked their Economic Statistics in order to create fake credibility for the Party which was in power. He also warned about Dictatorships which created and controlled phoney opposition groups to misdirect, identify, and trap dissidents, a lesson today for the naive followers of so-called "Third Parties". 

Many of his terms in 1984 especially became part of the English Language popular usage, such as Big Brother, Thought Police, Two Minutes Hate, Room 101, memory hole, Newspeak, doublethink, proles, unperson, and thoughtcrime.

Much of what we have come to accept as a part of daily life, political and social interaction, intellectual life(or lack thereof) Criminal Justice, (also lacking) and other forms of Dictatorship have become validations of Blair's warnings. Some would argue that this was an inevitable result in advances of technology, as did Zbigniew Brzezinski in his Book "The Technotronic Era" . I think Blair would disagree. I would think that his starting point would be his sense of the fundamental importance of human fairness, the absence of which he saw first hand during his upbringing in British India, where he saw the grossest and most abominable inequities of Racial and Class driven brutality visited upon a whole people. This is something that transcends whatever changes occur in technology and begs the question of what is our Human Nature, the question ironically posed by his story Animal Farm, an Allegory for the immorality of the British Aristocracy and its evil system.

These are some thoughts on Blair/Orwell, given the constraints of time and space, which I think are useful and worth pursuing. Certainly his books are worth rereading in the light of present times. And, emphatically worth thinking about, especially the next time you might accidentally tune in to Fox News, and watch it for a few minutes.