The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  McCarthyism, described by the senator as “Americanism with its sleeves rolled,” was anathema to many members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. One US propagandist in Rome called McCarthy “the chink in our shining armour, the embodied refutation of everything I’m saying.” The American Committee for Cultural Freedom was therefore sliced in two. Liberal members—Dwight Macdonald, Arthur Schlesinger, Mary McCarthy (no relation)—decried the senator’s thuggish dishonesty, while the conservative wing—James Burnham, Max Eastman, Irving Kristol—believed that the threat of communist infiltration justified extreme measures. Burnham’s The Web of Subversion: Underground Networks in the US Government was McCarthyism with its cuffs buttoned; his hawkishness led him to quit the committee, Partisan Review and his consultancy job with the Office of Policy Coordination. Orwell was right about him all along: “Burnham thinks always in terms of monsters and cataclysms . . . Everything must happen suddenly and completely, and the choice must be all or nothing, glory or bust.”

  The McCarthyites were a prime example of what the historian Richard Hofstadter later called “the paranoid style,” obsessed with “the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.” Hofstadter observed that anti-communism had rapidly degenerated into a mirror-image orthodoxy, different only in degree. Most of the worst culprits were themselves ex-communists who wielded the authority of apostasy. Refugees from doublethink, traumatised by their old lies and excuses, they turned to what Orwell described as “Transferred Nationalism.” Louis Fischer diagnosed the type brilliantly in The God That Failed:

  He abandons Communism intellectually, yet he needs an emotional substitute for it. Weak within himself, requiring security, a comforting dogma, and a big battalion, he gravitates to a new pole of infallibility, absolutism and doctrinal certainty . . . When he finds a new totalitarianism, he fights Communism with Communist-like violence and intolerance. He is an anti-Communist “Communist.”

  Orwell never possessed the quasi-religious faith in communism that for so many turned into its negative image, nor was he motivated by the “group-advancement and cultural monopoly” that Mary McCarthy thought motivated the zealots. Uninterested in accruing power, he never craved membership of the winning tribe. “In five years it may be as dangerous to praise Stalin as it was to attack him,” he wrote in 1946. “But I should not regard this as an advance. Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word. What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or black mail from any side.”

  McCarthy’s career ended in ignominy because he managed to alienate the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Army and his fellow congressmen. But McCarthyism, which outlasted him, was the kind of thing that Orwell had described in his statement on the broader relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “In the USA the phrase ‘Americanism’ or ‘hundred percent Americanism’ ”—a phrase dating from the first Red Scare in 1919—“is suitable and the qualifying adjective is as totalitarian as anyone could wish.”

  One of McCarthy’s malign innovations was to successfully operate a quasi-totalitarian disregard for the truth by exploiting democracy’s weaknesses. Ostensibly, he and the press were bitter enemies. He compared Time and Life to The Daily Worker, singled out a reporter for abuse in front of a jeering crowd, and once ranted about his mistreatment by the press to an audience of bewildered schoolchildren. Yet reporters loved, pursued and ultimately sustained him, because he could always be relied upon for juicy front-page copy. Even though much of what he told them was groundless, McCarthy knew, like no politician before him, how to hack the American press. He would embellish stories over several days to maximise coverage and hold press conferences an hour before reporters’ deadlines, leaving them no time to fact-check his statements, not that many even tried.

  In 1952, The New York Times admitted that it had misled its readers by printing McCarthy’s claims without question but abdicated responsibility for the deception: “It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore charges by Senator McCarthy just because they are usually proved exaggerated or false. The remedy lies with the reader.” By gaming the system, McCarthy thus carved out his own unique post-truth zone in which he could say anything. Decades later, Times reporter James “Scotty” Reston explained McCarthy’s success: “He knew that big lies produced big headlines. He also knew that most newspapers would print almost any outrageous charge a United States senator made in public . . . McCarthy knew how to take advantage of this ‘cult of objectivity.’ ” Almost everybody, he added, “came out of the McCarthy period feeling vaguely guilty.”

  One of McCarthy’s ugliest stunts, in 1953, was to dispatch his fanatical young lieutenants Roy Cohn and David Schine on a tour of the United States Information Agency’s libraries in Europe, where they aggravated everyone they met and drew up a list of “red” books to be removed, including titles which had previously fallen foul of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Some overeager German librarians actually incinerated the blacklisted books, an image so shocking that President Eisenhower broke his silence on McCarthy. “Don’t join the book-burners,” he told a graduating class at Dartmouth College. “Don’t think that you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.”

  The incident chimed with the theme of a forthcoming novel that became, culturally and politically, a kind of American answer to Nineteen Eighty-Four: Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. “Whether or not my ideas on censorship via the fire department will be old hat by this time next week, I dare not predict,” Bradbury wrote. “When the wind is right, a faint odour of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy.” Bradbury’s satire on mass media includes an alienated employee of a totalitarian regime; the suppression of knowledge and erasure of memory; the constant shadow of war; the “televisor”; and a very Orwellian inversion: in a world of fireproofed buildings, firemen start blazes instead of putting them out, and insist that it’s never been any different.

  Perhaps these affinities were coincidental. When asked whether he’d been influenced by Orwell, Bradbury instead named Darkness at Noon as the “true father, mother, and lunatic brother” of Fahrenheit 451. But from now on, a comparison to Nineteen Eighty-Four would be the price of entry for anyone publishing dystopian fiction. Between the Korean War and the Cuban missile crisis, the genre included Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano: America in the Coming Age of Electronics, Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future, David Karp’s One, L. P. Hartley’s Facial Justice, Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033, and Ayn Rand’s Anthem (finally making its US hardback debut) as well as many justly forgotten imitators. “Whereas twenty years ago the average yawn-enforcer would locate its authoritarian society on Venus or in the thirtieth century, it would nowadays, I think, set its sights on Earth within the next hundred years or so,” wrote the novelist Kingsley Amis in his survey of science fiction, New Maps of Hell. With the notable exceptions of B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two and Aldous Huxley’s 1962 swansong Island, writers had lost their appetite for designing utopias.

  In the US, where Anthem filled an entire issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, the dystopian genre blurred into science fiction. With its sensationalist, futuristic cover (“A Startling View of Life in 1984. Forbidden Love . . . Fear . . . Betrayal”), the 1950 Signet edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four was clearly pitched at fans of Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. But Amis noted that literary snobs refused to accept that Orwell’s book belonged in a category they believed was beneath serious consideration. In terms of genre as well as politics, Nineteen Eighty-Four resembled the contested territory on the fringes of Oceania: worth fighting over.

  In his Marxist Quarterly hatchet job, published in January 1956, James Walsh predicted, “1984 is already on the way out. We need the extra push now to get rid of it altogether.” In fact, what was on the way out was Soviet co
mmunism’s credibility in the West.

  In June, newspapers published the leaked text of “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” the February speech in which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had denounced many of Stalin’s crimes. Five months later Khrushchev trampled hopes of a cold war thaw by sending in tanks to crush a popular uprising in Hungary. The two events triggered an avalanche of disenchantment, as Communist Party members across the West walked out in their tens of thousands. It has even been claimed that a samizdat Hungarian translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four was a set text for the 1956 rebels.

  This explains the subsequent importance of Orwell’s list to his critics on the left. After Hungary, many of them had to accept that they had been wrong about the nature of Soviet communism and that he had been infuriatingly right. The most widely read socialist intellectual of the 1950s was a vindicated anti-communist and, what’s more, a dead one, encircled by a halo of moral rectitude. He therefore inspired a kind of resentful admiration. Sometimes the resentment swallowed the admiration. For the Marxist critic Raymond Williams, looking back years later, Orwell was a political roadblock: “if you engaged in any kind of socialist argument, there was an enormously inflated statue of Orwell warning you to go back. Down into the Sixties political editorials would regularly admonish younger radicals to read their Orwell and see where that all led to.”

  The first phase of the cold war certainly enabled the right to pull off a heist on Orwell in general, and Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular, but it was not permanent. History moved on, like sunlight passing through a room, and threw different shadows.

  CHAPTER 11

  So Damned Scared

  Nineteen Eighty-Four in the 1970s

  It is difficult to imagine a previous period when such an all-pervasive hopelessness was exhibited at all levels of British life.

  —Stephen Haseler, The Death of British Democracy, 1975

  On a bright, cold day in April 1973, David Bowie and his percussionist Geoff MacCormack boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway in Khabarovsk. The aviophobic singer was taking the long way home to London from his Japanese tour. The week-long journey to Moscow was a lark to begin with, but the closer they got to the capital, the thicker the atmosphere of tension and suspicion. In Moscow, Bowie watched a day-long military parade from the window of his hotel on Red Square. “On my trips through Russia I thought, well, this is what fascism must have felt like,” he later said. “They marched like them. They saluted like them.” As the train to Paris passed through the no-man’s land between East and West Berlin, the two men were stunned into silence by the still bombed-out ruins. “The sad reminders of man’s failings seemed to drag on forever as the train crawled onward,” remembered MacCormack. “Nobody uttered a word.”

  This heavy trip intensified Bowie’s growing sense of paranoia and panic. On the last leg of the journey home, he spoke to Roy Hollingsworth from Melody Maker about how it had changed him. “You see Roy,” he said, chain-smoking manically. “I’ve seen life, and I think I know who’s controlling this damned world. And after what I’ve seen of the state of this world, I’ve never been so damned scared in my life.”

  One did not need to have travelled through Brezhnev’s Russia to feel fearful in 1970s Britain. IRA bombs were almost as much a feature of life as the rocket bombs in Airstrip One. The economy was gripped by stagflation, an ugly word for an ugly condition which combined inflation with economic stagnation. In October 1973, a miners’ strike conspired with an Arab oil embargo to produce the worst fuel shortages since February 1947. With the return of blackouts, petrol rationing, reduced television service, and nonfunctioning elevators, Britain began to feel like the opening pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four. “There is a great sense of crisis everywhere,” wrote Labour MP Tony Benn, using the word of the moment. During the festive break, Conservative cabinet member John Davies told his family to enjoy themselves, “because I deeply believed then that it was the last Christmas of its kind we would enjoy.”

  On New Year’s Eve, the country switched to a three-day week for all nonessential businesses in order to conserve fuel. The resulting plunge in productivity cruelly exposed the underlying weakness of the economy, leading the governor of the Bank of England to predict a decade of austerity—ending, therefore, in 1984. Recession, terrorism, industrial unrest, a sense of irreversible national decline: an ocean of troubles which Conservative prime minister Edward Heath appeared utterly incapable of navigating. The New York Times observed “a gradual chilling, a fear of dreadful things.”

  One of those dreadful things, a military putsch like the one recently mounted by General Pinochet in Chile, surfaced in an article by political editor Patrick Cosgrave in the Christmas issue of The Spectator. “A country rent apart by warring factions, not one of which retains the support of the public for its veracity or ability, is already ripe for a coup,” speculated Cosgrave. Talk in the bars and corridors of Westminster had grown feverish. Could it happen here? Yes, he concluded, it really could. “Nothing is, of course, inevitable. But if the process of disillusion, failure and subversion, conscious or unconscious, which I have described goes on it can have only one result.”

  Of course, not everybody in Britain felt that democracy was on its deathbed. This economic crisis, unlike most, hit the well-off harder than the working class, so the fretful middle-class politicians, journalists and novelists were not showing the whole picture. Millions of Britons listened to Slade and the Osmonds, went to see Live and Let Die and The Way We Were, relaxed in front of Are You Being Served? and Porridge, enjoyed their extra days off, and generally went about their business. But Bowie’s antennae were attuned to shriller frequencies. His song “Life on Mars?” had looked for a way forward amid the debris of the 1960s; “Five Years” was a histrionic countdown to Armageddon; the ominous parenthetical in “Aladdin Sane (1913–1938–197?)” pencilled in a Third World War. “I’m an awful pessimist,” Bowie confessed to the New Musical Express. “That’s one of the things against me. I’m pessimistic about new things, new projects, new ideas, as far as society is concerned. I think it’s all over, personally. I think the end of the world happened ten years ago. This is it.” It was not at all surprising that his mind was turning to writing a rock musical based on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  Nor was Bowie the only person in an Orwellian frame of mind. The German magazine Merkur declared, “1974: der Countdown für 1984 hat begonnen.” It certainly hat begonnen. To borrow one of Orwell’s own phrases, his fateful date exerted the same hypnotic pull on anxious minds as a boa constrictor on a rabbit. “It is a shock to realize that the year is only a decade away,” wrote Richard N. Farmer in The Real World of 1984: A Look at the Foreseeable Future. “Instead of being way out there in the misty future, many of us will live to see what 1984 is really all about.” As the libertarian Jerome Tuccille wrote in Who’s Afraid of 1984?, “Never before in history has a single year held such ominous connotations for such a broad cross-section of humanity.”32

  By 1973, sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four had passed one million in the UK and at least ten million in the US. It had become all-purpose shorthand for not just a grim future but also an uncertain present. “The term Orwellian is made to apply to anything from a computer print-out to the functional coldness of a new airport,” wrote the novelist Anthony Burgess, pointing out that neither have much to do with the colourless decay of Airstrip One. In Parliament, Nineteen Eighty-Four surfaced in debates on China, Cambodia, civil liberties and privacy. The Washington Post called it “the most famous, the most frequently alluded-to book written in the past 25 years.”

  Summoning Orwell’s ghost was the order of the day. The publication of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell in four volumes in 1968 hugely enriched readers’ understanding of his personality and ideas, leading to another round of What Would Orwell Think? Several reviewers wondered what he might have said about such burning issues as Richard Nixon, Harold Wilson, Adolf Eichmann, Vietnam, Israe
l, the Prague Spring and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; none could answer confidently. Mary McCarthy concluded her essay in The New York Review of Books on a stark and callous note: “If he had lived, he might have been happiest on a desert island, and it was a blessing for him probably that he died.” Sonia was so offended that she wrote a methodical, six-page retort for Nova. Her late husband seemed to disappoint McCarthy, she wrote tartly, “if he does not set down his thoughts on events which happened after his death.”

  Guessing what Orwell might have thought was a much dicier proposition than saying what Nineteen Eighty-Four meant now. For most readers, disinclined to comb through letters and journals, the novel was a world entire. In the years since Stalin’s death in 1953, it had broken the bonds of cold war propaganda and become a book that almost any political faction could claim; it was increasingly claimed by the left. Even as the ultra-McCarthyite John Birch Society made 1984 the last four digits of its phone number, the Black Panthers added Orwell to the syllabus of their Oakland Community School. In Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a veteran of the 1930s left is told by an indignant student that Orwell was a “a fink . . . a sick counterrevolutionary. It’s good he died when he did,” but Philip Roth quoted “Politics and the English Language” in an epigraph for his anti-Nixon satire Our Gang. The New Left intellectual Bruce Franklin scoffed, “this trash can’t withstand the storms of rising revolution. For instance, how can you assert that revolutionary leaders are just pigs, as Orwell does, in the face of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh?” But the equally left-wing Noam Chomsky maintained that Orwell sided with “the common man” against “repressive powers,” so “the idea that his writings should be used for anti-communist ideology would have been horrifying to him. At least I find it horrifying.” The real-life radicals at International Times magazine were quite happy to accept a gift of Orwell’s typewriter from Sonia, while the FBI monitored campus societies named after Orwell in case they were fronts for socialist subversion.