Some conservatives compared Britain to Weimar Germany, while others talked of Chile before the coup. Pinochet’s takeover, and the subsequent “shock treatment” recommended by economist Milton Friedman, had a sinister allure—Chile’s Big Brother spoke of “scrubbing our minds clean.” Visiting the country in May for The Daily Telegraph, Peregrine Worsthorne advised readers to be “more openminded,” because despite the murders, tortures and disappearances, Pinochet’s junta wasn’t as bad as all that. “All right, a military dictatorship is ugly and repressive,” he wrote, clearing his throat. “But if a minority British Socialist Government ever sought, by cunning, duplicity or corruption, terror and foreign arms, to turn this country into a Communist State, I hope and pray our armed forces would intervene to prevent such a calamity as efficiently as the armed forces did in Chile.” Friedman went so far as to say that this was “the only outcome that is conceivable.”
This was the kind of febrile thinking that led renegade spooks and disgruntled grandees to gather in well-furnished rooms in order to brainstorm treason and discuss the rumour that Harold Wilson himself was a KGB mole, masterminding a communist cell in Downing Street. Fears of a general strike stoked talk of helicopter-borne commandos descending onto the picket lines. In Robin Maugham’s wartime pamphlet The 1946 MS., General Pointer justifies his state of emergency to the nation: “Today, because of the strikes throughout his country, neither confidence nor security exist . . . I am certain that you will agree with me that we must therefore, take every step possible to restore security in this country.” In July 1974, General Sir Walter Walker, until recently NATO’s commander in northern Europe, sounded uncomfortably similar in a letter to The Daily Telegraph calling for a dynamic strongman to save Britain from “the Communist Trojan horse in our midst.” The response, he claimed, was overwhelmingly positive. Asked if there was public appetite for a British Pinochet, he smoothly replied, “Perhaps the country might choose rule by the gun in preference to anarchy.” Oswald Mosley, the ghost of fascism past, materialised on television to endorse a similar binary choice. Lord Chalfont, a former Labour peer fond of quoting Orwell in the House of Lords, summed up these baleful manoeuvres in an article for the Times headlined “Could Britain be heading for a military takeover?,” berating both “the militants of the neo-Marxist left [and] the bullyboys of the neo-fascist right.”
Walker, a virulent bigot and red-baiter, became leader of Civil Assistance, which merged a breakaway faction of Unison with the similarly minded Red Alert. Colonel David Stirling, founder of the SAS, launched yet another organisation of “apprehensive patriots” called GB 75. When Stirling’s plans were leaked to Peace News, Tony Benn divined their real purpose: “Although I don’t for a moment take any of them seriously, there is no doubt that it is intended to create a feeling that anarchy is about to break out, and therefore we need a strong authoritarian Government.” Benn, who became industry secretary after the October election, was the lightning rod for efforts to undermine Wilson’s government, weathering a relentless campaign of smears, surveillance and death threats.
The storm clouds rolled on into 1975. “What is certain, and felt instinctively by almost everybody, is that things cannot go on in their present way,” pronounced a Times leader column in May 1975, setting no limit on how bad the situation could get before Britain got a grip on itself: “When you have reached 1938, you have sometimes to wait for 1940.” The following January, Lord Chalfont presented a polemical documentary called It Must Not Happen Here, in which he stood beside Karl Marx’s grave sombrely ticking off the ways in which Britain had already slid towards communism. Watching at home, Benn felt that he was “looking at the faces of the Junta.”36
During 1975 and 1976, the theme of doughty patriots thwarting Soviet plots to destroy British democracy was parodied in the sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, attacked in David Edgar’s play Destiny and celebrated in thrillers like Ted Allbeury’s The Special Collection and Kenneth Benton’s A Single Monstrous Act. Both Allbeury and Benton used to work for the intelligence services. There is no better illustration of the paranoia that seized mid-’70s Britain than the fact that some former agents were novelising scenarios that other former agents were simultaneously debating in earnest. The boundaries between fiction and reality became increasingly sketchy. One leaked dossier of MI5 dirty tricks was code-named “Clockwork Orange.”
Lord Chalfont later attributed the success of new Tory leader Margaret Thatcher to “all these fears of bureaucracy, of too much government, of the erosion of freedom of the individual, fears of anarchy.” Thatcher, he said, “struck a chord which was waiting to be struck.” While Unison, Civil Assistance and GB 75 all faded as quickly as they had arrived, the National Association for Freedom (NAFF) was a slick, professional operation with strong ties to Thatcher and the Tory right. One of NAFF’s leading figures, the Australian academic and journalist Robert Moss, marked the group’s launch in late 1975 with a hair-raising book called The Collapse of Democracy. Faced with either totalitarianism or anarchy, he suggested, Britain might find that the kind of authoritarianism seen in Chile, Spain and Brazil was the least worst option: “you do not pit Hamlet against Lady Macbeth.” He described the dreadful alternative in “Letter from London 1985,” a hyperventilating foray into dystopian fiction about an economically ravaged Republic of Britain under the heel of the Working People’s Government. In Moss’s nightmare the police have given way to “factory militias,” the House of Lords has been replaced by the Trade Union Congress, and Buckingham Palace is now the Ministry of Equality. Members of the banned Conservative Party live like guerrillas, listening to Radio Free Britain while trying to outwit the surveillance state. “It is a cold world we have entered in the name of equality and peace,” Moss concludes solemnly, “and I doubt whether there is any return from it, at least in our lifetimes.”
All prophecies are fiction until they come true. If the utopian novel began as an effort to sweeten political arguments with characters and plots, then it’s unsurprising that serious polemicists would add some Orwellian spice to their jeremiads. In The Death of British Democracy, Stephen Haseler, a self-described “cold war liberal” from the Labour right, sketched two equally dire near-future scenarios: either ungovernable chaos, poverty and violence, or a union-led dictatorship with “all the gobbledegook of thought involved in the Orwellian nightmare of 1984.” The essay collection 1985: An Escape from Orwell’s 1984: A Conservative Path to Freedom raised the spectre of Labour turning Britain into “a national-socialist member of the Warsaw Pact.” Only the resonance of the date mattered to the contributors: Orwell’s name was mentioned only once in its 146 pages of hard-right brainstorming, and he was quoted not at all.
It was getting hard to tell the forecasts from the fiction. The spectre of a trade union dictatorship went prime time with Wilfred Greatorex’s anti-socialist TV thriller 1990, which pitted Edward Woodward’s action-hero journalist against the KGB-like Public Control Department in a shabby totalitarian Britain brought about by national bankruptcy. “It’s much more frightening than 1984,” Woodward informed Radio Times, “because it’s closer to us than Orwell’s book was to his own generation. It’s really just around the corner.” Socialist playwright Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play took place in an internment camp established by a fascistic government of national unity in 1984. In Brenton’s Orwellian words: “It is a satire which says, ‘Don’t let the future be like this . . .’ ”
The new comic book 2000 AD also based its future shocks on the wildest fears of the era. Conceived by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra, the world of Judge Dredd resembled a mongrel of Diamond Dogs, Dirty Harry, The Sleeper Awakes and a berserk parody of General Walker’s authoritarian fantasies. The survivors of nuclear war live in seething mega-cities policed by militaristic lawmen with a cavalier disregard for due process. The anti-hero Dredd is a brutal quasi-fascist whose look Ezquerra modelled on his memories of Spain under General Franco.37 The
BBC television series Blake’s 7 knitted the cruellest innovations from Orwell, Huxley and Wells into a kind of Star Trek for the chronically pessimistic. Patrick McGoohan was filled with apprehension, too. In a 1977 television interview, he said: “I think progress is the biggest enemy on Earth, apart from oneself . . . I think we’re gonna take good care of this planet shortly.” An audience member asked if the public would rise up and set things right. “No,” said McGoohan, “because we’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche.”
As the novelist Martin Amis observed in 1978, “no one creates utopias anymore: even the utopias of the past now look like dystopias.” Amis, whose formerly socialist father Kingsley was now venting his fears in gloomy right-wing science fiction, was writing this in a review of Anthony Burgess’s very peculiar 1985. The first half of the book is an idiosyncratic critique of Nineteen Eighty-Four, driven by Burgess’s conviction that the novel was fundamentally a black comedy about post-war Britain. Having dismissed Orwell’s “improbable tyranny,” Burgess presents his alternative. His “Tucland” has the same basic premise as Robert Moss’s Republic of Britain—economic ruination and drab egalitarianism brought about by over-mighty trade unions—but Burgess stuffs it with prime-time pornography, knife-wielding street gangs, the brutish lingo of Worker’s English, and wealthy, fundamentalist Arabs. The new names of the Arab-owned hotels—the Al-Hiltons and Al-Idayinns—sum up the novella’s unhappy blend of leaden satire and neurotic conservatism. Every explicit nod to Orwell is an act of literary self-harm.
Among the book’s innumerable problems was Burgess’s inability to predict 1978, let alone 1985. Martin Amis guessed that it had been conceived in 1976, when “everything seemed ready for the terminal lurch,” but the fever had already broken by the time it came out. Britain remained fragile, fractious and violent, laying the ground for the Thatcherite revolution, but its acute existential crisis had subsided. The private armies had stood down. The violent far-right National Front, which had briefly become Britain’s fourth largest party, was in retreat. It had not happened here.
As for Burgess’s contention that Orwell’s “prophecy” was proving false, it was beside the point. “Novels don’t care whether they come true or not,” wrote Amis, “and Orwell has withstood the test of time in quite another sense.” Nineteen Eighty-Four had become a vessel into which anyone could pour their own version of the future. Whereas the ’60s generation invoked it in a spirit of defiant unity, the punks embraced the book’s sense of dread. “Look, you know what happened to Winston,” snapped the Jam. “Now it’s 1984 / Knock-knock at your front door,” sneered the Dead Kennedys. The Clash’s debut single, “1977,” climaxed with Joe Strummer shooting into the future, screaming the dates of years to come. He stopped abruptly, like a body plunging through a gallows: “It’s 1984!”
CHAPTER 12
Orwellmania
Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984
Orwell was floating around in the ether. I hadn’t read 1984, but we all know what it is.
—Terry Gilliam
A few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1983, a small number of viewers in Twin Falls, Idaho, became the first members of the public to see what would become the most celebrated television commercial of the decade.
This is what they saw. Legions of grey ciphers march like robots into an auditorium to hear a face on a colossal screen rant about the “Information Purification Directives” which will rid society of “contradictory truths.” Charging through their ranks, ineptly pursued by riot police, comes a young athlete with a picture of a computer on her vest, bearing a sledgehammer. She is the only woman in the room; the only source of colour and vitality. As the speech approaches its climax, she spins her hammer and flings it at the screen. The dictator’s face explodes, flooding the room with white light and shockwaves. The ciphers gawp in shock, like sleepers waking. “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh,” the narrator intones. “And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”
Several months earlier, Apple’s mercurial co-founder Steve Jobs had asked ad agency Chiat/Day for a “thunderclap” idea to launch his make-or-break product. Creative director Lee Clow, art director Brent Thomas and copywriter Steve Hayden proposed an Orwellian concept that they’d been toying with for a few months. Jobs, who still saw himself as a countercultural insurgent, loved it. Chiat/Day hired Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner, to film the commercial at London’s Shepperton Studios with an unprecedented budget. Scott cast discus-thrower Anya Major as the hammer-wielding heroine and David Graham, a character actor who had voiced Daleks in Doctor Who, as the ersatz Big Brother whose speech Hayden wrote by “kick[ing] around phrases from Mussolini to Mao.”
The low-key New Year’s Eve screening was booked solely to categorise the ad as a 1983 production and thus qualify it for awards season. The real showcase was to be the broadcast of the Super Bowl three weeks later, routinely the biggest US television event of the year. There was just one problem: the ad that had delighted Apple’s annual sales conference horrified the board of directors, who asked Jobs to kill it. “They said it would be irresponsible to spend all that money on an ad that didn’t show the Mac,” said Clow. Chiat/Day only kept it alive by dragging their heels and pretending they couldn’t sell off the top-dollar Super Bowl slot. It was a shrewd act of passive resistance. On January 22, midway through the game between the Washington Redskins and the Los Angeles Raiders, ninety-six million Americans saw “1984.” One admiring rival adman called it the first Super Bowl spot ever to get “people in bar rooms talking about a commercial instead of the game.” The ad immediately became a news story, generating priceless free publicity. According to Advertising Age, “No commercial in recent memory has created such widespread industry and public interest so quickly.”
The commercial was a brilliant example of anti-corporate corporate marketing, twisting Orwell’s warning into an upbeat fable for the information age. Major’s hammer-throwing rebel represented both Apple and the Apple user: the plucky underdog who takes power back from The Man. At the Mac launch on January 24, Jobs made a speech portraying industry leader IBM as a wicked Goliath trying to crush its only serious challenger: “Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?” Chiat/Day, however, didn’t care about IBM. Their target was the negative image of computers as instruments of intrusion and control, put across by movies like Ridley Scott’s own Blade Runner. The best way to combat malign technology, implied the ad, was with benign technology. If Winston Smith only had a hammer.
The “1984” commercial also demonstrated that the iconography of dystopia was now so well-established that it could be distilled into a sixty-second spot: the passive uniformed drones, the militarised police, the television screens, the generic totalitarian rhetoric, the lone rebel, the looming face. Viewers immediately knew where they were. The scenario of mechanised unanimity (“We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause”) is in fact more Zamyatin than Orwell, and Scott’s key visual reference was the H. G. Wells movie Things to Come. Chiat/Day account director Paul Conhune bluntly called the commercial “a B-grade interpretation of Orwell’s book” designed to “seize the notoriety Orwell created for this year.” For all its virtuosity, it didn’t take a maverick visionary to make that connection.
“THERE IS ONLY ONE YEAR LEFT!” screamed the Orwell-themed window display of a Greenwich Village bookstore in January 1983. A few streets away, more than seventy international luminaries, including conceptual artist Jenny Holzer and architect Rem Koolhaas, participated in an exhibition called 1984: A Preview, “casting its appraising eye on the Orwellian prophecies.” In the press, journalists of all political persuasions polished their crystal balls and sharpened their swords. In a special issue of The Village Voice (“LET’S FACE
IT”), Geoffrey Stokes wrote that the novel had “almost as much impact on the eve of 1984 as it did when it was published in 1949.” One year was apparently not enough for the German novelist Günter Grass, who branded the 1980s “Orwell’s decade.”
By December, Orwellmania was pandemic. “If you don’t have an opinion about Orwell’s portrait of the ultimate totalitarian state, you had better get one,” advised The San Francisco Chronicle. Bernard Crick, Orwell’s biographer and tireless advocate, warned of a “black plague” of Orwelliana that would approach the scale of Star Wars. The estate’s literary executor, Mark Hamilton, was certainly earning his keep. He told The Guardian that he had turned down applications for T-shirts, calendars, board games, a stage musical, and anything else that might “cheapen” Orwell’s reputation. When the reporter informed him of bootleg T-shirts reading “1984: Doublethink About It,” Hamilton sighed. “We can’t control everything.”
During 1983 and 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four sold almost four million copies in sixty-two languages. In January of what Penguin dubbed “the Year of the Book,” it became the first book ever to top the New York Times mass-market fiction best-seller list years after its initial publication. The celebrations were manifold: a new US edition with an afterword by Walter Cronkite; another annotated by Crick; the publication of a facsimile of the extant manuscript; cover stories in Time, Encounter, Radio Times and Der Spiegel; a movie; two television dramas; a stage adaptation by Czech dissident Pavel Kohout; a Madame Tussaud’s waxwork of the writer typing under the visored eye of an armed policeman; and an endless stream of documentaries and conferences. Journalists walked in Orwell’s size-twelve footsteps through Paris, London and Wigan. The Thoughtcrimes series at London’s Barbican Theatre featured political work by Samuel Beckett, Václav Havel and Harold Pinter, whose new play One for the Road was a meditation on language, violence and power.
The Ministry of Truth Page 28