1 THE REALITY PRINCIPLE

Almost immediately upon the onset of the great pseudo-pandemic of 2020-2, the name of the English novelist and essayist George Orwell, along with the title of his greatest work, enjoyed an extraordinary resurgence in public awareness, with quotations and memes proliferating all over the internet and even the streets as the relevance of his greatest work to our own times grew ever clearer. Within days of the first lockdowns, sceptics had tagged the syndrome Covid-19(84) — a formulation which encapsulated the proposition perfectly, and with an economy impossible even in Newspeak, that the emergency was being used, or had even been contrived, as a political tool.

Conscious UK rappers name-checked him, as the most effective way of evoking the totalitarian nightmare that was about to engulf the Western world. Memesters quoted and paraphrased him, often to brilliant offect.

But here and there in the comments I’d see a rumour that had already been floating around the internet for a few years: that George Orwell was one of theirs, not one of ours — an operative for the elite, a literary double-agent: in dissident parlance, a ‘shill’ — one who has taken the King’s Shilling — and that his last and greatest work was written not as a warning to humankind but as an instrument of ‘predictive programming’; in other words, that his intention was not to avert the dystopian future he described, but actually to help manifest it by conditioning his readers to accept, not its desirability of course, but its inevitability. [1]

[1] The most topical example to illustrate the principle of predictive conditioning would be the proliferation over the years of Hollywood plot-lines about devastating pandemics, including Twelve Monkeys (1997), I am Legion (2007),Contagion (2011) and many more— including, of course, Bill Gates’ Netflix Documentary The Next Pandemic (2019) — and the obvious role these played in conditioning the public to accept a terrifying new viral enemy-image.

The assumption is that in terms of the text itself it would be impossible to distinguish the functions of warning from conditioning: impossible to guage the author’s authenticity. It’s straight out of the book itself — under Ingsoc, anyone might be an agent of Goldstein; or an informer for the Thought Police. It transpires in the novel that even the rumoured underground rebel group — ‘the Brotherhood’ — has been set up by the Party as a fly-trap for dissidents, in an echo of the Bolsheviks’ own Operation Trust from the 1920s. The twenty-first century Truth Movement has no doubt been allowed to flourish for similar reasons, drawing in dissidents, though not so much to generate arrest lists as to map the human terrain.

The best way to control opposition is to make sure it is led by your own agents — that’s Disinfo 101. Beyond that, a paralysing atmosphere of mutual suspicion can be created by parachuting in disinformation agents whose task is to accuse others of being disinformation agents, triggering endless shill-wars and draining the energy of the movement — that’s Disinfo 2.0.

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As I’ve heard it, the case against Orwell goes something like this:

1. Orwell — his real name was Eric Blair (which doesn’t help!) — attended Eton College, England’s most prestigious secondary school and a grooming stable for future politicians, diplomats and intelligence officers. 

2. His great-grandfather was a wealthy man who married into the aristocracy and derived income from plantations in Jamaica. His father worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, and Eric Blair served in the Imperial Police in Burma before becoming a writer. His mother was from the wealthy Limouzin family; his maternal grandfather had timber interests in Burma.

3. One of Blair’s teachers at Eton was none other than Aldous Huxley, scion of an influential eugenicist family, brother of one of the architects of the United Nations, itself a prototype of the World State which Huxley went on to evoke in his own futuristic dystopia, Brave New World (1931). Huxley is presumed, then, to be a New World Order operative. The counter-culture researcher Jan Irvin of Gnostic Media has hypothesised that he may have been one of the architects of MK-ULTRA.

4. From this, the inference is drawn that Huxley became Orwell’s life-long ‘mentor’, feeding him information about the elite’s plans for humanity, for him to draw on in constructing a masterpiece of predictive conditioning posing as a political warning: the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Critics will also lump him in with Bertrand Russell, another democratic socialist from a wealthy background, who supported population reduction and mind control (‘through injections, injunctions and diet…’) and H G Wells, the popular English novelist turned promoter of a technocratic socialist World State, or ‘New World Order’.

5. The fact that Orwell took wartime work at the BBC (where he produced cultural broadcasts for Indian audiences) is taken as confirmation that he was an MI5 asset. From 1937 to the present day the intelligence agency has had offices in Broadcasting House, and vets all BBC employees. So this must be Orwell settling in back at HQ. (Orwell quit his post when he found out that almost nobody was listening to his broadcasts.) His first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessey worked as a censor at the Ministry of Information during the war.

6. In 1949, Celia Kirwin, the sister-in-law of Orwell’s close friend Arthur Koestler, started work at the Foreign Office in the Information Research Department (IRD), newly created to disseminate anti-Communist propaganda by placing articles in the international press worldwide and providing information to their authors. Orwell received a request from Kirwin, with whom he had been romantically involved at some point, to provide a list of writers who should not be approached by the IRD on account of their Communist sympathies. Orwell obliged, providing a list of thirty-eight names.

7. His last two books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were heavily promoted after his death by both the IRD and the US Central Intelligence Agency as propaganda assets in the ‘Cold War’ against the Soviet Union.

All of this is taken as evidence that the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist George Orwell was actually an agent of the British Empire and its intelligence services; placing all of his work — but especially his anti-totalitarian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four — under suspicion.

That’s the case in outline. If I’m missing something I invite anyone to help fill the gaps. Once in a while I have asked those who casually spread this calumny whether there is some concrete evidence they can point me to, but without learning anything new. Searching online, all I find is anti-semitic dross accusing him of having Jewish friends and showing a lack of ‘Jew awareness’ in his work. Expecting a man who risked his life to fight Fascism in the run-up to the Second World War to despise Jews is, I would suggest, not just a bigoted but an anachronistic smear. Orwell drew a veil, they say, over the role of prominent Jewish banking families in financing both Russian Communism and German National Socialism — but none of this emerged until long after Orwell was dead. Professor Anthony C Sutton, author of the explosive series of history books, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Wall Street and FDR, and Wall St and the Rise of Hitler, didn’t begin publishing until 1974, almost a quarter of a century after Orwell’s death.

The rumours seem to have taken off after the blogger Miles Mathis [3] ‘outed’ Orwell in the course of a 2015 post about Noam Chomsky. There are ‘red flags’ all over Orwell, he writes. He came from ‘vast pools of wealth’. He wore a Hitler-style moustache ‘throughout the war’. The photo he uses is from the mid-twenties, in Burma. It’s the only photo I’ve seen of him wearing this style of moustache, fashionable in the military at the time, after which he switched to the Clark Gable pencil style which he wore throughout the thirties and forties. (Does Mathis never have second thoughts about what he commits to print?) He goes on: most people think the portrait of Big Brother used on some editions was modelled on Hitler but really it was a portrait of Orwell himself! (In fact on its publication Nineteen Eighty-Four was universally recognised as what it was, a projection of Stalinism into a post-revolutionary future in England, and Big Brother as modelled on ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin, who was rarely seen in public.) When Orwell immersed himself in working-class life, homelessness and poverty, he was really ‘spying’ on the poor. He published in left-wing journals which were later exposed as having received CIA funding. (Again, this didn’t come out until twenty years or more after Orwell’s death). What else? Oh yes, going back to Eton, it seems that his principal tutor, the historian A S F Gow, may or may not have been the ‘fifth man’ in the Burgess-McClean Cambridge spy-ring. If so, then Goss was spying for the Soviets. So this is a very confused picture –a young man with a Hitler moustache, recruited by a Soviet spy to write anti-Communist satires? To Mathis it’s all the same — it’s just ‘Intel’.

If I’ve got it right — Mathis does not make his argument explicit, relying instead on sarcasm and innuendo — the accusation is this: that although Orwell gave every evidence of detesting imperialism and being prepared to oppose totalitarianism to the death, really he was working for the British Empire and the European totalitarians; that by condemning, satirising and lampooning totalitarianism he was actually serving its agenda by conditioning his readers to accept the inevitable victory of Big Brother.

These rudimentary and ludicrous remarks by Mathis, rather than the research of Jan Irvin, probably sparked the current trend of ‘exposing’ Orwell as a ‘shill’, which in recent years has reached a pitch of solipsistic idiocy I find amazing. I caught a hilarious bit of chat, with an obviously Mathis-inspired conspiratainment crew who call themselves The Sheep Farm, which went something like this: only a handful of photographs of George Orwell exist, and in some of them he looks like a different person. Thus we have no way of knowing whether he even existed; for all we know, his books were written by a committee. Throughout his career he wrote social commentaries, and then suddenly produced these two political satires, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which have nothing in common with his previous work and ‘came out of nowhere’.

And the interviewer, James Delingpole, unforgivably fails to object: ‘Out of nowhere. Aren’t you forgetting about Catalonia.’ Instead he buys into it and starts mourning another fallen cultural icon, perfectly ready to countenance that most Stalinist of tactics, the ‘unpersoning’ of George Orwell, and write him out of history.

This kind of culturally nihilistic, hands-free, competitive conspiracy freestyling is very fashionable at the moment, with the incomprehensibly popular Miles Mathis as its doyen and the lightweight conspiratainer James Delingpole as uncritical fan-boy. For George, it’s just déjà vu all over again. He’s been through this kind of smear-campaign before. Orwell was put on trial in absentia by the NKVD in Barcelona, 1938, remember? Mathis falsely implies that Orwell was convicted of being a British agent, which is not the case: the charge was simply that he was a member of the POUM, the Spanish Communist militia which was not affiliated to Moscow. The NKVD decreed that those who would not submit to Moscow’s leadership were ‘hindering the war effort’ and were therefore ‘objectively fascist’. Isn’t that beautiful totalitarian logic? Orwellian, you might say.

Andres Nin, leader of the POUM, was arrested and tortured to death. The Belgian Georges Kopp, Orwell’s friend and commander, was arrested and tortured for eighteen months. Mathis and the Sheep Farm boys don’t talk about this. Presumably they haven’t read Homage to Catalonia. Mathis’ perfunctory research, and the boys follow his lead in this, is sourced entirely from Wikipedia. None of his premises are based in the writing itself. The thing about Mathis and those he inspires is that he thinks that everything can be faked. They think that great literature can be produced to order, and I know it can’t. It has to come from somewhere.

[3] Mathis makes no claim to be a student of literature; he writes mainly about mathematics and physics, correcting the fundamental errors of Newton, Leibniz and Einstein, and even in these areas of study he dismisses anyone who attacks him as ‘agents’, ‘planted critics’ and so on. He does not comment on any aspect of Orwell’s work beyond its broadest outlines. Nor does he explain exactly what is so pernicious about it, just that it is written by (in his mind) a life-long agent of the elite and therefore must constitute a psychological programming; he can dismiss the authenticity of the work without needing to read it. But the fact is that while he makes a case, of sorts, against the writer, no case is made against the work… Or we could put it like this: while he makes a case, of sorts, against Eric Blair, no case is made against George Orwell, the writer. For what is a writer but his work? At some point you have to discuss the books themselves, or there is a huge gaping hole — a huge amount of circumstantial evidence is gathered, but until we know what crime has been committed, what’s the point in any of this?

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Mathis returned to the topic in 2023, eight years after his Chomsky post. By this time, the story has moved on somewhat: Eric Blair is now a ‘rich peer’ who was recruited into MI5 by his tutor A S F Gow while still at school, and Gow directs all his movements from that point on. It is Gow who instructs him to join the Imperial Police rather than going to Oxford, Gow who directs him to travel to the North of England to spy on coal miners agitating for better conditions, Gow who sends him to Catalonia to spy on the Republican resistance, and Gow who instructs him to ‘claim to be a writer’ as cover for his movements.

Around the same time, the Sheep Farm published a sprawling Wikipedia investigation — nine or ten rambling hours of hyperlinks and Wikipedia pages, endless geneological digressions intended to prove that Orwell is the scion of some sinister bloodline — that is, if he even existed. I scanned about half of it. Mathis at least keeps it brief, and is still sufficiently in touch with reality to know he’s writing about a real individual.

Mathis doesn’t believe he took a Fascist bullet through the throat in the trenches, though he has to accept that within the month Orwell and his wife were on the run from the Communists. He claims that they had to leave Spain because Orwell’s cover had been blown, and that he was later convicted by the NKVD of being an agent of the British government. The Sheep Farm boys seem to think that the Orwells were only imagining themselves to be in danger. Perhaps they think NKVD torture rooms are no big deal and it was all just fun and games. Perhaps they don’t know what happened to Orwell’s friend and comrade Georges Kopp.

It might be time to tell that story again.

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Eric Blair’s parents were not wealthy; his grandfather was a clergyman and his father a civil servant. He described his family background as ‘lower-upper-middle’ or ‘impoverished genteel’ class. His educational opportunities, including his attendance at Eton, were obtained through scholarships. Aldous Huxley taught French at the school for one term, and Blair was in his class. All agree that Huxley was a nervous, ineffective teacher who struggled to exert authority, and he didn’t remain long in teaching.

Blair invested much of his time at school in student journalism, but was unmotivated academically, and left Eton with qualifications too poor to enable him to apply to university, so he enlisted in the Imperial Police. Yes, he probably ended up in Burma because of his family connections. I imagine he was sent there to ‘become a man’, after the disgrace of Eton. But despite his ‘posh’ background, to use Mathis’s word, he became, over time, a convinced anti-imperialist, and a committed socialist. If you don’t believe him, or if you don’t understand what kind of socialist he was, read his work, or more of it. He was a prolific writer, and his political evolution is there for all to examine. His experiences in Burma, witnessing the racism and casual cruelty of his colleagues, kick-started his political education. He went there, according to schoolmate Steven Runciman, the historian, because he had ‘a romantic idea’ about the East, and indeed he liked Burma, appreciated its culture and became fluent in the language. It took time for disillusionment to set in. Returning to England to recuperate from dengue fever in 1927, he decided not to go back, and resigned from the police. Mathis finds this suspicious. ‘Suddenly at age 24, he quit the police to become a writer.’

By Orwell’s own account, he had wanted to be a writer since he was six years old. And now, after five years in Asia, he had some material. His autobiographical first novel Burmese Days was published in 1934, and we learn enough through the experiences of the conflicted main character John Flory to understand that the decision to leave the Indian Imperial Police was not sudden at all. If you want a quick take on his reasons, read the short story ‘A Hanging‘ (1931), and/or ‘Shooting an Elephant‘ (1936). In brief, he was worn out by the contradictions of his position, and feared what he might become if he remained.

“I think that he was very afraid that he would become part of the dirty secret himself, that he would either become a racist or a sadist or both by being in this situation, and wanted to repudiate this in himself.” –Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters, (UK: Orwell’s Victory) 2002.

Having seen how the poor lived in Burma, he wanted to know how they lived in his own country. Yes, he was able occasionally to draw on the financial support of his parents and one of his aunts as he made his way as a writer, but one should not assume, so of course Mathis assumes, that his colonial grandparents approved of or even knew what he was doing after his return from East. The main reason he used a pen-name was to protect his family from his writing, and vice versa. His writing about this period of his life — Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), for instance — suggests rather convincingly that he was well acquainted with intense anxiety about money.

His strength was always writing from reality: fictionalised memoir and reportage, based on experience, observation and use of the telling detail. He did not invent easily, and his one attempt at experimental fiction (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) fell apart in his hands; his response was to turn his limitations into a strength. Reality was enough, and he honoured it by cultivating a disciplined lucidity of thought and style. His essays, articles and reviews are written with poise and clarity, humming with intelligence; although he rejects stylistic display, there is no sacrifice of pleasure in the restrained beauty of his sentences — his writing is of the highest quality, and Orwell is rightly regarded as one of the greatest essayists in the history of the English language. 

After his Burmese experience, he made poverty and deprivation his theme. Mathis calls this ‘spying on the poor’. I call it finding a subject. For several years he periodically immersed himself in the lives of the working poor, the unemployed and the homeless. He made excursions disguised as a tramp, exploring the slums of London, staying in flophouses and workhouses, and working on the hop-farms in Kent as a seasonal labourer. He got himself arrested, hoping to experience Christmas in jail, but was released after two nights in a police cell. He washed dishes in Paris, lay sick in a hospital for the poor. He toured the North of England by public transport and on foot, lodged in a room above a tripe shop, went down the mines and into the factories, attended meetings of both the Communists and the Fascists and witnessed firsthand the violence of Mosley’s blackshirts. The writing based on these experiences — Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to Wigan Pier and was published under the Orwell brand, but his alter ego on his expeditions was ‘P S Burton’, so that’s three identities already. How many more ‘red flags’ do you want, the guy was obviously a spook!

Yes, he did keep in touch with his tutor at Eton, A S F Gow, and consulted him about his decision to become a writer, and later about his intention to marry Eileen. To Mathis and the Sheep Farm boys, this makes Gow his MI5 ‘handler’, directing Orwell’s movements. Perhaps it’s true — we can’t know: we don’t know that Gow was a recruiter for MI5, though it’s possible of course. The idea that Gow was the fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring arises from the art critic Brian Sewell’s assertion in his autobiography, and Sewell was close friend of Anthony Blunt, the ‘fourth man’. The notion that there was a fifth man had been sown by a Russian defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, sparking a craze of speculation in the mid-sixties, but it was later revealed that the scholar John Cairncross had confessed to MI5 back in 1964. Gow’s identification as an MI5 officer is dependent on the Sewell accusation– otherwise he would have no information to interest the Soviets, except as a tutor at Eton and then Trinity College. The novelist Anthony Powell, a former tutee of Gow at Trinity College Cambridge, dismissed the notion in his journals, believing that George Orwell, whom he knew, would have sniffed out and commented on any left-wing political interests on Gow’s part, and would have wanted nothing to do with them.

In any case, the speculation seems superfluous, given that Blair’s decisions are completely consistent with the young man’s desire to become a writer, and and need no further explanation. We know he wanted to become a writer. How do we know this? He became a writer.

What Orwell was doing, in literary terms, was developing the ‘Bohemian’ style of reportage which had appeared on the other side of the Atlantic some seventy years earlier, and into which Mark Twain made several excursions early in his writing career. Orwell was the first in England to bring to this genre a genuine literary sensibility, and yes, it is Bohemianism, of a gritty, grounded kind, propelled by an impatience to escape the bourgeois bubble and grapple with reality. Reading him, you do not get any sense of posturing or self-indulgence, but of lived experience, vividly evoked, and a compulsion to confront the truth about his own society.

Read the Burma stories, and you’ll understand a lot more about the compassion and fundamental honesty of this fine writer, and how he developed his ability to evoke reality — physical, social, economic, political — with economy and nuance.

For all the unpretentious lucidity of his prose, there’s something driven and self-destructive in his pursuit of the reality principle which only found full expression in his last and most famous book, the terrifying and uncompromising work which is associated more than any other with his name. Orwell’s final reality-immersion would be in Spain, fighting against Fascism in the Civil War.

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2 THE PURGE

After the failed Nationalist military coup and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with the siege of Madrid in 1936, Orwell headed out to join the Republican resistance. As a democratic socialist, he enlisted not in the Comintern-run International Brigades but the POUM militia (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, affiliated not to the Soviet Comintern but to the International Labour Party). He was at the frontline in Aragon for a little short of four months; it was winter, and the militias endured extreme deprivation at high altitude in Alcubierre. His comrades were poorly armed, trained and equipped, but “the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism … the ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England … the effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before.” (Homage to Catalonia, Ch 7) The posting was uneventful for long periods, but he did have some experiences of close combat, such as a diversionary grenades-and-bayonets night attack during the siege of Huelva.

But his most frightening experiences in Spain came not on the front-lines but the paranoid streets of Barcelona. Returning on leave after three months at the front, he found the city riven by sectarian conflict: the revolutionary atmosphere had disappeared; there were riflemen on rooftops, armed gangs roaming the streets. The Communist newspapers were denouncing their allies as fascists, and the NKVD secret police stealthily purging those who did not follow the Moscow line, in secret so that word would not get back to the front and especially the POUM militias holding the line in Madrid. Vicious multi-factional street-fighting broke out in May 1937, as the Socialist government tried to regain control of the Anarchist-dominated city. For the first time Orwell found himself under fire from those he thought were on his own side. Eventually the Anarchists stood down, and the government sent in assault guards to occupy the city.

Within days of his arrival back at the front, Orwell took a sniper’s bullet in the throat and survived by the merest chance: the bullet narrowly missed both the carotid artery and the trachea, and the shot was so clean it cauterised the wound as it passed through. It was eight days before he received medical attention. Discharged from hospital two weeks later, he staggered back into Barcelona, where he found the liquidation of the POUM in full swing — the Comintern had turned their Barcelona HQ into a prison and launched an open purge, branding the militia Trotskyites and fascist-collaborators and arresting them or massacring them in the streets and squares. Many were tortured, many more executed en masse or sent across into France where they were rounded up by the government. Andres Nin, the leader of the POUM, was arrested, tortured and murdered. The first Orwell knew of the danger he was in was when his wife (and editor) Eileen intercepted him in the street to prevent him entering his hotel, so that he wouldn’t be seen. He went into hiding, sleeping in a ruined church, but his friend and commander in the POUM, Georges Kopp, was not so lucky. Still hardly able to speak, Orwell broke cover to try to intervene with the Communists on Kopp’s behalf, visiting police and military authorities to retrieve paperwork that would prove Kopp was now working for the government and was no longer in the POUM. Kopp’s surviving relatives appreciate that these efforts constituted an act of extreme bravery. Orwell was not one to abandon a friend.

The Orwells failed in their attempt, and left the city the next day, making for the border with France disguised as tourists. Arriving back in England, Orwell worked for nine months writing-up his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, only to find the Communist campaign of lies against the POUM had infected the left-wing press in England. The New Statesman would no longer carry his articles, and his publishers, Gollancz’s Left Book Club, turned down his account of events in Spain. Ultimately, it was their loss — Orwell took the book to Frederic Warburg’s start-up company, and although Homage didn’t sell well, his next two books — his last two — would put Gollancz in the shade and Secker & Warburg on the map.

So we know exactly how the seeds of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were planted, and when and where: Barcelona and London, 1937-8. There should be no dispute about what Nineteen Eighty-Four is about, or what Orwell’s intentions were in writing it; it arises out of a very specific context. At a time when much of the Western intelligentsia had been seduced by naively idealistic notions about Communism, and many had indeed joined the Communist party, Orwell experienced, first-hand, the brutal psychopathy of Stalinism, and understood that Soviet Communism was as great a threat as German or Italian Fascism, and that the enemy was totalitarianism in any form. He found powerful ways of writing about the impact of this revelation in his final two novels. Animal Farm is an allegory of the Russian Revolution framed as a children’s story, which makes the brutality of its climax all the more shocking. Nineteen Eighty Four asks whether English Socialism might devolve into totalitarianism after a revolution in England, and imagines what life might be like a few decades down the line, which is as far as its predictive aspect goes. Because it is a great work of art as well as of propaganda, it has transcended that context and become a work for all time. But in the case of these libellous mischaracterisations of his motives, and the, yes I’ll say it, conspiracy theory about his loyalties, whether put about by Neo-Stalinists, anti-Semites or post-Covidian cultural nihilists, there is no doubt either about what happened in Spain or the intention behind the two anti-totalitarian masterpieces that arose directly out of it. Things took a very dark turn in Barcelona; and this became the darkness of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Madrid fell to the Francoists, and Barcelona, hollowed out, was taken without resistance. Three months later Hitler and Stalin finalised their non-aggression pact. George Kopp, however, was held for eighteen months, repeatedly interrogated by Russian NKVD operatives, beaten and tortured and continually moved around from camp to camp to keep him disoriented. By the time they released him he had lost half his body-weight and his own wife didn’t recognise him. Orwell invited Kopp to London, where he and Eileen, with help from her brother and sister-in-law, took care of him for two months, nursing him back to health, so there was plenty of time for the writer to listen to his friend’s experiences and reflect how easily it could have been him. He must have wondered how he would have stood up under torture, and Kopp’s experience unquestionably became an important element of the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell draws on the shock of seeing what they had done to Kopp in one of the most moving moments in the novel.

“Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He could not remember whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.

‘Go on,’ said O’Brien. ‘Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall see the side view as well.’

He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature’s face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird’s face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt. […] But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He saw now what O’Brien had meant about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.”

Those who continue to spread smears about Orwell should perhaps reflect that they are perpetuating the Stalinist witch-hunt which ended in torture and death for many of Orwell’s comrades, and which spurred him to write Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in the first place. In Spain Orwell had learned that in Russian Communism the free world faced a totalitarian threat as grave as that posed by Fascism; that the Stalinists were in fact bitter enemies of the egalitarian spirit he’d experienced in the trenches. Back in London, the left’s betrayal of free speech showed Orwell how easily the seeds of totalitarianism could transplant themselves to English soil. Could English Socialism devolve into Ingsoc? There’s a passing allusion in the novel which implicitly poses the question. 

“Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form — ‘English Socialism’, that is to say — it had been current earlier.” (Nineteen Eighty-Four Part I, Chapter III.) 

In 1941, for instance, when Orwell himself used it prominently in The Lion and the Unicorn — Socialism and the English Genius. 

The question now was how to prevent the perversion of the socialist ideal into the terror of Barcelona. Orwell had come back from Catalonia fully committed to socialism but bitterly opposed to totalitarianism in either its Fascist or Communist incarnations, both of which would happily have killed him. (Indeed, he never fully regained his health after that sniper’s bullet.) The enormity of these revelations, their shocking, dream-like quality, propelled him to his greatest fiction. But whether he turned them into a ‘fairytale’ for children or a futuristic dystopia, the left didn’t want to know.

After his desperately early death in 1950 (he was forty-six), the backlash over his anti-totalitarian novels rippled on for years as different interests bickered over rights and royalties, reputation and politics. The disciple of the reality principle became a weapon in the new ‘Cold War’; then the truth wars; then the corona wars. And now, he seems to have become disputed territory in the war to retain our history and cultural identity at all.

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3 THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

The calumny is put about by Miles Mathis and his imitators that George Orwell was no rebel but actually an operative for the totalitarian tendency that surfaced so monstrously in the 1930s and has returned in new forms in the twenty-first century. The smear rests on the kind of wild assumptions and uninformed speculation that gives ‘conspiracy theory’ a bad name, and comes from individuals who have not read Orwell in any detail, if at all, and know little to nothing about his life.

For example, it is taken for granted by his accusers that he was a Fabian Socialist, based on nothing more than the fact that he delivered a lecture to the Fabian Society in London in 1942. In fact his encounter with the Fabians was marked by cantankerous wrangling on both sides, and Orwell went there to challenge, not to endorse, the Fabian program; after his return from the Spanish civil war the writer had been ostracised by the Left in London and censored by leftist publications, including his own publisher, Gollancz.

Similarly, the coincidence that a young Aldous Huxley worked as a stand-in French teacher at Eton College for a term and that a young Eric Blair was in his class is inflated into rumours that the two men remained friends for the rest of their lives, which is to say, of Orwell’s, and that Huxley secretly became Orwell’s political and literary ‘mentor’.

In fact it is hard to see where Aldous Huxley fits into Orwell’s life, politics or literary development at all. Huxley was a pacifist, and Orwell had no time for pacifists; his nervous, ineffective stand-in French teacher at Eton was a ‘benign’ eugenicist and Utopian progressive, like the aristocratic socialist philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the novelist H.G Wells. Orwell was none of these things and despised all of them. As Orwell headed for the sound of gunfire, Huxley emigrated to Southern California and lived there for the rest of his life.

The counterculture researcher Jan Irvin (Gnostic Media) has attempted to expose Huxley as an ‘architect’ of the post-war MK-ULTRA mind-control and social engineering project. He has emphasised Huxley’s connections with the Esalen Institute and a number of the CIA cut-outs involved in steering the rising post-war counterculture into a hedonistic dead-end, and he was certainly involved in promoting the use of psychedelics, which he had featured twenty years earlier as the recreational chemical pacifier ‘soma’ in the society of Brave New World.

But to try to embroil Orwell with Huxley is not credible, philosophically, politically or personally. Orwell chose experience as his mentor, not some ‘highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck’ (England, Your England). Orwell’s framing as Huxley’s protégé quickly falls apart on examination.

Yes, there is the famous letter Huxley wrote to his former pupil after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four — but this letter is written specifically to take issue with Orwell’s version of a collectivised future society. Nor, if you read it, will you find any hint that these words are written to a personal friend. The tone is impersonal — ‘Dear Mr Orwell,’ he writes, not ‘Dear George’ or even ‘Dear Eric’ — the body of the letter contains no personal references on either side, and was sent via his publisher. Written a mere three months before Orwell’s death, it gives no hint that Huxley even knew he was ill. Orwell had merely instructed his publisher to include Huxley on the list of those to be sent complimentary copies. Even in reaching out, as we say, writer-to-writer, Huxley failed to comment on Nineteen Eight-Four beyond the routine acknowledgement that it is ‘very fine’ and ‘a profoundly important’ book, without saying what is fine or important about it — before going on to suggest that his own vision of the ‘ultimate revolution’, based not on force but on the pleasure principle, is more plausible. This is not to deny that Huxley’s letter alludes to important contexts, for instance in its references to de Sade. However, lecturing the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four on sadism as a political driving force seems a little superfluous, since the idea is explicitly endorsed by the character of O’Brien, and highlighted structurally in the novel as the torturer’s final revelation to Winston Smith: that there is no higher purpose behind the Party’s ruthless exercise of power; that the purpose of power is power, and the purpose of torture is torture. On the evidence of the letter, there seems to be nothing between these two writers beyond the fact that their paths once crossed at Eton and they both later produced influential dystopian novels.

The two novels are as different as the two men. Huxley’s social comedy transplanted into the 26th Century bears no comparison, artistically, to the raw, traumatic tour-de-force his younger contemporary produced. To see clearly the yawning political and philosophical gulf between these two writers, leave aside for a moment the contrasts in the two societies depicted, the paradigmatic differences that Huxley touches on in his letter, and focus on the writer’s attitude to his characters. The inevitable disaster that engulfs Orwell’s rebellious lovers, Winston and Julia, is evoked with intense pathos; Huxley’s protagonist Bernard Marx, by contrast, is a shallow, hypocritical loser, and Huxley is merely laughing at him — at all of his characters, trapped in this mindless, pointless, artificial society. Orwell’s vision is tragic and deeply moving, whereas Huxley merely finds the degraded future of humanity amusing.

In fact, despite routine journalistic assertions that he was heavily influenced by Brave New World, Orwell had made a number of critical asides about it in print. He saw Huxley as sharing H G Wells’ ‘essentially hedonistic worldview’ — in contrast to his own punishing pursuit of the reality principle — and having nothing to teach him about politics:

“A crude book like The Iron Heel, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come.” — Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)

The literary forerunner of Nineteen Eighty-Four was not Huxley’s book but We by Yevgeni Zamyatin, who was one of the first writers to experience the Soviets’ treatment of dissidents. Zamyatin’s novel was published in English in 1924 but banned in the Soviet Union, and Orwell was not even aware of its existence until the early forties. He finally obtained a copy in 1946, just when Nineteen Eighty-Four was taking shape in his mind, and he reviewed it enthusiastically, comparing it favourably with Huxley’s book.

“The resemblance with Brave New World is striking,” he wrote. “But though Zamyatin’s book is less well put together — it has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarise — it has a political point which the other lacks.” Zamyatin’s novel “is on the whole more relevant to our own situation.”

Both books are relevant to ours. Brave New World may have more in common with the suffocating technocracy we see rapidly taking shape in the post-Covid world; we may already be half-way there. When I read both books as a teenager, I wondered which would come true, and decided that they both would, in turn: that the world described in Nineteen Eighty-Four was a staging post on the way to Brave New World. Now I think that’s wrong: both visions are true, but they co-exist in time. While the compliant are seduced and conditioned into loving their servitude, Nineteen Eighty-Four lies always an inch beneath the surface, the iron fist inside the velvet glove. We saw enough five years ago to know that. Those who saw through the propaganda and refused to comply with medical invasions of our personal autonomy felt strong hints of the Orwellian nightmare as we endured that long, long Hate Week. The rappers and the memesters weren’t wrong. We were all Winston Smith, there, for a moment, and none of us will ever forget the experience.

Except that unlike Winston, we had already read the book, and the book-within-the-book as well; it was Orwell’s vision that gave us eyes. The novel is a political education as well as an unforgettable piece of fiction: it was Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, that introduced me to the concept of the false-flag attack when I was seventeen or eighteen —

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep people frightened’. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. (Chapter 5)

It gave me the concepts of doublethink and thoughtcrime, and made me think about permanent war, and the non-military functions of war; about cognitive control through linguistic debasement; about the malleability of the past. Within the context of Soviet/Eastern Bloc Communism, Orwell’s vision was astonishingly accurate. Christopher Hitchens, in Why Orwell Matters, quotes the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz, who gave Orwell perhaps the greatest compliment one writer can pay to another.

“Milosz had seen the Stalinization of Eastern Europe from the inside, as a cultural official. He wrote, of his fellow-sufferers:

‘A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. […] Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.’ — Czeslaw Milosz The Captive Mind, (1952)

Only one or two years after Orwell’s death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party.” — Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters, pp54-55

Hitchens points out that the book wasn’t only banned behind the Iron Curtain, but in many Moslem countries as well, following the lead of Iran, where the Shah could not tolerate its portrayal of political absolutism (he also hated Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Thus Nineteen Eighty-Four transcends its immediate political context, and thirty-five years after the fall of Soviet Communism remains both compelling and important. I’ve run into a number of people who read it for the first time during the Covid lockdowns. At the same time, the implausible smear about its author is repeated more and more fequently, by even well-intentioned but deeply disillusioned people like Mike Yeadon, who was so important in exposing the Covid deception. The danger is that we strip ourselves of our cultural assets, our teachers and examplars, the thought-leaders of our culture as it existed at the end of McLuhan’s Third Epoch, the era of print, of democracy, of Protestantism, nationalism, capitalism, human rights and the ferment of ideas. Totalitarians and absolutists — and that includes Technocrats, by the way —still hate Orwell, that’s for sure, and that’s why they send their shills to tell us he was a shill, to try to take him away from us. It’s nothing new.

George Orwell was one of the most honest writers who ever lived. He valued clarity above all and matched the transparency of his style with the openness of his thought. At six foot two, his head was always above the parapet. And he was someone you’d want alongside you in the trenches — no coward, no shill, and no question, George Orwell is one of ours.

As for this new vogue of vacuous conspiracy freestyling, I’ll say this to those perpetuating the smear-campaign against Orwell: you are collaborating in a process of cultural debasement which makes us weaker with every loss, and you should do some serious reading before you discard one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, whose work grows more relevant by the day. Until you do, you’re just playing totalitarian games, like Ingsoc’s child-spies:

‘Up with your hands!’ yelled a savage voice… ‘You’re a traitor!’ yelled the boy. ‘You’re a thought-criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you, I’ll send you to the salt mines!’

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APPENDIX: Huxley’s 1949 letter to Orwell

Wrightwood. Cal.

21 October, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sincerely,

Aldous Huxley