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Venezuela: How To Read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four Critically TodayAnonyme, Friday, July 23, 2004 - 09:52 (Analyses | Democratie)
Franz J T Lee
Certainly, all over Venezuela, at this moment can de witnessed revolutionary fire among the youth as never before, all over Bolivarian patrollers are organizing the masses, are guarding the victories of the revolution. However, what is somehow lacking is the profound understanding of the global transhistoric truth about this decisive moment in Venezuelan and Latin American history, the threat of global fascism, in its real violent, brutal consequences. We studied George Orwell's "1984" again and underlined that what we lived in Venezuela across the last five years, and that what is to come within the following weeks. Having this "classic" in our hands, in front of our transhistoric eyes, let us now page willy-nilly through this politically educative writing and here and there reflect on some of its "utopian" thoughts. We visit Winston, who like an orthodox Marxist, scribbles the following on a paper: "If there was hope it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. " (p. 60) Winston still dreams about educating, about conscientizing the proletariat, the working classes, the poor, the masses: " ... the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet - !" (p. 60) Nonetheless, he is aware of the opinions of the ruling classes across the ages, of what they understood by "slave emancipation" and "liberation", and what our scholars repeat in their academic text-books: "The Party claimed, of course, they have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the revolution they had been hideously repressed by the capitalists, they have been starved and flogged, women have been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six." (p. 61) And what did Plato, Aristotle, Voltaire, Montesquieu and all power-hungry rulers really think about the "mob", about the "crowd", about the "man-in-the-street"? "But, simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink , the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors, who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose on the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult." (p. 61-62) In comparison, Winston read Mrs. Parson's "children's history text-book" that explained what was happening in Britain, at the time of the "Glorious Revolution", at the eve of capitalism, long before the coming into existence of the "Globe", of "Oceania": "In the old days ..., London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you are had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters, who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale bread crusts and water. But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. ... The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and ... " (p. 62-63) Now, we ask: what happens when one tries to act and think independently? How does one feel? How is one being seen by the rest of the world? What happens when one challenges "time", the Past, indicating that it has nothing to do with total emancipatory transcendence, that divine Chronos is simply an ideological instrument, the formal logical guarantee for perpetual mental and bodily slavery. Who dares to challenge "Time", Father Time? Of course, only a lunatic!! Are we perhaps flying too high? Too near to the sun? Will our fragile, waxy wings melt away? Simply because we do not think and write within the straight-jacket of generally accepted, ordained, academic rules and regulations? Winston "wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong." (p. 68) Here, Winston challenged "absolute truths", even his very own ones, and he thought that it would be better for the clandestine "brotherhood", if he should be mistaken. As madman, he would be the first to recognize his own mistakes. Long live the lonely, lonesome lunatics! Now, rectifying myopic eyes of loyal, affirmative, systemic ideologues, that just associate Orwell's critique exclusively with Stalinists and Nazis, let us look at O'Brien's views concerning Winston's Newspeak articles in the "Times"? Not in the "Pravda" or the "Volkszeitung"! Questioningly, O'Brien, the mouthpiece of "Big Brother" said to Winston: "You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak I believe?" He continued: " ... in your article I noticed you had used two words which have became obsolete. " What follows now is of great interest to those who love to declare anything that displeases them, or that does not fit in their world outlook or life style, as "obsolete". "You are prepared to give your lives? Concerning the everlasting existence of Labour, of "Big Brother", who can only be changed from within, in total desperation, Winston asks O'Brien the following questions: "Does Big Brother exist? He, Big Brother, Bush, the "Empire", it will never die. This is exactly the opinion of all staunch believers in the system that fervently believe in the current New World Order, in Globalization; in "welfare", "good will" and "commonwealth". They believe that "Power", "Labour Power", Capitalist Power, would never die. But let us allow O'Brien to explain "Power", i.e., Labour alias Capital, to Winston: "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. " And then O'Brien let Schrödinger’s Cat out of the Pandora Box: Then O'Brien informed Winston about the future projects of "Big Brother", of what Bush and Kerry have in mind for Venezuela and Latin America: "We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. This is not a crazy Hitler or a mad Stalin speaking here. Generally as such, because we were "educated" to do so, we just fly over such statements, not giving them a second thought. However, this only seems to be science fiction, craziness or nonsense. In reality, it is stark, dark reality, not only in "Patriotic America", but also in Europe and elsewhere. Hence, Orwell has warned us about our limited knowledge concerning our "reality", about our "Governments", about our "Party", about the "Illuminati" and about the level of contemporary scientific-technological secret projects. He also indicated why then, in the 1940's, the Party did not wish to make public Tesla and Reich Technology. Also note that Big Brother or the Party are neither "Communist" nor "Nazi"; they are global; "Brotherhood" is not obsolete "Civilization", it is "Globalization": "Oceania is the World"! (p. 218) Finally, already applying Tesla Technology, O'Brien let more cats out of his bag, concerning space travel and colonization: According to Orwell, Winston Smith is the only "I" of all the "We" left on Planet Earth, and the drama is about the destruction of this last historic ray in the Patria, in the "fatherland". Of course, by the way, true to our Invisible, Invulnerable, Invincible Principle, we have no intention to end up like Winston. The Bolivarian Revolution demonstrates that the real, true human species is still very much alive. Seen from today in the Fourth Empire of the United States of America, as exposed in his book, we will illustrate below that some of Orwell's "prophecies" were more accurate than those of the Oracle of Delphi, or of any modern "Horoscope": "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strength". Winston writes: "To the future or to the past, to a time, when thought is free, when men are different from one another, and do not live alone - to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone" (p.26). Winston is protesting against the declaration of Big Brother, that thinking, thought, theory and philosophy are capital crimes, especially in a world of action, of cement, of concrete, of activism, where theory and philosophy have been sent to the ideological asylum. He confirms that he had been taught, been mind-controlled, that: "The Party said, that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew, that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist?" (p.34). For sure, the truth disappeared from all the data bases and "new knowledge" has been fabricated - surely, this will be changed again tomorrow, depending on the global and "globalized" interests of Big Brother, who teaches: "Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past." Today, more than ever, it is obvious that Big Brother controls global reality in mind, thought, body and soul; he produces "Virtual Reality", ideology; in the language of "Newspeak", it is called "doublethink". For this very reason, urgently Venezuela necessitates a clear, precise revolutionary práxis-theory. Concerning thinking and language, Winston is being informed: "We're getting the language into its final shape - the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. ... We're destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every dday". (p.45) Well, we may just as well begin to construct, learn and think our own Revolutionary "Language", which will remain an important tool of thought. Newspeak, sorry, Newsweek, already has traces of the "new" virtually real language. In the German daily newspaper "Bild", Orwell is already obsolete: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words (in other words, of thinking), of course, the wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of, as well". (p.45) Now, if you take a "verb" out of a sentence, obviously you can only express "peace", standstill, rest, the status quo. Everything you say is then possible, is positive, justification, affirmation and defence of universal global fascism. Winston has to learn: "Do you know, that Newspeak is the only language in the world, whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?". (p.46) Now, let's study American English or English American, and tell the world, what we notice with reference to the above. For example, listen to the amount of words, that the typical American uses daily, what he says and how he expresses himself: yeah man, you s.o.a.b., f... you, m.-f., etc.... The Then the Party member unveils the essence of Mind Control, of Thought Control, of Ideology, of Newspeak: "Don't you see, that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words, in which to express it." Concerning the so-called bourgeois-democratic revolution, in the field of language, Winston is being told: "The Revolution (sic!) will be complete, when the language is perfect. ... By the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive, who could understand such a conversation as we are having now." (p.47) Winston immediately wants to mention an exception, that the proletariat will still understand us, but the Party member suspects his train of thought and instantly says: "The proles are not human beings." (p. 47) So we see, the rulers have never considered the poor or the workers as human beings; all that they considered human along "history" were only themselves. Aristotle considered the poor, the slaves, to be "speaking-tools"; Big Brother considers them here to be "newspeak-tools". Concerning government propaganda in general, and what politicians remark in the mass media in particular, -- which reminds us of Burnham's "Cooperative Socialism", in Guyana, a while ago -- fabulous statistics are being published officially: "There was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, ... everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards." (p.52) How Big Brother, how Globalization, how Post-Industrial Society, have completed the process of controlling the proles, Winston himself gets a taste of it. The following the Bolivarians should read very carefully, this is what is on the order of the day soon, on August 15, 2004: "We shall crush you down to the point, from which there is no coming back. ... Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves." (p.211). Exactly, these are the body, mind and thought controlled millions, that should be globalized, should be eradicated from the face of the Earth by means of the current wars of terror. Then O'Brien, the Party member, explains the "world of fear and treachery", of Capitalism of the 21st Century to Winston: "A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless, as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. ... In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy." (p.220) This is an excellent description of today's life on a world scale. How many millions have read Orwell's book, and how many of them could read between the lines that what we have spotlighted above? Many things Orwell himself could not have seen, could not have understood, in his very own intellectual production. Meanwhile, they are there, have always been there. Strange things happen, but on the spur of the moment they should not be disqualified, just like that; recklessly, they should not be identified as pure madness and nonsense. Give the mind a small opportunity to re-flect, re-think, re-vise all those "crazy" events. Who knows, perhaps they are true, could be true, or be too "good" not to be "true". In this case, we would have a tweeny-weeny chance to become wise, exempted from any folly whatsoever. The above concerns the "Opposition" in Venezuela, for once in its life time, it should think, think whether Chávez really is a "tyrant", a #dictator"! And when Winston claims to be a "man", a human being, O'Brien corrects him: "If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct - we are the inheritors. Do you understand, that you are ALONE? You are outside history, you are non-existent." (p.222) In total capitulation, finally Winston asks: "Tell me, how soon will they shoot me?" Cynically, O'Brien answers: "...Don't give up hope, ... in the end, we shall shoot you." This is the essence of patrian "Hope"; in the end, at the end of Hope, "we shall shoot you." However, against this fascist "hope", Bolivarian optimistic militancy and militant optimism will be victorious, real, true freedom is "made of sterner stuff". NO, NO, NO, against orwellian global fascism in venezuela!! ----------
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