Being Orwell's Big Brother

The Orwell Trust, which administers the Orwell Prize for political writing, is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the release of his diaries by posting them as a blog. It will be interested to see how such a smart writer and gifted craftsperson worked on a first draft basis.

Welcome to the Internet, Eric Blair

For those to whom the name in the headline is unfamiliar, you might recognize the associated alias: George Orwell. But whichever you use, it would be handy to remember his anti-Utopia 1984, because a recent spat on the blog Boing-Bloing is making it practically relevant. You can check the link for the quasi-sordid details (one of the involved parties is a sex columnist of notably ribald sensibilities), but after some kind of falling out, one of Boing-Boing's bloggers removed all mention of the other woman's pen name. The New York Times passed on some interesting questions from the blog's readers:

But the Boing Boing readership certainly viewed it as an act taken on behalf of the Web site. Was Boing Boing deceiving its loyal audience by silently deleting the material, even if no one noticed the absences until a year later? What does it even mean to deceive an audience when it comes to a catalog of one’s personal writings? And does popularity convey different responsibilities to the people who produce a Web site?

The twist, of course, is that for nearly everyone who lives with what the Internet says about them, being unpublished would seem a dream come true. Those photographs from the frat party can be unpublished? Who knew? The essay to the Mickey Mouse Fan Club, too?

How about a few steps further. What if there comes a time when more and more people relied on the Internet and not books, newspapers, and magazines? And what if, unlike more permanent forms of publishing, all that information could be whisked away in a moment? Such an ability would make the Ministry of Truth's job a breeze. Forbid caching sites (like the Wayback Machine) and trust that over time, people would succumb to laziness and simply look online for the most authoritative and "latest" information. Doesn't sound that much different from today, does it?

Redefining History

Those with power in the US, over a number of years, have been taken with the idea of using language - even redefining it - to further their own agendas. This has been an unfortunate situation, because when you change the meaning of words, you begin manipulating thought in subtle and permanent ways with often unpredictable results. George Orwell saw the approaching danger when he wrote 1984, and, unfortunately, his view was prescient.

Now we see another form of redefining words - this time in redefining our collective memory of history. It's not the first time, but, again, another disturbing trend. In this case, President Bush tried to argue that the situation in Iraq is like that of Vietnam in the early 1970s, and even referring to al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents in terms of the "war machine of imperial Japan," according to the Wall Street Journal. (Nothing like dredging up World War II imagery when Japan has greatly changed and is now a close ally.) He warns that a quick withdrawal could lead to chaos and another Khmer Rouge. "Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end," he said.

But this is rewriting history, as the 1984 character Winston Smith saw it done. Instead of seeing the past as immutable, it become an assemblage of clay. When you want to support something you do today, you rearrange the parts, eliminating the ones you don't like, and trot out the "proof." But, again according to the Journal, some historians are upset by this comparison.

"The president emphasized the violence in the wake of American withdrawal from Vietnam. But this happened because the United States left too late, not too early," says Steven Simon, a Mideast expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It was the expansion of the war that opened the door to Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge." Ret. Army Brig. Gen. John Johns tells the Journal that what he "learned in Vietnam is that U.S. forces could not conduct a counterinsurgency operation. The longer we stay there, the worse it's going to get."

You won't hear too many politicians complain about this, because, at least in my opinion, the majority want access to the same tools to further their ends.

But nothing good can come out of pretending that the past is something other than it was beyond trying to interpret what happened. To remake history is to lie - no other word fits this. But it's not a lie just told to someone else, but to yourself. When you lie to yourself, you destroy your reason. How can you effectively be rational at all if you won't see what is there and insist on making your decisions based on personal fancy? That means we now have a generation of politicians that do their work in a dream world, where the building blocks of experience are set tumbling and the very material of thought - language - is warped and twisted for expediency. Is there any wonder why our country has become so messed up?

The New Censorship - the Information Age Meets Orwell

I came across this World Editors Forum blog entry on Paul Moreira's book Les Nouvelles Censures (The New Censorship, I think) indirectly and finally tracked it down. It's worth a read and some thought. Here's the center of the issue:

Moreira’s thesis is based on this paradox: in a society seemingly – and really – more and more transparent, the forms of censorship and control of information are becoming increasingly subtle and mechanical. In an age in which raw censorship isn’t possible anymore (at least in most true democracies), more and more resources are being put into controlling not what the people hear and see, but how they think and react to it.

According to Moreira, the journey between (controversial) news material and its actual delivery to the public now typically transits through a “communication filter” – a public relations firm, spokesman, or communication consultants. These filters, commonly known in the US as spin doctors, proceed to a play game of chess with journalists and news media.

It's not altogether a new observation - the book and documentary Toxic Sludge Is Good For You looks at the influence of PR on so-called news.

But look beyond the "spinning" of the news and you'll see that various interested parties are actually trying to redefine language - decidedly 1984 in flavor. When you control language, you control thought, and if you have enough success, it becomes virtually impossible for someone to oppose you, because you've made it virtually impossible for that person to even conceive of something different. In an age where catsup was supposed to be a vegetable (in the 1980s), the vice president isn't part of the executive branch of government (the current administration), and political parties hire consultants to try and use language to create impressions at contrast with reality, this is no longer a theoretical consideration.