The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  Rubashov is held in a prison where the lights burn day and night and is interrogated relentlessly in a process known in Russia as “the conveyor.” He is questioned first by his former friend Ivanov, then by the younger, more fanatical apparatchik Gletkin. Orwell called the latter “an almost perfect specimen of the human gramophone,” uninhibited by memories of the old world. “The Gletkins,” writes Koestler, “had nothing to erase; they need not deny their past, because they had none.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four, too, the most fanatical citizens are the young: “It was almost normal for people under thirty to be frightened of their own children.” Parsons’s daughter, who reports her father to the Thought Police, was probably based on Pavlik Morozov, the thirteen-year-old communist who was allegedly murdered by his family in 1932 for betraying his father to the secret police and subsequently canonised as a “boy hero” in Soviet propaganda. In Airstrip One, where they sing, “Under the spreading chestnut tree / I sold you and you sold me,” betrayal is promoted as a virtue. The family is nothing compared with the state.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin’s old friend Razumnik Ivanov-Razumnik met around a thousand prisoners during his years in Moscow jails and knew only twelve who refused to confess. Unlike most of them, Rubashov is not physically tortured; his dismantling is purely psychological. Nagged by toothache, tobacco deprivation and a bad conscience, he gradually loses every moral and intellectual basis for resistance. By the logic of the party he has loyally served, there is no I, only the collective we, which is the Party, which represents History, which can never be wrong. “How could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken?” asks Winston Smith. “By what external standard could you check its judgements?” And if mistakes are impossible, then the Party must constantly delete contradictory evidence, leaving only pale rectangular spaces on the walls and gaps in the library shelves to limn the void. “Rubashov remarked jokingly to Arlova that the only thing left to be done was to publish a new and revised edition of the back numbers of all newspapers.” Orwell turned Rubashov’s joke into Winston Smith’s job.

  Of course Rubashov eventually confesses. Of course he dies. And yet he is not fully defeated. The Party’s ultimate aim is to colonise the brain and eliminate what Orwell dubbed thoughtcrime. “We persecuted the seeds of evil not only in men’s deeds, but in their thoughts,” Rubashov writes. “We admitted no private sphere, not even inside a man’s skull.” But he goes to his death with a head full of heretical thoughts about the corruption of the revolution and the mystical “oceanic sense” that transcends it all. Koestler was kinder than Orwell. He granted Stalin’s victims the possibility that, despite their public disintegration, they did not make that final private surrender. O’Brien seems to be describing this very scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet.” Not so in Oceania: “We make the brain perfect before we blow it out.”

  In his Tribune essay, Orwell typically counterbalanced his praise for Darkness at Noon with rough treatment of Koestler’s latest book, Arrival and Departure, a “shallow” novel about a refugee from fascism. He felt that Koestler combined the blackest cynicism about short-term progress with a “quasi-mystical belief” in a far-off Utopia, because he was too hedonistic (a terrible character flaw in Orwell’s eyes) to accept life as the painful, messy, compromised experience it is. “Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life,” Orwell offered, “perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.”

  Orwell and his contemporaries were a robust, pugnacious bunch. Correlating Orwell’s correspondence with the names of writers that he reviewed, or who reviewed him, you might expect them to have formed a cosy circuit of mutual log-rolling. In fact, they prided themselves on their critical integrity and pulled few punches. If Orwell had been cold-shouldered by everybody he had criticised in print, then his literary social circle would have shrunk to the size of a farthing.

  Still, his rough honesty could lead to some awkward moments. In 1945, Koestler and his partner Mamaine Paget invited Orwell to spend Christmas with them in Wales. The day before Orwell’s arrival, Koestler read a recent issue of Tribune and was dismayed to see his friend describe his new science-fiction play Twilight Bar as “an unworthy squib.” So when Koestler collected Orwell from Llandudno station, he was furious.

  “That was a bloody awful review you wrote, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Orwell flatly replied. “And it’s a bloody awful play, isn’t it?”

  Only on the drive back to Llandudno a week later did Orwell quietly concede that yes, perhaps he had been a little too harsh. Yet the issue had not spoiled the holiday. Perhaps, knowing what Orwell had been through that year, Koestler was disinclined to press the point.

  In February 1945, Orwell finally got his chance to be a war correspondent. The Observer and the Manchester Evening News dispatched him to liberated Paris while Eileen and Richard went to stay with Gwen O’Shaughnessy in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham.

  In Thurston Clarke’s Thirteen O’Clock, a 1984 conspiracy thriller about an MP’s wife who discovers Orwell’s lost diaries, Orwell spends his time in Europe on the trail of the US colonel who betrayed his Spanish comrades to the NKVD. The truth is less dramatic but far from dull. When Captain Eric Blair checked in to the Hotel Scribe in Paris on February 15, he found as many writers in the French capital as there had been in Spain. He befriended the philosopher A. J. Ayer; dined with P. G. Wodehouse; crossed paths with Malcolm Muggeridge, who was working for MI6; reconnected with his Spanish commander Jose Rovira; introduced himself to André Malraux, now an adviser to Charles de Gaulle; and allegedly bumped into Hemingway.17 Orwell also arranged to meet Albert Camus at Les Deux Magots, but Camus was ill with tuberculosis that day, thwarting what could have been a remarkable meeting between two natural rebels who put principles before political expediency and turned political writing into an art. Orwell later sent Camus a copy of the French translation of Animal Farm.

  In late March, Orwell accompanied Allied forces on their march into Cologne. “After years of war it is an intensely strange feeling to be at last standing on German soil,” he wrote in his only dispatch before he fell ill and was admitted to hospital. While there, he missed the urgent letters Eileen was sending to the Hotel Scribe—her last. Eileen was due an emergency hysterectomy in Newcastle on March 29 to remove several rapidly growing tumours from her uterus. In her letters, she was heartbreakingly self-effacing about the cost of the operation (“I really don’t think I’m worth the money”) and briskly unsentimental about the possibility of dying on the operating table, but adamant about the future she wanted. She told Orwell that he needed to drop journalism, concentrate on novels, and move to the country as soon as possible. “I don’t think you understand what a nightmare the London life is to me . . . All these years I have felt as though I were in a mild kind of concentration camp.” On his return to Paris, Orwell read the letters and telegraphed Eileen, but too late. The next day a telegram from The Observer regretfully informed him that his wife of nine years was dead at the age of thirty-nine. She had suffered cardiac arrest under anaesthesia.

  Orwell hitched a lift on a military aircraft to London, materialising at Inez Holden’s door in a desperate state, and travelled on to Stockton-on-Tees for the funeral. The marrow-deep reserve that he had inherited from his father confused some friends into thinking that he was stoic about his loss, but his feelings leaked out in his letters, in which he was less concerned with his own grief than with the unfairness of Eileen’s stolen future. “It was a most horrible thing to happen because she had five really miserable years of bad health and overwork, and things were just beginning to get better,” he wrote to Anthony Powell. He felt enormously guilty that he had been sexually unfaithful, selfish, oblivious to the
seriousness of her illness, and absent when she needed him most. The shock, and the ensuing loneliness, haunted him for the next four years. “I don’t think he looked after her much, but I think he loved her,” said Eileen’s friend and colleague Lettice Cooper. “I think he didn’t know how to look after anybody, not even himself.”

  As usual, Orwell buried himself in work. A few days after the funeral he was back in Europe. In Paris when Germany surrendered, he witnessed celebrants jamming the streets for two whole days as they chanted “Avec nous!” and sang “La Marseillaise.” He then visited Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Austria to see for himself the immediate aftermath of a collapsed dictatorship. The devastation moved him to horror and pity: “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”

  It was easy for a man who had never experienced Nazi occupation to say, but when Orwell saw defeated SS officers being beaten and humiliated in a POW camp, he felt strongly that “the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream.” He worried that war crimes trials and the partition of Germany would only make Europe harder to heal, satisfying nothing but the public’s bloodlust. If war criminals were herded into Wembley Stadium to be eaten by lions or trampled by elephants, he thought, there would be a packed house. That image had occurred to him in January when he visited an exhibition in London called “Horrors of the Concentration Camp” and left feeling that it was a kind of pornography. In Airstrip One, St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields Church has become an atrocity exhibition and the public hanging of war criminals is a big day out for all the family. After the war, he found the return of such executions at Nuremberg and Kharkov “barbarous” and decried the way the British public, like Winston Smith, “participate at second hand by watching the news films.” This marked “another turn on the downward spiral that we have been following ever since 1933.”

  Another problem occupying Orwell’s mind in 1945 was prejudice. Antisemitism is only implied in Nineteen Eighty-Four, via the character of Emmanuel Goldstein, and racism doesn’t figure at all. In fact, Goldstein’s book insists that there is no racial discrimination in Oceania because the Party is united by ideology, not blood. Yet Orwell considered making racism a feature of Ingsoc. His original outline includes antisemitism and “anti-Jew propaganda.” In early drafts, the drowning refugees that Winston sees in a newsreel are targeted because they are Jewish and there is a gruesome account of a televised lynching in the American portion of Oceania.

  So it would be wrong to conclude that Orwell didn’t think ethnic prejudice mattered. As far back as The Road to Wigan Pier, he called racial prejudice “entirely spurious” in all its forms. In “As I Please,” he decried racist slurs and the mistreatment of black soldiers in London, and attacked the way African-Americans were disenfranchised, “pushed out of skilled jobs, segregated and insulted in the Army, assaulted by white policemen and discriminated against by white magistrates.” In “Antisemitism in Britain,” his 1945 essay for Contemporary Jewish Record, he wrote, “Something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilization, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil.”

  Orwell called this lunacy nationalism, a word which encompassed every form of partisanship from fascism to Zionism. He certainly did not believe they were all as bad as each other, but they all demonstrated the same mental habits. Patriotism, he thought, was largely subconscious and benign: a feeling rather than an ideology. Nationalism, he explained in “Notes on Nationalism,” written while he was in Europe, “is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also—since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself—unshakably certain of being right.” Orwell listed dozens of examples of people believing emotionally satisfying lies, dismissing inexpedient truths, applying outrageous double standards, and rewriting events. These are the psychological ingredients for doublethink, or “reality control,” defined in Nineteen Eighty-Four as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.”

  Nationalism was Orwell’s unifying theory of political psychology: a skeleton key that unlocked all manner of biases, fallacies and pernicious mental phenomena. The patterns of thought that he would push to extremes in Nineteen Eighty-Four sprang up everywhere, like deadly weeds. The only herbicide was to make the “moral effort” to admit one’s biases and to subject oneself to relentless self-examination. Orwell argued that antisemitism, for example, should be investigated “by people who know that they are not immune to that kind of emotion.” That included himself. During the 1930s, notably in Down and Out in Paris and London, he had made a few casually hostile remarks about Jews, typical of his generation and class, and only made an effort to examine his prejudice during the war, although he neglected also to reconsider his knee-jerk homophobia and thoughtless dismissal of feminism. He noticed that the general consensus that antisemitism was unacceptable did not, as one might hope, force people to examine their own prejudices but to redraw the definition in a way that excluded them, while reaching for examples of bad behaviour by Jews. “It is obvious that these accusations merely rationalize some deep-rooted prejudice,” he wrote. “To attempt to counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and may sometimes be worse than useless.” In fact, one of the features of antisemitism was “an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.”

  Orwell visualised racial prejudice as a nerve that might go unnoticed until it was prodded. Ideologies such as Nazism activated that nerve for their own ends, but a dictatorship could only function if the mass of people went along with it, whether through malice, apathy or fear. Orwell’s belief in self-criticism on both a personal and a national level meant acknowledging that totalitarianism was not a disease unique to Germany and Russia but one with the potential to seize any society on Earth. Everybody is wired to believe themselves righteous and to defend their positions with whatever degree of hypocrisy and self-deception is required. In Airstrip One, it doesn’t matter whether Big Brother really exists, or whether the Thought Police are watching at any given time, once the virus has taken hold, because the most powerful lies are the ones people tell themselves. In a 1944 column about pamphlets, Orwell noticed that across the political spectrum, “Nobody is searching for the truth, everybody is putting forward a ‘case’ with complete disregard for fairness and accuracy, and the most plainly obvious facts can be ignored by those who don’t want to see them . . . To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable.”

  Reading “Notes in Nationalism” now, you can apply to its catalogue of cognitive biases labels that did not exist at the time: confirmation bias, filter bubbles, backfire effect, groupthink.18 Orwell was less interested in the personalities of Hitler and Stalin, about whom he wrote surprisingly little, than in the reasons why so many ordinary people followed them. One was the decay of consensus reality. He described how newspaper readers, faced with genuine confusion and outright dishonesty, surrendered the idea that the truth was attainable at all: “The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.”

  On June 4, 1945, Winston Churchill’s first radio broadcast of the general election campaign amounted to a piece of dystopian fiction about a one-party police state. “There can be no doubt that socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state,” he railed. “No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worde
d expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.”

  The Labour leader Clement Attlee correctly identified Churchill’s broadcast as a “second hand version” of The Road to Serfdom. The public, meanwhile, found this hysterical prognosis hard to square with the shy, steady, incorruptibly honest man who had spent five years shoulder to shoulder with Churchill in the wartime coalition government. Attlee may, as Orwell noted, have borne a cranial resemblance to Lenin but, with his dry, dull voice and modest demeanour, he was nobody’s idea of a power-hungry strongman. The British public was not necessarily craving socialism—in a 1943 poll, only 3 per cent of the people who wanted “great changes” after the war mentioned it—but it was interested in the fairer society Labour was offering in its manifesto, Let Us Now Face the Future.

  Covering the election for The Observer after his return from Paris, Orwell’s plan was to report the views of the man on the street, but the man on the street wouldn’t play ball. In the pubs and on the buses, the election barely registered. “In the face of terrifying dangers and golden political opportunities, people just keep on keeping on, in a sort of twilight sleep,” he grumbled. Poorly informed by frustrated campaigners and inadequate opinion polls, Orwell predicted that Churchill’s party would still win a slim majority on July 5. Instead, Labour won 393 out of 640 seats, with an unprecedented 12 per cent swing. “I was wrong on several points,” Orwell admitted in his postmortem for Partisan Review, but “everybody else, so far as I know, was also wrong.” That included the victors. The morning after the results came in, the US embassy in London cabled Washington to say “no one was more surprised than were the leaders of the Labour Party.” At the end of “that queer, dramatic, dreamlike day,” The New Yorker’s London correspondent Mollie Panter-Downes covered the celebration at Westminster’s Central Hall, where Labour members sang “Jerusalem” and party chairman Harold Laski mischievously introduced himself as “the temporary head of the socialist Gestapo.”