Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1949-06-26
Russio and 1884


In his grimly fascinating 1894" tit
sometimes chills the spine and makes the
stomach turn, George Orwell looks ahead
thirty-five years and emissions horren
dous age In which totalitarianism is carried
to its logical extremes on a global scale.
Everywhere in this loathsome new world,
technology and the Antichrist are in
control of all things animate and inani-
mate. Wickedness Is goodness; falsehood
Is truth; ugliness is beauty; freedom is
slavery" war Is peace" Ignorance Is
strength" there Is not a single old value
that has not been transvalued into the
opposite of itself. Evil, In short, has be-
come virtue, and woe to any one who
commits the crime Of thinking otherwise.
Actually, however, not many people are
capable of committing such a crime in
1884" For the entire past of human
society has been rewritten in way that
obliterates all knowledge of what really
happened before the new order Of things
came into being. The only truths are lies,
and the average man, having been
ceaselessly indoctrinated with those lies
by every conceivable means, literally be-
lieves them. AS for the above-average
man. he is tortured and "vaporized" unless
he, too, develops an unquestioning faith
in them through a process called double
think"
George Orwell, of course, has written q
satirical fantasy. The world thirty-five
years from now is not likely to be quite
the world he has depicted. Yet the thing
that makes his book particularly creepy,
and even frightening, is that much OF
what happens in 1t Is already taking place
in terrifying actuality-among the hun
dreds Of millions Of people who are cut
of from us by the Iron Curtain There.
in that vast region of darkness and
tyranny, might is right, power is God the
most ruthless sort of dictatorship Is called
democracy" The whip, the secret police,
political oppression and suppression, reli-
gious persecution, multitudes of slave
laborers in concentration camps, faxed
trials knocking justice, rigid censorship,
an endless propaganda of distortions and
lies, manufactured hate, an almost lunatic
self glorification of leadership, the re~rit-
ing of science and history to conform with
the party line, the purges, the firing squads
these things and dozens OF others of
their evil kind are all audaciously justified
as wholesome expressions Of sainted way
of life designed by Marx, Lenin and Stain
to create a Utopia of peace, happiness
and liberty for the whole of mankind.
Here in the free Western world, when
we read about the fate of clergymen or
genuinely democratic political leaders In
Czechoslovakia and other Soviet satellites,
or when we note how the Moscow propa-
ganda line necessarily claims that Russia
invented practically everything. that
capitalists are plotting to unleash a new
war or that the Red Army and Navy saved
the United States from defeat by Japan,
we are disposed to shrug the whole thing
of as a sign Of totalitarian weakness. That
is what it may be. All the lying, all the
thought control, all the oppression, all the
destruction of human rights may be cal
culated to counter mass discomfort and
prevent any possible rebellion against the
dismal conditions prevailing behind the
Iron Curtain.
Yet, we must ask ourselves whether this
total and amending effort to turn reality
upside down may not NC eneCGuS
psychiatric Transformation in the peoples
dominated by Russia. II one is told over
and over again that black Is white or
that evil is good, and If no contradictory
idea is ever allowed to circulate, Is 1t not
possible that the nearer of the falsehood,
and the teller as well, will in time actually
believe it? The falsehood is obvious to US.
but if it is all that is preached behind the
Iron Curtain, it conceivably can take on
the aspects of gospel truth there.
The process of "doublethink," in other
words, may in fact be taking hold right
now in the world Of the Soviets, with even
the members of the Politburo mesmerized
by it and developing fanatical faith IN
their own vicious make-believe. The
possibility ought not to be dismissed. 1t Is
real enough to suggest that unless the
Kremlin lifts its blockade against truth,
a large part of George Orwell's bleak and
grisly fantasy may be indistinguishable
from reality thirty-five years from now.
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