The place where there is no darkness

Orwell worked here and foresaw the future of China
Ai Weiwei was kept in a tiny cell with the light on 24 hours per day, according to the Washington Post. Why do Chinese dictators behave like caricatures from George Orwell’s novel 1984? For those who don’t remember, in Orwell’s dystopia, undercover police agent-provocateur O’brien tells would-be dissident Winston Smith that they will meet again, “in the place where there is no darkness”. This turns out to be a harshly lit interrogation cell, rather than a bright post-dictatorship future, where O’brien ruthlessly tortures and brainwashes Smith until he loves Big Brother and dies.

Orwell was a lifelong socialist who had the courage of his convictions; he fought in Spain for Republican Spain’s popular front government in 1937 and was wounded there; he described the experience in Homage to Catalonia, including the persecution and murder of “heretical” communists there (such members of the Trotskyite POUM ) by Stalin’s agents. Returning to Britain, in the early 1940s Orwell wrote Animal Farm, an allegory in which the animals unite to overthrow their farmer, and found an animal’s republic in which all are equal. However, the revolution degenerates when the pigs make themselves the new farm bosses, claiming that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. This was a thinly-disguised parody of Stalinist Russia, then an ally in the war against Nazi Germany.

Orwell felt a deep hatred of Stalin’s corrupt revolution and his next and final book was a stronger attack on Stalinist Russia and those countries, like China, which followed the Stalinist model. Orwell wrote it while he was dying of tuberculosis, and called it 1984, an inversion of the year it was written, 1948. The book is probably still the greatest anti-fascist, anti- totalitarian work of literature ever written in the English language. Concepts such as doubtlethink and newspeak were borrowed from it by political scientists. Thoughtcrime and memory hole also entered the language. Orwell died before the IT age, but he foresaw that dictators would use new technology both to spy on people and to spread propaganda and lies. Many features of the dystopia are still clearly recognisable in Communist China, in particular the constant re-writing of history, which is Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth. When Oceania switches sides and declares war on Eurasia, all media references to the past must be rewritten, so that it appears that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

In a recent example of this, Hu Jintao said on July 1st that the Communist Party was founded on this day 90 years ago, when in fact the Party was founded some time afterwards. Some people say that this does not matter, after all it is only a minor revision of history; other revisions such as the one after June 4th 1989 matter more. But Hu’s attitude is typical of a party for which changing the past to build the future has become second nature. The CPC is also obsessed with use of language, which it refers to as tifa, especially when referring to the non-nation of Taiwan. Oceania, the Party-state inhabited by Winston Smith, is constantly at war, just as China can not drop it’s belligerent attitude to Taiwan, the US and other countries. As Ai Weiwei once said, “they need an enemy”.

Readers of 1984 today also recognise another feature of Chinese propaganda: statistics are constantly broadcast with positive stories about increasing production. Had he not died in 1949, Orwell would not have been surprised by the Great Leap Forward, when fake statistics of bumper crop yields were used to starve millions to death.


As for doublethink, it simply means the ability to hold contradictory beliefs. Psychologists today refer to it as cognitive dissonance. It is not hard to find examples of it in the arguments of the apologists of dictatorship, including foreign apologists such as Kuhn. In the 1930s, there were many in Europe who sympathised with Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler had built roads and Mussolini had made the trains run on time, they said. When the Oswald Mosley-led Fascist marched in London, Britain’s popular Daily Mail celebrated them with a front page headline: Hoorah for the Blackshirts!

In the political desperation which accompanied the economic depression of the 1930s, many saw salvation in extremism. In Japan, militarism took hold, leading to the invasion of China and ultimately to the conquest of China by the CCP. China’s present political system dates to the era of fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, remarkably unmodified.
How nice it would be if dictators could learn some new lines and stop leaning on Orwell's script. I hope by 2084 they have done that
This photo was taken and the text was written on 2011-07-31 at London,England