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C00002 00002	orwell[f83,jmc]		Review of two books reviewing 1984
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orwell[f83,jmc]		Review of two books reviewing 1984

%3Stansky, Peter (ed.) (1983):%2 On 1984%1, Freeman, San Francisco

%3Howe, Irving (ed.) (1983):%2 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in our Century%1,
Perrenial Library, Harper and Row.

	Orwell's book is about totalitarianism, and more specifically, it
is about the danger of totalitarianism with an originally socialist
motivation or at least with an ostensible socialist motivation and
using socialist slogans as an ideological justification.
Orwell explicitly intended as a cautionary tale about tendencies rather
than as prediction.

	Orwell tells us nothing about Big Brother himself, even whether
he exists, because his totalitarian society is regarded as self-sustaining
independently of the specific personality of the leader.  This omission
is the most important deviation from reality, because the development
of existing totalitarian societies has turned out to depend decisively
on the personality of the leader and to change drastically on the death
of the leader.

	In this error, Orwell follows Dostoevsky and Koestler.  All
three employ a grand inquisitor who explains to his victim the objectives
of the system.  How the top man or top group(comes to have the objectives
in question and what maintains them is never explained.  However, in
the existing totalitarian societies, the personal ego of the leader
rather than merely his fanatically upholding some ideal played a
decisive role.  Stalin, Hitler and Mao were all peculiar people.
Moreover, the people who surrounded them were dominantly ordinary
egotistical, power-hungry and wealth-hungry gangster politicians.

	However, the original leaders and even more their successors
turn out to have a bundle of ordinary motivations.  These motivations
vary from individual to individual.  They aren't the
pure fanatics required for maintenance and development of the
Orwellian society.  The existing totalitarian societies develop along
lines similar to tyrannies of the past, but substantially modified by
modern technology.  The tyrannies of the past often lasted for tens of
successions, so we can use our knowledge of them to attempt to predict
what will happen in the Soviet Union and China.

	Nazism and Italian Fascism were destroyed from the outside.
However, they might have had a better chance of developing along
somewhat Orwellian lines than the communist countries.  This is because
both were explicitly based on the existence of a dictator.  Had
these societies survived the death of their dictators, new dictators
would have been called for.  Of course, the system might have been
modified by the reluctance and fear of the henchmen to giving anyone
the power enjoyed by Hitler and Mussolini, although Hitler's and
Mussolini's henchmen had were not decimated by purges the way Stalin's
and Mao's were.

Dallin discusses this point.

The technology isn't up to creating 1984.  People are more resistant
than Orwell hypothesized and more capable of hypocrisy.  As
Deng said to Shirley MacLaine when she referred to the Chinese
physicist who told her that raising pigs on the commune was as
important to him as physics, "He was lying".  However, more technology,
e.g. combining drugs with conditioning, might succeed in making
brain-washing effective.  Neither Orwell nor any of the 
commentators, however, discusses what kind of political structure
would produce and maintain the requisite O'Brien's.

Consider "Kruschev Remembers" and Djilas's "Conversations with Stalin".
Each shows that Soviet leaders thought in terms of Marxist cliches.  This
doesn't mean that they took Marxist slogans literally.  They interpreted
them in ways appropriate to their personal interests and ideas.
Nevertheless, if one wants to postulate a particular kind of totalitarian
society maintained over leadership successions, one has to find an
ideological rationalization that will fit the top leaders and every kind
of subordinate whose enthusiasm is necessary to maintain the system.  If
enthusiasm will not be obtained, only acquiescence and servitude, then one
has to show that this is enough to prevent the system from unravelling.