A Defence of 'Orwellian'

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 25th Jun 18

For Orwell’s birthday, I’d like to make a defence of Orwell on account of a quirk of our political parlance. Someone who spends an unhealthy majority of their time reading about politics on the internet tends to run across the term ‘Orwellian’ in a bafflingly diffuse array of sometimes fairly unrelated contexts. Sure, the big bads like the Snoopers’ Charter and the NSA and most things occurring in Russia get ‘Orwellian’ labels and it’s fairly justified. Justified in its use by the average Facebook-user-cum-political-analyst’s loose grasp of a book they almost definitely haven’t read, anyway.
 Enough people have seen ‘Orwellian’ standing for ‘bad oppressive state apparatus’ to learn the broad context and make an educated guess in their own writing. Unfortunately, enough people have learned the word from people who haven’t read 1984who also learned the word from people who haven’t read 1984that such instances as LBC firing Katie Hopkins, Sadiq Khan’s anti-junk food advertisements, and Tommy Robinson being arrested for breaching the peace of court find themselves referred to as ‘Orwellian’. Apparently the somewhat baggier definition of ‘Orwellian’ is “a decision made by someone in a position of power which I don’t agree with”. I wager a tidy sum that at least one person has accused the British state of acting ‘Orwellian’ for arresting the men doing Nazi salutes at the ‘Free Tommy’ demonstration in London.

Orwell’s politics get co-opted constantly, mostly because 1984 has had such an enduring impact in presenting something that we’re all so strongly, gut-feeling-ly opposed to – whatever it is. Even for those of us who’ve read 1984, its authorial political intent can be hard to pin down. To some it’s clearly authoritarianism in general, to some is clearly specifically the Stalinists, to some it’s clearly specifically communists in general, to some it’s clearly actually the Nazis, to some it’s clearly the very concept of society (God bless Libertarians). But all this only serves to reduce a very complex man who did many interesting and conflicting things and wrote more than one book. Naturally EDL troglodytes calling Antifa ‘Orwellian’ will be dismayed to learn that Orwell spent time in the Spanish Civil War shooting fascists (in fact EDL ‘patriots’ may also be dismayed to learn that that Second World War was fought for precisely the opposite reason of protecting the right of people to do a Nazi salute on the streets of London), while those on the left, who thought the EDL can sod off because “he’s our guy”, will be dismayed to learn that shortly before his death Orwell produced a blacklist for the Foreign Office of crypto-communists and, according to The New York Review of Books, eight variations of jews, in 1949 – McCarthyism before McCarthy even McCarthyed!

But this is ignoring one of the more egregious reductionisms of ‘Orwellian’: why does it only get used in the context of the dystopian authoritarianism that Orwell was critiquing (whoops looks like I just made a claim about what 1984is about – but it’s broad, it’s a broad claim, it’s fine). Just to pluck an example off the top of my head, in Orwell’s essay, ‘My Country Left or Right’, Orwell makes a case that patriotism can be left-wing. In a sense then, a sense which almost nobody would recognise, Red London’s (the Facebook meme page) attempts, however dubious, to reclaim English nationalism could be described as ‘Orwellian’, and not in the sense of an insult. It seems barmy to immortalise someone as the concept of the thing they were opposed to, or to which we so want them to have been opposed to (‘Orwellian’ in an argument is, after all, an appeal to authority). We don’t call the 5 billionaires who own 80% of UK press media ‘Gramscian’ or the fact that we still have a monarch ‘Miltonian’ or ‘Painite’, and we certainly don’t call bankers’ bonuses ‘Marxist’. Whatever those who have actually studied or at least read Orwell may think of his politics, we can all agree that it’s a bit sad that his entire legacy is reduced to a book that, at least going by the ways in which it’s used, no one seems to have actually read.