The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 by Dorian Lynskey
Orwell wrote about fascism in 1936: “If you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass
off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with
a rubber truncheon.”
(T)he fact that the novel speaks to us so loudly and clearly in 2019 is a terrible indictment of politicians and
citizens alike. While it’s still a warning, it has also become a reminder of all the painful lessons that the world
appears to have unlearned since Orwell’s lifetime, especially those concerning the fragility of truth in the face
of power. I hesitate to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more relevant than ever, but it’s a damn sight more
relevant than it should be.
It was (Orwell’s) awareness of his own flaws that inoculated him against utopian delusions of human
perfectibility.
“If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness,” Orwell wrote, a
dozen years before the rodents broke Winston Smith’s spirit. Rats are mentioned in all but one of Orwell’s
nine books.
Souvarine’s Cauchemar en U.R.S.S. supplied Orwell’s first insight into the operation of Stalin’s regime. Many
of the details and anecdotes he discovered there fed into Nineteen Eighty-Four: the cult of personality; the
rewriting of history; the obliteration of freedom of speech; the contempt for objective truth; the echoes of the
Spanish Inquisition; the arbitrary arrests, denunciations and forced confessions; above all, the suffocating
climate of suspicion, self-censorship and fear.
At root, Orwell thought utopias sounded boring and joyless and didn’t believe people really wanted them. “On
the whole human beings want to be good,” he wrote in his 1941 essay “The Art of Donald McGill,” “but not
too good, and not quite all the time.”
Orwell …. thought that one of the left’s great fallacies was “the belief that the truth will prevail and persecution
defeats itself, or that man is naturally good and is only corrupted by his environment.”
“those who fight dragons risk becoming dragons themselves.”
Orwell’s typical protagonist is a plain, mediocre individual who finds their role in society intolerable, attempts
to resist or escape, and ends up back where they began, minus the hope that a better life is possible.
“the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries” can happen here.
Orwell’s description of the proles is the least persuasive element of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is hardly credible
that a regime obsessed with absolute control would allow 85 per cent of the population to live beyond the
reach of the Thought Police and telescreens, nor that the proles would be immune to doublethink.
All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what
one is doing, and why. —George Orwell, diary entry, March 14, 1942
In June 1942, the Indian Section relocated from Portland Place to a requisitioned department store at 200
Oxford Street, where the staff worked in cubicles like the ones in the Ministry of Truth’s Records Department.
The subterranean staff canteen, with its distinctive aroma of boiled cabbage, resurfaced in the novel, as did the
cleaners who sang to themselves every morning as they swept the corridors. The Ministry of Truth’s
building—“an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete”—was a Wellsian exaggeration of
the Ministry of Information’s HQ at the University of London’s Senate House, where Eileen worked. Though
one-fifth the size of the fictional Ministry, this sixty-four-metre-tall art deco tower was then the second highest
building in London; the Orwells could see it from the windows of their flat in Langford Court.
“one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the use it is actually put to.” Orwell.
Desmond Hawkins thought that what really shaped the role of propaganda in Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t the
BBC but the Nazi broadcasts that its employees were required to study: “We were listening to ‘Germany
Calling,’ every kind of distortion of truth and ‘doublethink.’ So we were seeing how the new mass media could
be used, and bear in mind that for Orwell, as for me, we were born into a world where there was no radio.
“progress is a con and science merely produces more efficient killing machines.” Orwell
Orwell understood better what he had seen unfolding in Spain: “for the first time, I saw newspaper reports
which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied by an ordinary lie . . . I
saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according
to various ‘party lines.’
In the past, people were guilty of deliberate deceit or unconscious bias, but at least they believed in the
existence of facts and the distinction between true and false. Totalitarian regimes, however, lied on such a
grand scale that they made Orwell feel that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”
What was just an inkling in 1937 had been honed into a conviction that would underpin the Ministry of Truth
and the true source of Ingsoc’s power: it “controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such
and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well,
two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the
last few years that is not a frivolous statement.”
“Is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?” Orwell asked. “Before
writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of
today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true.”
In one column, he described the radio as if it were a telescreen: “a sort of totalitarian world of its own, braying
propaganda night and day to people who can listen to nothing else.” In another, he recalled meeting a young
pacifist painter, on the first night of the Blitz, who insisted that he could weather German occupation with his
integrity intact. “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside . . . Out in
the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl
to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attic the secret
enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom.” It was a fallacy that he was to directly
refute in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the room above Charrington’s shop is a sanctum that turns out to be
a trap. “It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world,” says O’Brien,
“however secret and powerless it may be.”
“The most encouraging fact about revolutionary activity is that, although it always fails, it always continues,”
Orwell wrote in 1948. “The vision of a world of free and equal human beings, living together in a state of
brotherhood . . . never materialises, but the belief in it never seems to die out.”
Behaviour is right or wrong regardless of who’s doing it. If you suppress the rights of your political enemies,
Orwell thought, then you can be sure that one day they will suppress yours.
Ideas, not plot, were (Orwell’s) way in.
The novel’s famously disorienting first line, for example, originally read: “It was a cold, blowy day in early
April, and a million radios were striking thirteen.” This was the sixth of his books to open with the time of
day.
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection,” he wrote, “that one is sometimes willing
to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly
intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the
inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
“I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied . . . I think it is a good idea but the
execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB.”
Oceania’s ubiquitous, intangible ruler is a hybrid of Koestler’s No. 1, Zamyatin’s Benefactor, Hitler and, most
of all, “Uncle Joe” Stalin, about whom André Gide wrote, “His portrait is seen everywhere, his name is on
everyone’s lips and praise of him occurs in every public speech. Is all this the result of worship, love or fear?
Who can say?” Stalin was often called “the insoluble mystery,” “the Enigma” or “the Communist Sphinx,”
obscured from the masses by his inner circle. The less like a real, and therefore imperfect, human being he
appeared, the more powerful he became. “The chief qualification of a mass leader,” wrote Arendt, “has become
unending infallibility; he can never admit an error . . . Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules
all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.”
Orwell’s motive for making such an extreme scenario at least imaginable was not despair, but not exactly hope
either. “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one,” he explained in a
press statement after the book came out. “Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
The book was variously compared to an earthquake, a bundle of dynamite, and the label on a bottle of poison.
“I read it with such cold shivers I haven’t had since as a child I read Swift about the Yahoos,” John Dos Passos
wrote to Orwell, confessing that he’d had nightmares about the telescreen. Several booksellers told Warburg
that they were unable to sleep after reading their advance copies. For E. M. Forster, it was “too terrible a novel
to be read straight through.”
The most astute critics were those who understood Orwell’s message that the germs of totalitarianism existed
in Us as well as Them. In Goldstein’s book, the supposedly irreconcilable ideologies of the three super-states
are “barely distinguishable” and the social structures not at all. “Behind Stalin lurks Big Brother,” Forster
wrote, “which seems appropriate, but Big Brother also lurks behind Churchill, Truman, Gandhi, and any leader
whom propaganda utilizes or invents.”
“I do not believe that the kind of society which I described necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of
course for the fact that the book is satire) that something resembling it could arrive.” Orwell
If that is what the world is going to be like, we might as well put our heads in the gas ovens now. —Viewer
complaint to the BBC on the TV version of 1984, December 1954
If someone had written a novel in 1910 and called it ‘1954’ and forecast the existence of totalitarian
Governments, ‘brainwashing,’ extermination camps, slave labour, the horrors of atomic and hydrogen bombs,
he would probably have been accused of wild exaggeration and morbid, crooked thinking.
Big Brother proved especially popular. During the 1950s, the name was applied in Parliament to targets as
diverse as the Conservative government, the Labour left, President Eisenhower, Lord Beaverbrook, Mao’s
China, the caliphate of Oman, the House of Lords, the trade union leadership, the Coal Board and the Post
Office. Not everybody caught the reference. When, during a 1956 debate about fuel policy, one MP objected
to being labelled Big Brother, the speaker of the House of Commons was nonplussed: “I thought it was a term
of affection.”
in 1958, an East German judge sentenced a teenager to three years in prison for reading and discussing the
book, he called Orwell “the most hated writer in the Soviet Union and the socialist states.”
It is a mark of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s uncommon bleakness that a “happy” ending is one in which its
protagonists are shot to death, having achieved nothing.
Even as the ultra-McCarthyite John Birch Society made 1984 the last four digits of its phone number, the
Black Panthers added Orwell to the syllabus of their Oakland Community School.
Orwell didn’t say much about Nineteen Eighty-Four, but what he did say, very firmly, was that it was not a
prophecy. A satire, a parody and a warning, yes, but not that.
“The thoughts in the film industry were that the film wasn’t going to be successful because it didn’t have a
happy ending,” remembered Radford. “And also it wasn’t really a book—it was essentially a gigantic essay.
They said, ‘Your audience is going to be over thirty-five and will know who Orwell is. It’s going to be small.’
But it was huge and it was fifteen-to twenty-year-olds. Why?” He laughed. “Because it was so completely
about despair. Young people love despair.”
When a teacher in New York assigned the novel to forty-nine adult students in 1982, only one read it as anticommunist; the rest were reminded of the FBI, CIA, Watergate, television and computers.
Pynchon wrote in his foreword to the 2003 edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four that the internet was “a
development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old twentieth-century tyrants with their goofy
mustaches could only dream about.”
Effectiveness is one of the watchwords of Vladimir Putin’s mixed tyranny, or “managed democracy.” Since
first becoming Russia’s president in 2000, buoyed by a craving for strength and stability after the nervegrinding upheavals of the post-communist ’90s, the former KGB officer has gradually brought back such
features of the old regime as leader-worship, martial parades, mass arrests, show trials, political prisoners,
territorial aggression, the one-party state, censorship, Newspeak and endemic paranoia. In 2012, Putin declared
his dream of building a Russian-led replacement for the European Union, “from Lisbon to Vladivostok,”
unbound by such bothersome concepts as human rights and free and fair elections. Inspired by the fascist
thinker Aleksandr Dugin, he called it Eurasia.
During Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton, it was hard to watch the candidate whipping supporters
into a cry of “Lock her up!” without being reminded of the Two Minutes Hate and Orwell’s description of the
Party mindset: “a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories,
and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party.” …The president meets most of the criteria of
Orwell’s 1944 definition of fascism: “something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and
anti-working-class . . . almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist.’ ”
During the two decades preceding the 2016 election, groups such as climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers,
creationists, birthers, 9/11 truthers and conspiracy theorists of every variety all demonstrated a fierce disregard
for factual evidence that contradicted their beliefs, often reinforced by right-wing media outlets such as Fox
News and talk radio, and by online echo chambers. This increasingly popular mindset was a toxic cocktail of
cynicism and credulity. People who were proudly sceptical of CNN or The New York Times were perfectly
happy to take unsourced Facebook posts and quack science at face value; those who doubted the BBC eagerly
rubber-stamped the state propaganda of Putin or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
During the 2016 election campaign, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, flooded social media
with fake news stories designed to generate confusion, cynicism and division. One of the agency’s popular
memes read: “The People Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe: George Orwell.” The quotation
was fabricated. Orwell never used the phrase the media, which did not enter common usage until after his
death, and he would never have made such a simplistic claim. The irony of Russian propagandists putting
words into Orwell’s mouth in order to hijack his prestige as a truth-teller to erode faith in journalism is
breathtaking.
The growth of “deepfake” image synthesis, which combines computer graphics and artificial intelligence to
manufacture images whose artificiality can only be identified by expert analysis, has the potential to create a
paranoid labyrinth in which, according to the viewer’s bias, fake images will pass as real while real ones are
dismissed as fake. With image synthesis, Winston’s fictional Comrade Ogilvy could be made to walk and talk
while the crucial photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford could be shrugged off as a hoax.
It is truly Orwellian that the phrase “fake news” has been turned on its head by Trump and his fellow
authoritarians to describe real news that is not to their liking, while flagrant lies become “alternative facts.” In
March 2019, The Washington Post calculated that Trump had made 9,014 false claims during his first 773
days in office; the average had risen from just under six a day during his first year to twenty-two a day in 2019.
In China, which operates the world’s most sophisticated censorship regime, any reference to Orwell’s book is
scrubbed from the internet along with every other whisper of dissent.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is about many things, and its readers’ concerns dictate which one is paramount at any
point in history. During the cold war, it was a book about totalitarianism. In the 1980s, it became a warning
about invasive technology. Today, it is most of all a defence of truth.
“The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don’t let it happen. It
depends on you.”