The British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC), happily amplified by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in
the United States which carries its World News, continues to pump out its
regular dreck about the alleged economic chaos in Russia and the imagined
miserable state of the Russian people.
It
is all lies of course. Patrick Armstrong‘s
authoritative regular updates including his reports on this website are a
necessary corrective to such crude propaganda.
But
amid all their countless fiascoes and failures in every other field (including
the highest per capita death rate from COVID-19 in Europe, and one of the
highest in the world) the British remain world leaders at managing global Fake
News. As long as the tone remains restrained and dignified, literally any
slander will be swallowed by the credulous and every foul scandal and shame can
be confidently covered up.
None
of this would have surprised the late, great George Orwell. It is fashionable
these days to endlessly trot him out as a zombie (dead but alleged to be living
– so that he cannot set the record straight himself) critic of Russia and all
the other global news outlets outside the control of the New York and London
plutocracies. And it is certainly true, that Orwell, whose hatred and fear of
communism was very real, served before his death as an informer to MI-5,
British domestic security.
But
it was not the Soviet Union, Stalin’s show trials or his experiences with the
Trotskyite POUM group in Barcelona and Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
that “made Orwell Orwell” as the Anglo-America Conventional Wisdom Narrative
has it. It was his visceral loathing of the British Empire – compounded during
World War II by his work for the BBC which he eventually gave up in disgust.
And
it was his BBC experiences that gave Orwell the model for his unforgettable
Ministry of Truth in his great classic “1984.”
George
Orwell had worked in one of the greatest of all world centers of Fake News. And
he knew it.
More
profoundly, the great secret of George Orwell’s life has been hiding in plain
sight for 70 years since he died. Orwell became a sadistic torturer in the
service of the British Empire during his years in Burma, modern Myanmar. And as
a fundamentally decent man, he was so disgusted by what he had done that he
spent the rest of his life not just atoning but slowly and willfully committing
suicide before his heartbreakingly premature death while still in his 40s.
The
first important breakthrough in this fundamental reassessment of Orwell comes
from one of the best books on him. “Finding George Orwell in Burma” was
published in 2005 and written by “Emma Larkin”, a pseudonym for an outstanding
American journalist in Asia whose identity I have long suspected to be an old
friend and deeply respected colleague, and whose continued anonymity I respect.
“Larkin”
took the trouble to travel widely in Burma during its repressive military
dictatorship and her superb research reveals crucial truths about Orwell.
According to his own writings and his deeply autobiographical novel “Burmese
Days” Orwell loathed all his time as a British colonial policeman in Burma,
modern Myanmar. The impression he systematically gives in that novel and in his
classic essay “Shooting an Elephant” is of a bitterly lonely, alienated, deeply
unhappy man, despised and even loathed by his fellow British colonialists
throughout society and a ludicrous failure at his job.
This
was not, however, the reality that “Larkin” uncovered. All surviving witnesses
agreed that Orwell – Eric Blair as he then still was – remained held in high
regard during his years in the colonial police service. He was a senior and
efficient officer. Indeed it was precisely his knowledge of crime, vice, murder
and the general underside of human society during his police colonial service
while still in his 20s that gave him the street smarts, experience, and moral
authority to see through all the countless lies of right and left, of American
capitalists and British imperialists as well as European totalitarians for the
rest of his life.
The
second revelation to throw light on what Orwell had to do in those years comes
from one of the most famous and horrifying scenes in “1984.” Indeed, almost
nothing even in the memoirs of Nazi death camp survivors has anything like it:
That is the scene where “O’Brien”, the secret police officer tortures the
“hero” (if he can be called that) Winston Smith by locking his face to a cage
in which a starving rat is ready to pounce and devour him if it is opened.
I
remember thinking, when I was first exposed to the power of “1984” at my outstanding
Northern Irish school, “What kind of mind could invent something as horrific as
that?”) The answer was so obvious that I like everyone else missed it entirely.
Orwell
did not “invent” or “come up” with the idea as a fictional plot device: It was
just a routine interrogation technique used by the British colonial police in
Burma, modern Myanmar. Orwell never “brilliantly” invented such a diabolical
technique of torture as a literary device. He did not have to imagine it. It
was routinely employed by himself and his colleagues. That was how and why the
British Empire worked so well for so long. They knew what they were doing. And
what they did was not nice at all.
A
final step in my enlightenment about Orwell, whose writings I have revered all
my life – and still do – was provided by our alarmingly brilliant elder
daughter about a decade ago when she too was given “1984” to read as part of
her school curriculum. Discussing it with her one day, I made some casual
obvious remark that Orwell was in the novel as Winston Smith.
My
American-raised teenager then naturally corrected me. “No, Dad, ” she said.
“Orwell isn’t Winston, or he’s not just Winston. He’s O’Brien too. O’Brien
actually likes Winston. He doesn’t want to torture him. He even admires him.
But he does it because it’s his duty.”
She
was right, of course.
But
how could Orwell the great enemy of tyranny, lies and torture so identify with
and understand so well the torturer? It was because he himself had been one.
“Emma
Larkin’s” great book brings out that Orwell as a senior colonial police officer
in the 1920s was a leading figure in a ruthless war waged by the British
imperial authorities against drug and human trafficking crime cartels every bit
as vicious and ruthless as those in modern Ukraine, Columbia and Mexico today.
It was a “war on terror” where anything and everything was permitted to “get
the job done.”
The
young Eric Blair was so disgusted by the experience that when he returned home
he abandoned the respectable middle class life style he had always enjoyed and
became, not just an idealistic socialist as many in those days did, but a
penniless, starving tramp. He even abandoned his name and very identity. He
suffered a radical personality collapse: He killed Eric Blair. He became George
Orwell.
Orwell’s
early famous book “Down and Out in London and Paris” is a testament to how much
he literally tortured and humiliated himself in those first years back from
Burma. And for the rest of his life.
He
ate miserably badly, was skinny and ravaged by tuberculosis and other health
problems, smoked heavily and denied himself any decent medical care. His
appearance was always abominable. His friend, the writer Malcolm Muggeridge
speculated that Orwell wanted to remake himself as a caricature of a tramp.
The
truth clearly was that Orwell never forgave himself for what he did as a young
agent of empire in Burma. Even his literally suicidal decision to go to the
most primitive, cold, wet and poverty-stricken corner of creation in a remote
island off Scotland to finish “1984” in isolation before he died was consistent
with the merciless punishments he had inflicted on himself all his life since
leaving Burma.
The conclusion is clear:
For all the intensity of George Orwell’s experiences in Spain, his passion for
truth and integrity, his hatred of the abuse of power did not originate from
his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. They all flowed directly from his own
actions as an agent of the British Empire in Burma in the 1920s: Just as his
creation of the Ministry of Truth flowed directly from his experience of
working in the Belly of the Beast of the BBC in the early 1940s.
George Orwell spent more
than 20 years slowly committing suicide because of the terrible crimes he
committed as a torturer for the British Empire in Burma. We can therefore have
no doubt what his horror and disgust would be at what the CIA did under
President George W. Bush in its “Global War on Terror.” Also, Orwell would
identify at once and without hesitation the real fake news flowing out of New
York, Atlanta, Washington and London today, just as he did in the 1930s and
1940s.
Let us therefore reclaim
and embrace The Real George Orwell: The cause of fighting to prevent a Third
World War depends on it.
