Classic
Conservatives and Libertarians can learn from OrwellAn excerpt from an article by Warren Mass
March 25, 2006
Classic conservatives (as opposed to “neo-conservatives,” who are really socialists) and libertarians have traditionally looked to the fall of the Roman republic and its supplantation by a tyrannical empire as the model against which we should remain vigilant. They soundly observe the maxim offered by George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But just as modern tyrants use technology not available to the Caesars, so have their strategies and conspiracies become more sophisticated than those that existed in the days of the Roman republic and empire. Every so often, members of today’s “Inner Parties” break their omerta and reveal something of the conspiracies and intrigues that threaten our freedom. Orwell (whose real name was Eric Blair) was a leftist throughout his career. He fought for the “Republican” (communist) side in the Spanish Civil War as part of the Independent Labour Party contingent — a group of Englishmen who joined the militia of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), a revolutionary socialist party. His abhorrence of absolute despotism caused him to adopt a more “moderate” socialist philosophy, however. He wrote in 1946: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” As an “anti-totalitarian,” anti-Stalinist with strong Trotskyist tendencies, Orwell thus shared much, philosophically, with the U.S. “neo-conservative” movement that came to dominate such “conservative” institutions as National Review magazine, and ultimately, the Republican Party.
Having had firsthand knowledge of the international socialist agenda, Orwell’s depiction of world-wide totalitarianism in 1984 is to be valued as much as, for example, Professor Carroll Quigley’s 1966 exposure of the Council on Foreign Relations’ conspiratorial agenda in Tragedy and Hope. Orwell’s statements concerning contemporary events were often strikingly revealing. For example, he observed in 1940 that, for most of the decade of the 1930s, “the central stream of English literature was more or less directly under Communist control.”
As a witness to the United Nations’ first meeting, Orwell wrote in the March 22, 1946 issue of the London Tribune: “The United Nations organization’s usefulness as an instrument of world peace is nil. This was just as obvious before it began functioning as now. Yet only a few months ago millions of well-informed people believed that it was going to be a success.”
While 1984 is a work of fiction and Orwell was certainly no prophet, over time, his work continually appears to take on almost prophetic qualities. We live in a society where government’s electronic surveillance takes us eerily towards the world where “Big Brother is Watching You.” And the manifestation of Orwell’s description of “perpetual war” as part-and-parcel of today’s U.S. foreign policy certainly gives the thinking man or woman much to ponder.