George Orwell's Life and Legacy

Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts, and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therest ispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com . Hi there, it's Alasta here. Welcome to the Rest is Politics, and today we've got a very special guest from our stablemate podcast, The Rest is History. Dominique Sambrook., welcome Thank you, Alistair. It's nice to be on a proper professional podcast for once. Oh not always you say that. Uh Dominic, you you are here to discuss your new show and it's called The Book Club. Tell us about it. So it's a show that I do with my producer on the Rest is history, who's called Tabitha Siret, and we always chat about books and what we're reading, our favourite novels. And we did a mini-series together on the rest is history for rest is history club members where we talked about some of our favourite books. Uh the listeners liked it amazingly, so we decided to launch it as a standalone show. We've done four or five episodes and we recently did an episode that might appeal to you, Alistair, 'cause it's on a very political book. It's actually last week's episode, and it was George Orwell's nineteen eighty four, which I think you read when you were at school, is that right? I think I read it in nineteen seventy four. So I read nineteen eighty four and 1974. I think that's why I remember it. And my God, yeah, it's so relevant. It is so relevant. When I look at what's happening in the States right now, whether you have, you know, you look at ice and you think, mm, this is all a bit big brotherish. Yeah. You look at the way that Trump communicates, and you're tempted to say this is all a bit Orwellian. I mean Orwell and Orwellian and 1984 have entered the language even for people who have never read that book. Yeah, we were talking about this on the show actually. It's such an interesting thing because there aren't many books that embed themselves in the imagination so successfully. And a lot of the concepts that Orwell comes up with, so the idea of Britain as airstrip one, the idea of um double think, so in other words, having two ideas in your head at once and and one of them you know is a lie, but you force yourself to believe it anyway. The thing about Big Brother, the thing about Room 101. I think what's so interesting to me is that I don't know whether you would agree with this, is that it's obviously you read it, it's a massively a book of its time, so shaped in the Seondcld Wor War and the Cold War, and what Orwell's writing about is the totalitarianism of Stalin in particular. But as you say, you look at the world now, so so his idea that you're being observed through your telescreen, um, and it's checking every detail of your facial reactions and whatnot. And people are watching you the whole time, and the party, the sort of propaganda ministry is pumping out this stuff, you know, war is peace, freedom is slavery that people must at some level know is not true, but they're going along with it anyway. It feels it does feel very relevant, doesn't it? And I think the the Trumpian stuff, you know, Trump's use of social media and the way in which, ever since his first term, the hearing administration would tell people things that everybody in the room knew were untrue, and yet the MAGA movement kind of forced themselves to believe it. It is pretty chilling actually. What was the th the the phrase about you know not believing your own eyes? 'Cause that's kind of where I felt we were in Minnesota. Yeah. I actually felt it we were talking uh on the podcast this week about Trump's reaction to the death of Robert Muller. So there's Robert Muller. Robert Muller said you know he did the Russia investigation uh the brush of hoax as as Trump called it, he dies and Trump, I mean social media didn't exist when Or was writing, it didn't exist in nineteen eighty four. But his first instinct and his reaction is to put out a post saying, I'm glad he's dead. It means nobody else can be hurt. Now, that's horrible, but it's very kind of in on message on brand for Trump. But then to see every Republican who's out being interviewed on the day trying to say why it's not a terrible thing to say. When deep down they know that it is. And likewise, you know, Charlie Kir k gets assassinated and most right minded people come out and say that's a horrible thing, whatever his views, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But no, for the Trump Magalot, you had to come out and say he deserves half flags at half master around the country. We we should all attack the left because they killed him. Yeah. I think Berlusconi is a big part of this the development of this culture that we now have. He was maybe the starter of he understood that if you get media, you get the lead hand on the levers of media, you get sport as he did through football, owning one of the biggest clubs in the world. And then he does the political stuff and he becomes prime minister. But then the guy who took it to the next level, I think was Putin, nothing is true, anything is possible. That's a classic Orwell sort of said nothing is true, anything is possible, how Putin remade modern Russia, which is another book you should do for the book club by the way. And then we now have Trump, who he's nothing is true, anything is possible. I agree completely. So I think at the core of this is the idea of truth and is there such a thing as identifiable, verifiable truth? And in nineteen eighty four you may remember that um one of the ways in which they break Winston Smith when they've you know Winston is the main character who's tried to rebel and they've taken him into room one oh one and one of the things they basically get him to do, they want him not just to say that two plus two equals five, but they want him at some level to believe it. And so there's a line that goes from Stalin's show trials in the thirties. He broke like the old Bolsheviks, the people who'd been at his side in the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties. They came out and they confessed that they had been plotting against Even when they hadn't, and they you know it's always been a question, did they actually believe it themselves? And I agree with you that you now look at people, particularly in America, and you think to yourself, do they believe, you know, Trump spokesman or whatever, or JD Vance or Rubio or whoever, do they actually believe deep down in what they're saying? Or when the cameras are off, do they walk away and do they say,, well actually you know, I'm just being cynical, I'm just doing this for personal advancement, and I don't really believe it. It's hard to know though, isn't it? Because the first people they convince with their lies are themselves, don't you think? That people often c fool themselves a little bit? I don't believe that Rubio believes what he says now. If he does, then the character that we've seen over the decades he's been building his career, he was a fraud. One of them's a fraud. Right. Well. And I think it's the one now because basically Trump has he's remade the Republican Party, he's become all powerful within it, and the only way to advance and to stay advanced is to be you know, as far up Trump's backside as it's possible to be. When we interviewed on leading, we interviewed the Polish uh Foreign Minister Sikorsky, and I was asking him about Lavrov, the uh Russian foreign minister who I'd always sort of felt was a quite impressive figure in his own right. And so I said to Sir Corsk, look, you've met this guy dozens and dozens of times. Is he impressive? Is he a serious diplomat? And he said, he Well, was, but he's not now, because his entire existence now depends on essentially echoing whatever Putin says does or wants. And I think that's where the people around Trump are now. It's why I've got to say, I mean, you know, when I was in working in government, um, you know, we got accused of spin and of lying and of manipulation and all that stuff. Now I can defend what we did. But the point the the reason why I think I am able to defend that is because in Tony Blair we had a a leader who didn't only not fear being challenged internally, he expected it. Whereas I think we now have in Trump and Putin and probably Erdogan and probably Modi and quite a lot of the big leaders around the world, I think we have people who are deliberately surrounded by echo chambers. Yeah. And I think that's dangerous. Don't you think that what we have now though is a is a media landscape, a sort of political landscape in which it's cap you're capable of creating a gigantic echo chamber now in which actually people come to and that's it's not just the echo chamber, but it's also that people simply don't it's impossible for people to identify where the truth lies. So when Trump says relentlessly, um, I actually was cheated in that previous election in 2020. And even though you know you and I know that he wasn't and that he lost fair and square, but he says it so relentlessly, and the the media ecosystem that he's created, so not just truth Social, but X and his loyal TV channels and whatnot. They pump that message out. And you just I just wonder, somebody in ten years time, you know, somebody who's a child now who wants to look into it, what will they believe and what will AI tell them? What will they know is the truth? You know, that's that's quite a chilling thing, I think. The other thing that I've mildly obsessed with is Trump's so he uses these percentages all the time. We've cut your prescriptions by 300%. What does that mean? It's impossible to cut it by more than 100%. You cut it by 100%, it means it's now free. Cut it by 300%, it means you're paying double what you were paying. But you hear people then repeating. This is restors politics bingo, I know, but this is uh like Boris Johnson and his new hospitals, isn't it? Just make up a stat and um and and people will believe it and people will repeat it, it sticks in their minds. Some people believe it. And the what w the trouble with what's happening now with the echo chamber, with the algorithmization of life, is we can all end up only consuming the stuff that reinforces our beliefs all the time. I think that's what's good about these long-form podcasts is that you know we do at least try to get to base all our very, very strong and strongly held opinions on something that is factually accurate. But you know the thing about Orwell, I mean I obviously I do most of my talking now on the podcast, but I still go to the BBC quite a lot. And there's that statue, there's an amazing statue of Orwell outside the BBC. And it's, you know, and he's leaning forward. It's larger than life and he's leaning forward. And I I've got to say, I wonder whether the BBC people are conscious enough of what it says on that statue. If liberty means anything at all. It means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. And that's absolutely right. And that should be the role of media. Completely. It should be to challenge and to scrutinize. And right now, I feel that because of the magification of global politics, I feel that at the moment they're not really doing that to I would argue to the right. I don't think they did it during Brexit. I don't think they did actually tell people what they didn't want to hear, they told them what they did want to hear. Yeah. One of the reasons why we're in the mess that we're in. So, without further ado, here for you all is a clip from our episode of the book club that Tabby and I did about George Orwell's nineteen eighty four, and we hope you enjoy it So this is a world of total surveillance, and when Winston reaches his flat, he reflects that the telescreen in his flat will capture every sound and gesture. So he lives with the assumption that everything will be overheard, every moment scrutinized. He even says at one point that there's only there's one kind of safe moment in his day, and that's when he's in his bed with his eyes closed in the darkness. Yeah. And as the story unfolds, he starts to kind of gradually rebel in very, very small ways against the suffocating grip of the party and big brother. So for instance, you know, as it it's really, really small. He he buys an antique journal and starts keeping a diary. Because the reason that's a rebellion is because that's kind of his own. It's his own thoughts and considerations. It doesn't belong to the party. Um he has seditious thoughts of his own and he buys an amber paperweight from this kind of antiquarian shop. And i the reason that's seditious is it's 'cause from a former age. So and then perhaps it's from the past, exactly. And the past doesn't exist anymore. And perhaps most memorably he starts an illicit affair with a character called Julia, who's his colleague. Called O'Brien, who they think is part of a resistance group called the Brotherhood. Exactly. This doesn't end well, does it? No, it's a big spoiler alert, it doesn't end well. So uh as lots of readers will know, they're arrested and Winston ends up in the dreaded ministry of love. The most nauseating name. Yeah. And specifically in its most feared room, which is room one oh one. And we'll come back to what happens in room one oh one. So nineteen eighty four, it's a dystopian uh political warning. It is a doomed love story. It's a horror story. It's a work of science fiction. It is a reflection on the importance of history,, um a warning about the corruption of language. But more than any of those things, I mean that all you know, those are those are aspects of it, but up bottom, it is a really gripping and terrifying story. I mean it is a brilliant read. My son read it when he was about eleven or twelve and he absolut I mean he didn't care about any of those things. He just loved it as a gripping story. Totally. I mean it's it's a page turner throughout and he well as a master of suspense, he builds that as as we go on. And it's it's a phenomenon, I mean I think probably unmatched in the twentieth century. Maybe apart from by Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, and surprisingly, you know, that that's a comparison that we'll we'll touch on later. You wouldn't think to put them together, but but you can. And its legacy is just it's gigantic. The words and concepts from 1984, so many of them are are s really familiar today. You know, Big Brother, Room 101, both of which interestingly have spawned reality TV shows. So that's the idea of being of being watched. So it's George Orwell, the progenitor of Love Island. And then you have Thought Crime, Double Think, The Two Minutes Hate, Airstrip One, etc. All of this. And the word Orwellian has actually come to donate something in itself. It's it it's associated with totalitarianism, with kind of the curtailment of freedom. Like peop people even used it, I remember during the the COVID lockdowns. Of course, yeah. Yeah, massively. And the above all the surveillance culture that I think most people today are so familiar with. So there's loads, loads to talk about here. There's all well, he's a very interesting figure, the times that he lived in, what this book's all about, why it's endured and has seeped into culture in the way that it has. And also I always think it's interesting like to explore whether or not it is a period piece born of that particular moment or whether or not it's actually a prophecy with lessons for us today. So I love George Orwell. Um the man as much as the books. He's lodstar for me for lots of uh as he is for many writers. Um I once made a TV programme about Britain in the early Cold War that touched on nineteen eighty four. And actually when I was a I mean you were good enough to read one of my more um inflammatory columns. Yeah. Oh the title of one of my more inflammatory columnist.s I mean I probably in my in my days as a columnist for Britain's best loved mid market newspaper I must have quoted from George Orwell about six thousand times. He's one of those writers that basically when you run out of a when you've run out of ideas and you're groping desperately for a conclusion. Orwell is the writer that you um that you read for. But interestingly actually Tabby, I have a sense that um Orwell appeals much more to men than than to women. So you I've never really heard you wax lyrical about George Orwell. And I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that the person producing this podcast, Aaliyah, is not an Orwell fan. No, she described this as a boy book. And I think she is not entirely wrong there at all. I me an, I think and I remember thinking this the first time around as well, and I was struck by it this time, it's it's clearly, you know, ingenious and highly original. But I think there's a big difference between admiring a book and liking it and I I don't really like 1984. And I think there is something in in the idea of it being much more of a boy book than a girl book. I actually I did a bit of digging and they did a a a UGov poll in 2014 which showed that men were much more likely to read 1984 than women. I think there's very various reasons for that. I think in part because it's a book that deals much more in kind of structures and kind of systems, power systems and structures than relationships. It's it doesn't it it's it's not very um interior. It's it's emotionally really, really stark and cold. There's very little kind of relational fulfillment and the whole thing is centered on a one man's perspective, you know, it's the it's the male gaze throughout. And I just I found it, you know, reading it in a in a chilly, you know, London January on the quite nineteen forties esque northern line, back from work, every night with the shadows closing in. I found it a pretty bleak re ad. Oh no, this is shocking. We'll explore that a bit more later. The the the the idea of kind of perhaps the the sexism in 1984. But first of all, talk about George Orwell, your your hero. Okay. So the funny thing about Orwell is Orwell is renowned for his clarity and his honesty and his sympathy for the underdog and his hostility to authority. But there's an irony here because he's a son of empire, it's a son of privilege, and he's a former imperial policeman who writes under a name not his own. So his name is actu ally Eric Arthur Blair. Um so he's born in Bengal in nineteen oh three. His father was in the Indian civil service and he basically worked as a d uh the on the export of opium His family, interestingly, he described them um famously as lower upper middle class, or was fascinated by class. Basically because his fa his family were genteel but they didn't have the money to sustain it. So that meant that there's always a huge or a widening gap between their expectations and their capacity to pay for them. And that meant that all well reflected a lot about the sort of social caste and so on. He's very a bright boy, he went to scholarship to prep school and then another scholarship to Eton, a King's scholarship to Eton, where he was taught French by Aldus Huxley, the author of Brave New World. That is a great detail though. The two kind of fathers of dystopian literature. Exactly. So um he wasn't a great star at Eton. Um his parents thought that he probably wouldn't win a scholarship to university and they didn't have the money to send him. So they applied for him to join the Indian Imperial Police, which he does. He passes the exam, he goes off to Burma. And some of his biographers see Burma as formative for him because of course Burma, you know, he has an experience of repression and punishments and surveillance. But he's on the other side of that equation because he's working for the authorities. Yeah, and he he really doesn't enjoy Burma, does he? No, not at all. I think he he finds it very awkward. He's he wrote brilliantly, by the way, about his time in Burma. There's a brilliant essay about shooting an elephant and everyone sort of staring at him and the sort of pressure that he felt as the representative of imperial authority, surrounded by all these people whose lives he didn't really understand. So that's why I guess he he went back to England eventually in nineteen twenty eight and then that's when he first had a stab at becoming a writer. Yeah, exactly. And a big big change. He lived mainly in a sort of sleepy Sussex seaside town called Southwold, and that's where his family retired to. And that's when he takes the name George Orwell, and he takes it from the king. Yeah, George. Patriotic, yeah, a good patriotic man. And then the local river 'cause he sees it as a s solid English name. And then he really gives the writing his best shot. And he writes Down and Out in Paris and London and that's published in 1933, and then four books after that. So there's Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and Coming Up for Air. And none of these are very successful, and let's face it, we probably wouldn't know them well today if it hadn't been for his later works. The common theme of those books is there's a central character who's trapped by his times who feels it's very claustrophobic and the character tries to escape and basically fails. So this is a constant theme for Orwell. And I think that reflects I mean obviously the theme in 1984, and I think that reflects his personality. He's a he's a he's shaped very much by the establishment, but also he's quite thoughtful, he's spiky, he's awkward, he's kind of a man apart. He likes to see himself as a man apart. Anyway, the paradox is on the one hand he's quite anti-authority, anti-establishment, but on the other, you know, he's very loyal to his old school friends, so the people at his bedside when he was dying were all older. That's led some people to to think retrospectively that he might have been gay, hasn't it? I can't believe that people think that. Well I can believe that people think it, but I think they're deluded. I mean I mean one of the great criticisms of Orwell now is that Orwell, you know, is no woman is safe around George Orwell. He's either sort of paying feebly at them or he's asking them to marry him. Anyway, talking about asking them to marry him, he does get married in nineteen thirty six to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who's Oxford educated and basically becomes his typist . And then at the end of nineteen thirty six, the defining political event of his life, he goes off to the Spanish Civil W Before then, I think all had I mean he'd been interested in politics, but he hadn't been fundamentally political. And the Spanish Civil War changes that. He volunteers for the Republicans, the left wing forces. He joins a militia called the Pume. But the what really is so formative is that the left wing forces in Spain are fighting among themselves. So there's a rift in Barcelona where he's been very excited and happy. There's a big rift between on the one hand, all these different kind of sectarian militias like the PUM. Yeah. And on the other, the Orthodox communists. And the Orthodox kind of Stalinist communists basically stamp on these other militias. And Orwell is really shocked by this. He's shocked by Stalinism, he's shocked by the experience of kind of truth and language being threatened by propaganda and by kind of totalitarian orthodoxy. And and and and that stays with him politically forever. And that gives him his obsession, I think, with totalitarianism and with Stalinism. Yeah, and Stalinism, I mean Stalin's shadow looms large in 1984. And obviously, Big Brother, I mean, he's not entirely Stalin. Like as we said, you know, the shadows of Hitler and him. But the similarities between Stalin and Big Brother are impossible to miss, I would say. I mean, the moustache is not alone. There's more than that as well. Yeah, so the moustache is diff definitely a giveaway because it's definitely Stalin's moustache and not Hitler's. And the description of the face, kind of raggedly, solidly handsome. Yeah, exactly. But also the way in which in the history books we discover they've been constantly rewritten to emphasise the role of Big Brother and to push Big Brother back earlier and earlier into the beginning of the revolution and this is of course exactly what Stalin's court historians did with him. They wrote out the other leaders of the Russian Revolution and put Stalin centre stage. And there's also a lot of stuff. I mean when Orwell has come back when he comes back to England, this is the point at which Stalin's show trials are being reported. So people like Grigory Zanoviev or Lev Kamenev or Nikolai Bukharin, the so called old Bolsheviks, they are being dragged in front of the courts in Moscow in these terrible show trials. And that the show the shadow of trials hangs over nineteen eighty four and there's three characters, Aaronson Jones and Rutherford, in the book, who are basically like the old Bolsheviks of Airstrip One and the same thing, exactly the same thing happens to them. Yeah, and they're disappeared, aren't they? Ye