Eric Arthur Blair (aka George Orwell) didn’t just dream up an interesting story with “1984”. His real life experience in the Spanish Civil War demonstrated these problems to him first hand.
He was thirty three years old when he was a faithful volunteer “defending democracy” in the Spanish Civil War. In May 1937, he was shot in the throat by a Fascist sniper. Miraculously this didn’t end his life and he recovered quickly. However being taken from the front lines exposed him to the hypocrisy of the war.
You’d think he’d be a hero for taking a bullet for the cause. Yet he experienced seeing how if you didn’t fall in line with the official narrative you were ostracized at best or persecuted at worst. With friends like these who needs enemies?
A key concept that he experienced was to have the authorities “watching”. He realized that if people knew they were being watched, they would censor themselves. This eventually led to the famous “Big Brother is Watching” phrase. It takes courage to speak the truth when you know that you are being watched and might face negative consequences if you speak out.
To quote his official biographer (Michael Sheldon – Professor of English at Indiana State University) “What an awakening Spain was for him. On the one hand, his head had nearly been blown off by a Fascist sniper, and on the other hand, his heroic sacrifice was suddenly transformed for fraudulent political purposes into a crime. At the front, he was a valiant freedom fighter risking his life for the common good. Yet in Barcelona, he was an enemy of the people, a member of a suspect group to be spied on, vilified, and threatened for reasons known only to the scheming Soviets.”
His brilliance was in realizing what would happen as technology improved and “Big Brother” grew in power. His experience had revealed to him a nightmare vision of a brutal, politicized future in which individual freedom would be sacrificed to serve those in power.
The past two and a half years have been a modern demonstration of this reality!
I had no idea that the premise of 1984 was born out of personal experience! Great article! And so true that a watched society self censors. Only the brave stand up...and I suppose that has been ever the case.