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David Simon and E.L. Doctorow on ‘the Potential for the Orwellian Nightmare’

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David Simon and E.L. Doctorow on ‘the Potential for the Orwellian Nightmare’

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Although the events of 1984 did not happen, Kieran Guckian talks about how our society is experiencing an increase in internet use and how we could potentially be living an “Orwellian nightmare”. Although the internet is a place where we are free to say and do anything we please, it’s almost impossible to avoid corporations that use your data to influence you and fake news. The article talks about how companies use people’s data about what they like or don't like to create an algorithm that guaranteed to make you spend more time and money on their app. Although it’s not a totalitarian government, it’s concerning to see how people are unknowingly drawn to applications that are designed to take up as much of their time as possible.

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"It's only the free and open Internet that allows ... creativity and the free exchange of ideas to be heard." A fairly straightforward idea, especially for opening remarks at an event titled "Who's Afraid of Free Speech?" But Ross LaJeunesse, the Google executive who introduced the event-which the company sponsored, and which was hosted by PEN and The Atlantic- would find that idea tested, when panelists E.L. Doctorow and David Simon name-checked Google for its privacy policies.

About 45 minutes into the event, a member of the audience asked a question, following up with a provocation: "Have any of you been denied writing a column or article in the United States? No, you haven't, because we have free speech. But what we also have is Google. The NSA doesn't bother me. It's the information corporations can get on you and package into data that influences you, like the way you spend [money]."

Doctorow, a prolific author whose work includes a fictionalized account of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial, agreed: "They're on the same page, as we like to say. The NSA couldn't work without the agreement or participation of these companies. Their priority is to create wealth for themselves-you're right to be alarmed."

Google's LaJeunesse jumped in: "I really wasn't going to interrupt the program, because I'm here to listen. But I did want to set the record straight," he said.

It is important, when we talk about these issues, to talk with specificity and to speak about facts. It is a real danger to conflate the actions of a government, that are not transparent, with something a company like Google does. We're completely transparent. We give control to the users-they can use our services without signing in. If you choose to sign in, we give you complete control over that data as well. We even give you a button so that you can delete all that data at once or export it to another service.

Simon, a former Baltimore Sun journalist and the creator of the TV series The Wire, was dubious.

But is it a matter of hunting down these moments where Google ... informs you that it is going to use your information in some new and varied way, and you have to negate [that use]?
I had to opt out of a program where stuff I said online could be used in advertising. That's a rather cynical performance. Shouldn't I have to opt into it, something that extraordinary?

The exchange illustrated some of the complexities surrounding the broader public conversation about privacy and technology.

LaJeunesse was clarifying the facts about how Google's service works: It's true that people can use the search engine without providing any personal information to the company. Those who choose to sign in to Google's other services, like gmail, have some control over the ads they see and what's searchable from their account information.

But his approach to these critiques also revealed an underlying assumption shared by many tech companies: If Google or an entity like it offers a service, it has a right to expect something from the people who use that service. Essentially, this is the expectation of any business: It provides a good in return for some sort of compensation. In this case, that compensation is information about how people use the Internet, which Google monetizes by serving people ads when they use Google services.

But Simon and Doctorow looked at the issue differently.

Simon questioned Google's right to use anyone's personal information for advertising without what he characterized as active consent. He seemed to suggest that there's something innately objectionable about Google capturing our daily lives on the Internet in data, parceling it, and selling it to companies who want to sell us stuff in turn. In this sense, he and LaJeunesse were arguing about two different things: the content of a privacy policy, versus the legitimacy of the type of business model that requires a privacy policy to exist.

Doctorow appeared to object on a more fundamental level: "They're turning people into pieces of information," he said. "Algorithm, algorithm-what more could you want?" Again, he and LaJeunesse were focusing on separate issues: the way Google uses its data-gathering capabilities, versus the way data-gathering capabilities transform the relationship between people and companies.

These are all, of course, huge issues in the contemporary relationship between technology and those who use it. And the emotional stakes around these issues can be high-as the two writers' quick and visceral reactions illustrate.

But as Simon himself pointed out earlier in the conversation, those emotional stakes may be distorting public debates about digital privacy and information control, especially concerning the NSA, in important ways.

"What bothers me about the NSA dynamic is not that there aren't issues to discuss and there isn't government excess to worry about," he said. People reacted strongly to Edward Snowden's information about government data-gathering; but "the only thing that's different now is that suddenly the people who are subjected to it ... suddenly it's us, and our own fears, and I think a lot of the discussion is probably hyperbolic."

Simon pointed to a number of ways that the government has historically collected and used people's personal information, such as the longstanding practice of keeping on file the fingerprints of anyone who commits a crime, including misdemeanors. Fewer people object to this kind of practice because it seems like a good trade-off, Simon says-some privacy is sacrificed to help the police do their jobs more effectively. Trade-offs: That's what a nuanced conversation about the government and privacy should be about, he says.

"The hard part about a democracy is that you often have competing, legitimate goals," he said. "There's the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression, when no one is feeling the chill. And then there are other goals, which is to say, law enforcement and counter-terrorism."

After the past six months of the media "doing the headless chicken over the NSA revelations," Simon fears that the public discussion has become overly simplistic. There's been too much talk about general principles of free speech and expression, he says, and not enough attention paid to resolving specific issues like the secrecy of FISA courts, which oversees surveillance warrants for suspected spies within the United States.

Simon's critique of the media's coverage of FISA courts may be debatable. (See, e.g., this recent take from The Atlantic.) But he makes a vital point: A society like the United States can't ultimately choose between free expression and government surveillance. We have to balance them appropriately, and that balance can only ever depend on tough, practical decisions.

One might add, despite Simon's critique of Google, that we can't ultimately choose between freedom from data collection and the legitimate profit motives of tech companies.

"The potential for the Orwellian nightmare is vast," Simon said at one point during the event. But in discussions about privacy, whether regarding the government or regarding Google, principles may serve better as starting points rather than solutions.

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David Simon and E.L. Doctorow on 'the Potential for the Orwellian Nightmare'

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"It's only the free and open Internet that allows ... creativity and the free exchange of ideas to be heard." A fairly straightforward idea, especially for opening remarks at an event titled "Who's Afraid of Free Speech?"

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Psychology News Article (Non-fiction connection)

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Obedience to Authority and the Milgram Experiments

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Obedience to Authority and the Milgram Experiments

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Participants in the Milgram experiment were told to send electric shocks to who they thought was another participant but was really an actor. When the actor got a question wrong from a memory quiz, the experimenter would tell the participant to send a shock despite the crying, screaming, and begging of the actor. More than half the participants administered the shocks, even the ones described as lethal. The experiment’s shocking results implied that people were willing to follow authority even if it meant doing something immoral. However, the experiment had many flaws, both ethical and methodical. Whether or not authority can have complete control over us remains a mystery, but the study reveals that humans have the capability of doing immoral acts under the influence of a powerful figure.

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The power of authority: how easily we do what we’re told

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Milgram’s experiment is rightly famous, but does it show what we think it does?

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Fear is being used to manipulate the public

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Fear is being used to manipulate the public

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This article talks about how fear is being used to “control” people and make them adopt certain political beliefs. The article describes it as “how free people enslave themselves and allows tyrants to prevail”. Powerful figures knowingly create that fear and use it to gain loyalty, similar to how Big Brother used fear as a tool to manipulate people into believing in whatever he pleased.

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- Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist

America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions. This plague on our nation - one that has been spreading like wildfire - is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live.

Everywhere you turn, those on both the left and the right wings are fomenting distrust and division. You can't escape it.

We're being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of Muslims, fear of extremists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government. The list goes on and on.

The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.

Fear makes people stupid.

Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie the mup in knots over matters lacking in national significance.

Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an "us" against "them" mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.

All the while, those in power - bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations - move their costly agendas forward, and "we the suckers" get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

America has already entered a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of the content of their Facebook posts, and law-abiding Americans are having their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented and their communications monitored These threats are not to be underestimated.

Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.

An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America. However, with crime at a 40-year low, is such fear of terrorism rational?

Even in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the shootings in San Bernardino and Paris, statistics show that those living in the American police state are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. Thus, the government's endless jabbering about terrorism amounts to little more than propaganda - the propaganda of fear - a tactic used to terrorize, cower and control the population.

So far, these tactics are working. As history makes clear, fear leads to fascistic, totalitarian regimes. It's a simple enough formula. National crises, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex, or the rational thinking part, of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for itself is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.

Modern America now possesses all of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state.

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it's not only expedient but necessary. In times of "crisis," expediency is upheld as the central principle - that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.

Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring.

It's called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences.

For example, neuroscientists observed how quickly fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post once reported (Dec. 7, 2013):

"In the experiment, researchers taught male mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by associating the scent with mild foot shocks. Two weeks later, they bred with females. The resulting pups were raised to adulthood having never been exposed to the smell. Yet when the critters caught a whiff of it for the first time, they suddenly became anxious and fearful. They were even born with more cherry-blossom-detecting neurons in their noses and more brain space devoted to cherry-blossom-smelling."

Now consider the ramifications of inherited generations of fears and experiences on human beings. As the Post reported, "Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."

In other words, fear, trauma and compliance can be passed down through the generations.

Fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it now operates in our contemporary world - all of which raises fundamental questions about us as human beings and what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.

We are at a critical crossroads in American history, and we have a choice: freedom or fascism.

Let's hope the American people make the right choice while we still have the freedom to choose.

John W. Whitehead is president and founder of the Albemarle County-based Rutherford Institute, a civil-liberties organization, and author of the award-winning book "A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State."He can be reached at johnw@rutherford.org. A longer version of this commentary is available at www.Rutherford.org.

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Fear is being used to manipulate the public

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Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions. This plague on our nation - one that has been spreading like wildfire - is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live.

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This poem, “Control by Fear” by Francis Duggan, talks about how fear plays a role in obedience to political authority. He mentions how leaders gain respect only through instilling fear into their followers and that fear can be used as a weapon. The ideas presented in the poem reflect how Big Brother in 1984 used fear to gain loyalty and make people do what he wanted them to do. Fear is constantly being fed to the citizens of the party, and it’s what prevented Winston from living freely.

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This piece, titled Mind Control, depicts a crowd of people in front of a large eye. The eyelashes of the eyes reach down into the people’s brains and take control of their minds, leaving them in a zombie-like state. The piece communicates how a single power source, such as a watching eye, can take control over people. It mirrors the way in which Big Brother uses posters with watchful eyes to remind the citizens of the Party that they are being monitored and must act the way they are supposed to.

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The stacked up televisions are brainwashing the unthinking people and then making them mindless. Literally. The eyelashes are reaching for the people minds.

Equipment: Pencils (4B, 6B, 7B, 8B) charocoal, kneades eraser and some tissues.

Size: Regular A2-paper.

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Mind Control by Sebmaestro on DeviantArt

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Deviation Actions Featured in groups See All Published: The stacked up televisions are brainwashing the unthinking people and then making them mindless. Literally. The eyelashes are reaching for the people minds. Equipment: Pencils (4B, 6B, 7B, 8B) charocoal, kneades eraser and some tissues. Size: Regular A2-paper.

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George Orwell was born in Motihari, Bengal, and grew up to become a part of the Burma division of the Indian Imperial Police. After his marriage, Orwell spent six months in Spain as a volunteer against Franco. He was hit by a bullet and witnessed the attempt of Soviet-sponsored hit squads to surpass the Trotskyist POUM militia. This event played a huge role in the development of his political beliefs and how he felt about totalitarianism.

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George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, and critic most famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).

The following biography was written by D.J. Taylor. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. His Biography of Orwell, Orwell: the Life won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award. D.J. Taylor is a Trustee of The Orwell Foundation.

You can find more work about Orwell in our library.

Orwell: A (Brief) Life, by D.J. Taylor

GEORGE ORWELL, the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was working as an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service, into what - with the uncanny precision he brought to all social judgments - he described as 'the lower-upper-middle classes'. In fact the Blairs were remote descendants of the Fane Earls of Westmoreland. Like many a child of the Raj, Orwell was swiftly returned to England and brought up almost exclusively by his mother. The Thames Valley locales in which the family settled provided the background to his novel Coming Up For Air (1939).

Happily for the family finances - never flourishing - Orwell was a studious child. From St Cyprian's preparatory school in Eastbourne, a legendary establishment that also educated Cyril Connolly and Cecil Beaton, he won a King's Scholarship to Eton College, arriving at the school in May 1917. Orwell left a caustic memoir of his time at St Cyprian's ('Such, Such Were The Joys') but also remarked that 'No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.' At Eton he frankly slacked, leaving the school in December 1921 after only a term in the sixth form. The following June he passed the entrance examination of the Indian Imperial Police and was accepted into its Burma division.

Orwell's five-year stint in Burma is often seen as a mournful period of parentally-ordained exile. However both sides of his family were professionally attached to the Eastern Empire, and his stated reason for applying for the Burma posting was that he had relatives there. Almost nothing is known of Orwell's time in the province, other than that it offered the material for two of his best-known essays, 'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an Elephant' and his first novel Burmese Days (1934). It also ruined his health. Although disillusioned by the Imperial 'racket' he had helped to administer, he left Burma in June 1927 on a medical certificate. The decision to resign from the Burma Police was taken after his return.

For the next five years he led a vagrant life. Some of this time was spent at his parents' home in Southwold, Suffolk. There were periods teaching in private schools, living in Paris and masquerading as a tramp, the background to his first published work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). His professional alias, which combined the name of the reigning monarch with a local river, was adopted shortly before publication. His teaching career was brought to a close by a bout of pneumonia and at the end of 1934, having used a long, recuperative stay in Southwold to complete a second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), he decamped to London to work in a Hampstead bookshop. This was a productive period. Here he met and married his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, and wrote a third novel, partly based on his book-trade experiences, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

The Orwells began their married life in a tiny cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, where Orwell worked up the material gathered on a recent tour of the industrial north into The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Although the book's second half consists of a long, inflammatory polemic on Socialism, Orwell's political views were still not fully formed. The defining political experience of his life, alternatively, was the six months he spent in Spain, in 1937, as a Republican volunteer against Franco. He was wounded in the throat - the bullet passing within a few millimetres of his carotid artery - and was present in Barcelona when Soviet-sponsored hit-squads attempted to suppress the Trotskyist POUM militia, of which he had been a member. Spain made Orwell 'believe in Socialism for the first time', as he put it, while instilling an enduring hatred of totalitarian political systems.

Homage to Catalonia, an account of his time in Spain, was published in April 1938. He spent most of the next year recuperating, both in England and Morocco, from a life-threatening lung haemorrhage. At this stage Orwell was determined to oppose the looming international conflict, only changing his mind on the announcement of the Russo-German pact in August 1939. Initially Orwell had high hopes of the war, which he believed would instil a sense of Socialist purpose: this view was developed in the pamphlet essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941). Rejected for military service on health grounds, he became a talks producer in the BBC's Eastern Service, a job he came to dislike. The BBC's atmosphere, he complained, 'is something between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless'. In 1943 he secured a more congenial billet as literary editor of the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune, to which he also contributed a column under the heading 'As I Please'.

Animal Farm, his bitter satire of the Soviet experiment, was written by the middle of 1944. Publishers' timidity, and the covert pressure exerted by a Russian spy working for the Ministry of Information, delayed its appearance until August 1945. By this time Orwell's personal life was in ruins. Five months previously Eileen had died of heart failure during a routine operation. The couple had previously adopted a small boy, Richard Horatio Blair, whom Orwell, with the help of his sister Avril, determined to raise on his own.

Through his friend David Astor, he had already begun to explore the possibility of living on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Much of the last half-decade of his life was spent in the Inner Hebrides struggling against worsening health to complete his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. After finishing a final draft at the end of 1948 he suffered a complete physical collapse and was taken away to a nursing home in the Cotswolds suffering from advanced tuberculosis. The novel's enormous international success, on publication in June 1949, came too late for its author. He was transferred to University College Hospital in September and died there on 21 January 1950, aged 46. Shortly before his death he made an unexpected second marriage to Sonia Brownell, an editorial assistant on the literary magazine Horizon. Sitting down to read his obituaries on the day of his funeral, his friend Malcolm Muggeridge thought that he saw in them 'how the legend of a human being is created'.

D. J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is the author of five novels, including English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass and The Comedy Man. He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s, and an acclaimed biography,Thackeray. His critically acclaimed Orwell biography, Orwell: The Life (2003) won the Whitbread Biography Award, and he gave the 2005 Orwell Lecture entitled 'Projections of the Inner "I": George Orwell's Fiction'. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich.

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George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, and critic most famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). The following biography was written by D.J. Taylor. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. His Biography of Orwell, Orwell: the Life won the 2003 Whitbread…

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George Orwell wrote 1984 in the year 1949 and served as a warning for the future. Orwell held socialist beliefs but was against totalitarianism. World War II had recently ended and Orwell wanted to warn against the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and Stalinism. Orwell was against the way that Stalin would utilize fear and propaganda to gain loyalty. Fear was commonly used by totalitarian leaders, including the character of Big Brother,  in order to gain control over others.

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A decade of political chaos shaped George Orwell's vision of a totalitarian future, writes David Aaronovitch.

I was brought up in a house full of books, none of them by George Orwell.

Simone de Beauvoir was there, as was Sartre and Aldous Huxley and even Lenin. The last is actually a clue as to the absence of the first.

My parents were Communists. To them Orwell was on the other side of politics - someone whose principal writings were hostile to them and what they wanted to achieve.

This suspicious animosity had lasted beyond the death of Orwell and the demise of Stalin, and into the period when British Communists, by and large, now held the same view of the Soviet Union under Uncle Joe that Orwell had held and that had motivated him to write both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Their problem was, I now think, made acute by the way in which these two great books - and Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular - had become major weapons in the ideological war between left and right.

This use of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and its contradiction to Orwell's own long-stated support for some kind of socialism, needed explaining.

How had it come about that the targets in Nineteen Eighty-Four were English socialists and their nightmare totalitarian state? After all, Orwell was in charge of naming his own inventions and could have easily decided on names and characteristics that were friendlier to the political tendencies that he claimed to favour.

For years the question of Orwell's intentions in Nineteen Eighty-Four has caused great debate.

With a few exceptions on the far left, every political tendency has wanted to claim him. So there has been a well-established and heartfelt desire on the more moderate left to claim that Orwell was indeed a genuine socialist whose warning was aimed at totalitarianism in general, not at the left per se.

The right, of course, have had the easier task of suggesting that Orwell was writing about what he appeared to be writing about. It seems to me that the right probably has the better argument.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, but Orwell was first set on the road to it at least 12 years earlier when he was fighting Franco's insurgents in Spain as a member of a left-wing, but non-Stalinist militia, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).

Orwell had gone to Spain to fight Francoist fascism, but found himself face-to-face with another form of totalitarianism. The pro-Stalin communist forces in Spain turned on the POUM, branding them Trotskyist traitors.

Back home no one wanted to know about his experiences. Even non-communist left-wingers, including the publisher Victor Gollancz and the New Statesman editor Kingsley Martin, were reluctant to publish his accounts of what had happened, for fear of harming the overall cause of anti-fascism.

Orwell's opposition to totalitarianism, of left and right alike, was toughened up by his association with the novelist Arthur Koestler, a communist who had been imprisoned under threat of execution by the fascists in Spain.

Koestler later escaped to England where he published his novel, Darkness at Noon, in 1940.

This bleak story of an old Bolshevik who confesses to crimes he has not committed and is shot by the Soviet authorities, was to have a profound influence on Orwell.

His many book reviews also reveal much about his political influences, but one name, James Burnham, stands out.

An ex-communist, Burnham's 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, filled Orwell with both horror and fascination.

In the book, he found two of the crucial elements of his novel: a world ruled by three super-states, and the idea that the overlords of the future would not be demagogues or democrats, but managers and bureaucrats.

Two events were to bring Burnham's dark prophecy to some kind of fruition. First, in 1943, at the Tehran Conference, Marshal Stalin, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met to discuss the world after the war.

Orwell saw the beginnings of a Burnham-style carve-up of the globe into superpowers and told friends that this was what initially set him going on the novel.

Less than two years later, the Americans dropped atom bombs on Japan. In an essay for Tribune magazine called You and the Atomic Bomb, Orwell argued that the A-Bomb threatened to bring into being Burnham's world of super states governed by totalitarian hierarchies of managers.

It's often missed that Nineteen Eighty-Four is set a few decades after an atomic war. The managers administering the book's three super states, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, have tacitly agreed not to try to destroy each other but to continue forever in a kind of cold war.

Indeed, it was Orwell who coined the phrase "cold war" in that 1945 essay.

In his view of things, totalitarianism was not merely a theoretical threat from a fictional future. The urgency of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and of much of Orwell's wartime and post-war writing, springs clearly from his sense that totalitarianism was already proving dangerously attractive to many on the left, not least intellectuals..

But what I think we can see is that, with fascist totalitarianism utterly defeated in WWII, Orwell found himself one of the relatively few people prepared to agitate against the left-totalitarianism of our erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union.

When Animal Farm was published, and when Nineteen Eighty-Four was being conceptualised and then written, Orwell's overwhelming preoccupation was to warn against Stalinism and its onward march.

We may speculate what Orwell might have thought had he lived to see Stalin dead, Joe McCarthy in his pomp, to have witnessed the Khrushchev speech denouncing Stalin to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, decolonisation, or a succession of Conservative governments led by men like Eden, whom Orwell appeared to despise.

Perhaps a new book would have been written to give succour to the real socialists of the world.

And maybe my parents would have allowed that one on to their shelves, somewhere between Alex Comfort and Virginia Woolf.

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A decade of political chaos shaped George Orwell's vision of a totalitarian future, writes David Aaronovitch. I was brought up in a house full of books, none of them by George Orwell. Simone de Beauvoir was there, as was Sartre and Aldous Huxley and even Lenin.