Orwell's 1984, the Jewess Refugee

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off....To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back...For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless. For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper....His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

April 4th, 1984.  Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. There was a middle-aged woman might have been a Jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself. all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they

Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish.--George Orwell  (1949) 1984, pp. 8-10 [typos and italics in original].

Recently I re-read and taught 1984. I was startled to be reminded that the opening set piece of the novel is the diary entry quoted above. When Orwell wrote the lines, memories of the catastrophic treatment of Jewish refugees were fresh to his audience, even if not Winston's contemporaries. Somehow I had completely suppressed the fact that readers are introduced to the essential lawlessness ("nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws") of Oceania and its inhumanity by way of its undisguised savage treatment of refugees. 

As an aside, this element of 1984 is more widely repressed. The lengthy and interesting wikipedia page devoted to 1984 makes no mention of refugees. And judging by scholar.google this aspect of 1984 is not of much interest.+

In the present (the actual 2018) navies shooting at refugees and killing refugees, or creating circumstances in which they are let to drown, are not uncommon in the Mediterranean (see here; and here). While the main intent is not, perhaps, to kill refugees, it is a foreseeable side-effect from a system of incentives designed to  keep them out of Europe. (In practice, the policy of disincentives is indiscriminate among refugees, asylum seekers, and economic migrants.) 

In one-non-trivial sense present reality is worse than Orwell imagined (for my admiration of his essays, see here and here). European governments are democratic, rule-governed, and, for the most part, their policies have the sanction of law. And while there is a part of the European public that prefers not to really know about such distasteful matters, there can be no doubt that a non-trivial part of the public -- increasingly xenophobic --would cheer these deaths on and reliably vote for parties promising these results.

I call this 'worse' because Oceania is a ruthless tyranny of the few (the elite of the inner party) -- although the few are also gripped by this tyranny --, and so the reader can imagine that the horrific behavior described in Orwell's set-piece is a consequence of the sort of propaganda that can only thrive in a tyranny. This thought is encouraged by Orwell because the set--piece seems to imply, in fact, that while Winston (part of the meritocratic elite, even if in the outer party) cheers on the killing, by contrast the natural sentiments of ordinary people, if left alone (as the 'Proles' are), are not fully corruptible.* But the sober reality, one that needs permanent reminding (as (recall) Judith Shklar correctly insisted), is that democratic politics -- even ones operating in a strong juridical framework  -- are also capable of horrific policies.

There is another sense in which the situation is worse today. Winston's predicament is, in part, that his diary words only can have meaning to his interrogator as means to torture him. (Because of the absence of law their status as evidence is irrelevant.) In other respects his words are utterly futile because (to put Winston's words in my terms) there is no implied audience for which they may be transformative. It is notable (and worth further reflection some other time) that in a future in which Oceania does not exist anymore he expects his predicament not to generate sympathy but to be meaningless.

The Mediterranean killings are happening among a people who pride themselves on free speech and the role of public opinion. Our civic religion, or ideology, is that we are capable of political change in virtue, at least in part, of the availability of public speech. But it's precisely (recall) unfettered (profitable) speech that sustains our inhumane policy. And the false lovers of freedom and democracy feel no shame.

*Before one accuses Orwell of romanticism of the proletariat, it should be noted that the woman does not object to the scene as such, but only to its suitability for children.

+Orwell's attitude toward Jews (recall this post on his essay on antisemitism) in 1984 is -- unsurprising given the prominence of Goldstein -- of considerable interest to scholars.

Comments

[Michael Kremer]

This is excellent.

[Clifford Thurlow]

Wonderful piece, thank you. One never gets bored being reminded of the genius that is 1984.

[rita]

excellent piece and now -2023, more timely than even 2018.

[Charles Beckett]

This exact passage from 1984 has been much on my mind recently, for various reasons, and your analysis of it is very interesting.

I agree that the reaction of the Prole in the cinema tends to imply that Orwell is suggesting a natural human reaction (untainted by Party brainwashing and propaganda) might be compassionate, and should be contrasted with the conditioned attitude of Party members.

But as you say, we witness again and again in our own society how the natural response from many people to this kind of barbarity is either one of outright support or one of total indifference, and that does seem to be an even more bitter and cruel reality than Orwell's dystopian vision.

In some ways, 1984, far from being read as a dystopia, now has to be considered a kind of romantic vision of the human spirit corrupted by totalitarianism when in reality such thorough political and ideological conditioning is ahrdly necessary to produce widespread sadism and cruelty.

[Eric Stephen Schliesser]

Thank you for your interesting reflections, Charles.