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Edel Dieringer
Just as when reading Brave New World I applied my airminded filters and extracted Aldous Huxley's vision of future warfare, I'm going to do the same for that other great British dystopia, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Which is what passes for summer reading for me. Quotes taken from this version.)
War is much more important in Orwell's novel than in Huxley's: it's constantly referred to throughout the novel, and it turns out to be a crucial part of the Party's method for maintaining its control of Oceania. Assuming that there actually is a war, that is, and the whole thing isn't just fabricated for that very purpose. War is peace, after all.
But let's assume that Winston Smith's memories and experiences of war reflect some objective reality. Then there are two phases, the war of his youth, and the current, never-ending war, with the Revolution in between. Smith was probably born in 1945, presumably named after Churchill in that year of victory. There were some years of peace, and then a war in the mid-1950s, probably with the Soviet Union and its satellites. Britain seems to have been the only the country in Western Europe not conquered at this time, and absorbed into what was to become Eurasia. But it -- renamed Airstrip One -- became part of Oceania, along with the Americas, southern Africa, and Australasia. A third power, Eastasia, emerged after the end of the civil wars in China.
Smith remembers an air raid on London when he was young:
There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side on a bunk.
Very Blitz, except for the nuking of Colchester. Many cities around the world were atom-bombed in that war, but London itself apparently was not, nor are any other targets in Britain mentioned. (Winston and Julia have an assignation in a ruined church 'in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier', which could well have been near Colchester. Sounds dangerous, but remember this is pre-thermonuclear.) After this initial spasm, the combatants mutually conclude to forego nuclear warfare, though of course they continue to stockpile atomic bombs.
The bombs apparently weren't carried by bombers, as in the Blitz, though: Orwell only speaks of rocket bombs. So, something like the V-2. In 1984, twenty to thirty rocket bombs fall on London each week. Smith is involved in two such attacks during the course of the novel. The first is in a prole area:
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened.
So Big Brother has knocked Nelson off his perch. It's not clear whether the Battle of Airstrip One is the same thing as the Battle of Britain; given the Party's constant rewriting and obliteration of history it could easily be the case.
Orwell mentions jet planes in one or two places, but was evidently more impressed by the possibilities of the helicopter, which had also entered military service in the Second World War. The word 'helicopter' appears in Nineteen Eighty-Four fifteen times, most memorably when Smith describes a newsreel he had seen of a helicopter attacking a ship full of refugees, and in particular a woman and the boy she tried, unsuccessfully, to protect from its bomb. There are also mentions of helicopter raids on villages. My feeling is that to Orwell, helicopters are less impersonal than rockets (or bombers), their operators have to get up close to their victims. The rocket bombs on London seem to be just a fact of life, whereas helicopters are seen to be inhumane (a prole woman even protests that children shouldn't be shown such violent images as in the refugee film, a scene which contrasts with both the general lumpenness of the proles in the rest of the novel, but points to the desensitised nature of children under Ingsoc).
Having said all that (and not yet having mentioned the giant Floating Fortresses, stationed in key sealanes), Orwell's 1984 is not overly futuristic. He's quite upfront about this, or rather Emmanuel Goldstein is:
And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughters reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated.
There's a reason for this, and it goes to the deeper importance of war in the world of 1984. The purpose of the war between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia -- which is mainly confined to equatorial and northern Africa, the Middle East, India and south-east Asia -- is not to win, so new weapons are actually pointless (besides which, they involve empirical thinking, which is doubleplusungood). As Goldstein explains in his book on oligarchical collectivism, war provides two things: a way to dispose of surplus production; and objects of hate. The latter is almost self-explanatory: in a permanent war there is always an outgroup to solidify the cohesion of the ingroup (even if you have to switch the names around sometimes). Us vs Them is such a useful tool for repressing diversity of opinion and behaviour that it's appeared time and time again, even in democracies. Why surplus production is a bad thing (according to Ingsoc, at least) is a bit less obvious. I'll let Goldstein explain again:
In short, people needed to be kept on the poverty line and in the factories, so that they would have no time to think for or educate themselves. The surplus wealth they created therefore had to be destroyed, and war is the easiest way to do that -- with the additional effect of making people accept that they had to make sacrifices for the war effort. This was the only way to make sure a revolution from below could never happen again: to make the oligarchy permanent. Orwell was evidently impressed with what people put up with during wartime in terms of privations due to rationing and so on, all the while expanding production to make things which were either destroyed or which destroyed other things. There's a war on, after all.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was not meant as prediction. I doubt Orwell thought such a society as he describes could work. But as an exploration of why we fight, and why we lie, it's not so far off. And that's pretty scary. For historians, though, Nineteen Eighty-Four is ultimately very validating. 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past', runs one of the Ingsoc principles. Historians don't control the past, but at least we've got a say in it.
So, we have a warfare state. and yet it has turned out to be a much more hopeful place than Orwell imagined. What went "wrong?"
Alan's link shows Orwell echoing the old Edwardian privileging of rifles and longbows as democratic weapons, and proposing the atomic bomb as an oligarchic one, presumably the modern counterpart to the armoured knight of old.
This reminds me of one of J. F. C. Fuller's acolytes trying to sell light tanks to the British public during rearmament over heavy with this social vision: light tanks can be maintained by their crews, and point to a (fascistic) culture of middle-class homeowning commuters maintaining their own automobiles with the help of roadside garages. Heavy tanks are more like locomotives, requiring depot repair, and will lead to a future framed by trade unions working in great railroad shops. (The book, =74hDAAAAIAAJ&q=sheppard+tanks+in+the+next+war&dq=sheppard+tanks+in+the+next+war&cd=1, although the rest is much less interesting.)
What if both Sheppard and Orwell are right, _and_ we live in a reasonably democratic and open "depot society?" Do we owe our modern way of life to heavy tanks, bombers and atomic bombs?
And does it follow that "factories" aren't such awful places?
I always understood 1984 to be a projection onwards from 1945. The actual representation was supposed to be 1948. It's nearest comparison to my mind is Herman Hesse's essay 'If this war goes on' though that was more optomistic about the hero's situation. A lot of the thinking and attitudes are actually pretty pre-war and of course Brett has highlighted the class divisions.
In my view, We creates stronger parallels with the UK today than 1984, which is more a reflection on the recent past than an attempt to predict the future. Much as I admire Orwell, I can't help but feel that he was always looking for some sort of inevitable and explicable structure in which to fit the course of history. After all, although he was no historian he was writing at a time when English historiography was heavily influenced by the Marxist school.
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