When I was about 5 years old, I believed I could control the weather. Each day I would enter the clothes closet off my bedroom where I had an upside-down cardboard box with plastic knobs and other thingamajigs inserted into it. Depending on the weather I wanted for the day, I would turn the knobs this way and that. If I didn’t like these predictions, I would take a reverse course of action, twisting the other way. As you can imagine, climate change was nowhere near my radar – or anyone else’s for that matter -- so it was an easy job dealing with my imaginary daily task at hand.
Not so nowadays. I am glad nothing became of my early
interest in meteorology, because I am not fond of death threats. The absurdity of Trump and company falsely
accusing meteorologists - and even President Biden - of conspiracies to
manipulate the weather is mind boggling. That hurricane Helene pummeled six
states is fact. That hurricane Milton pounded
Florida is also fact. (Sidenote: Hurricanes are identified by a list of given
names – not surnames, so there is no hidden reference to John Milton’s
“Paradise Lost”). That man-made
greenhouse gases cause climate change and are behind the increase in power and
frequency of such hurricanes is also fact.
Apparently for Trump and fellow retroactive clowns, there is no “truth”,
which, if you read Orwell, puts him in the same league with Fascists. Again, if you read Orwell below, you will see
that he too was familiar with the idea of ‘weather decrees’ (but not climate
change). Reading Orwell even further suggests
a possible affinity, in his mind, between Fascism and ancient slavery.
I know that it is the fashion to say that most of
recorded history is lies anyway. I am
willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but
what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could
be truthfully written. In the past
people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or
they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes;
but in each case they believed that “the facts” existed and were more or less
discoverable. And in practice there was
always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost
everyone. If you look up the history of
the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will
find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German
sources. A British and German historian
would disagree deeply on many things, even in fundamentals, but there would
still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would
seriously challenge the other. It is
just this common basis of agreement that such a thing as “the truth”
exists. There is, for instance, no such
thing as “science”. There is only
“German science”, “Jewish science” etc.
The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in
which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but
the past. If the Leader says of such
and such event, “It never happened” – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well,
two and two are five. This prospect
frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few
years that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself
with visions of a totalitarian future?
Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come
true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a
nightmare that couldn’t come true.
Against the shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white
tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, you deny the truth,
the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently
can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of
the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination
of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no
longer exist. We in England underrate
the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and past security have
given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing
that you most fear never really happens.
Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right
invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that
evil always defeats itself in the long run.
Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow
destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern
industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military
force?
Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that
slavery would return to Europe? Well,
slavery has been restored under our noses.
The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles,
Russians, Jews, and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or
swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simply chattel slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and
selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways – the breaking up of families,
for instance –the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American
cotton plantations. There is no need for
thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian
domination endures. We don’t grasp its
full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a régime
founded on slavery must collapse.
But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity
with that of any modern state.
Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four
thousand years.
When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me
is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested
generation after generation have left behind them no record what-ever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how
many slaves’ names are known to you? I
can think of two, or possibly three. One
is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus.
Also in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with
the maker’s name inscribed on the bottom, “Felix fecit”. I have a vivid mental picture of poor Felix
(a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may
not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely
know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone into utter silence.[1]
George Orwell, My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943
(1968)
[1]
George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” in The Collected Essays,
Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4
vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 258-260.
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