COMRADE OGILVY: THE MANIPULATION OF HISTORY

His heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen

sole guardian of truth and sanity  in a world of lies.

                                                                                   1984: Chapter 1

 

I spoke to a Romanian once who had taken advantage of Romania’s EU admission to escape to Britain. Why she had left could be summed up in one word: 1984.  For her, 1984 was not a fictional projection of certain trends.  1984 was the reality she had lived through: hence her presence in London. 

Two things about the book staggered her: Orwell’s genius in projecting the mindset of a totalitarian state; and the blithe indifference among westerners to the starkness of Orwell’s warning.                                                                          

The concepts of 1984 have passed into our language, and, indeed , into the realities of our lives.  Big Brother and the Thought Police are now recognised features of our society.  However, although we are currently the most photographed society in the world, telescreens – the two-way televisions that can look into apartments – have a way to go: At the moment it’s a problem of technology:  infuriating for those who would love  to ensure that you are not secretly smacking your children, smoking, or simply enjoying your freedom in the privacy of your own home.  (What might happen when the technology comes on stream may be surmised from the fact that authority – via your Provider – could already have details of every internet site that you have visited.)

But when it comes to our – and America’s – current popular approach to history, the agenda  might have been taken straight out of the pages of  1984: Chapter 4.

 

Winston Smith’s task in the Ministry of Truth is an exercise in daily lying.  Or, as Orwell expresses it, “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.”  The Present is the criterion of judgement: and the Past must be altered to align with it .

Several examples are given by Orwell; one will suffice here.  In February, Big Brother had promised there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration..  That promise is there in the existing records.  Now, in April, the ration is to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.  The existing record must therefore be changed:  After Winston has done his work, any one going back to the February record will find not the promise of no change, but a warning of reductions in April.  With the Ministry’s inability to admit its lies even to itself, this is not the falsification of a fact; this is the correction of a misprint.  It’s the sort of world that politicians must dream of, but that film directors have made a reality.

Today, in America, there are black judges.  In the America of 1866 there were none. This omission on the part of history is rectified in the film Summersby.  Summersby returns from the Civil War having assumed the identity of some one else.  Becoming responsible for said other person’s crimes, he is put on trial for murder, and is found guilty by a black judge.

            You can go back to the records and confirm that there were no black judges at that time anywhere in the States.  In the South, the Judge would have been a slave the year before. Where would he have found the time to train, and to achieve that level of seniority in the legal system? 

             Is this mere hair splitting?   No: the facts in this case really matter.  What of the insult to those Northern soldiers who gave their lives for the abolition of slavery?  For if the South could boast black lawyers in the 1850s – allowing time for the Judge to progress his way through the system – what on earth was the need for the Civil War? 

            Summersby, of course, is only a film.  We can go back to the historical records and establish the reality.  Orwell’s point is much more serious: not a film’s falsification of history, but a falsification of the actual historical record by those who are its guardians.  In the world of 1984, we would re-visit the records of 1866, and now find confirmation of black judges in any state we cared to examine.  And if our memories could not accommodate the alteration – for it is in the individual living memory, as well as in the written record, that the past is recorded – then we would be duly liquidated.

That this sort of process has not happened yet in Britain can be seen from the saga of MPs expenses.  The first call for the public to know the details followed on the confirmation of the Freedom of Information Act in 2005.  In the world of 1984, the House of Commons would have shredded the originals and produced a completely new set: apart from the real records of those deemed unpersons, and therefore fit for sacrifice.

As it was, MPs assumed their right to privacy.  Caught on the hop because of the Act they themselves had demanded, the House of Commons produced a set of expenses that had been subject to redaction.  ‘Redaction’ is a gloriously Orwellian word.  To the average voter, it sounds like ‘reduction’: something to be applauded in the case of politicians.  In practice, of course, redaction is the scholarly term for editing.  Redacted expenses forms meant expenses forms with the incriminating details all blacked out.  The unexpurgated versions, however, were still in existence: and in due course their detail was made available to the taxpaying voter. 

But it is time to move on to the concept of the unperson.

 

In 1984, unpersons are those who have offended by thought, word or deed.  They must be deemed never to have existed, and all references to them must be expunged from the system.

When I compare the way history is taught now with the way it was taught when I myself was at school, historical white males have tended to become unpersons.   If most school kids today seem to know about Henry VIII; that is because of his involvement with six women.  Drake, as far as I can establish to the contrary, is now effectively an unperson.  So, to a lesser extent, is Nelson.

If modern kids have heard of Nelson, it’s probably the Mandela variety.   If they’ve heard of the naval one, it’s probably via the history of medicine: the diseases and amputations suffered by sailors in Nelson’s navy, with Nelson as one example.

            History, obviously, is a subject in which the data increases by the day, and there must be several valid methods of organising it.  If you’re going for the thematic cross-cultural approach, rather than, say, telling the story of your own nation, then the history of medicine seems to me an admirable way of doing it.  I decline to specify that one way of teaching history is better than another, for I am not qualified to judge.  What I do wish to point out is Orwell’s uncanny anticipation of the unperson, before this became established educational practice. 

 

If you omit characters from the historical drama then, equally, you can add new ones.  To keep his superiors happy, Winston Smith duly draws attention to the obscure Comrade Ogilvy.

At the age of three, this paragon of social virtue demanded a machine gun.  At the age of eleven, he denounced his uncle to the Thought Police.  At nineteen he invented a new hand grenade that killed thirty-one unarmed prisoners in its first trial. At twenty-three he died: jumping out of a helicopter to save secret dispatches.

As it happens, Comrade Ogilvy is purely fictional: fictional, that is, even within the fiction, “It was true there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.”  So far so harmless; Comrade Ogilvy is no different from a character in a novel.  What becomes sinister, is when Comrade Ogilvy becomes more than this.  Once slotted into a re-written back issue of a newspaper, Comrade Ogilvy can be passed off as having had actual historical existence:  “He would exist just as authentically, and on the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.“ 

 In 1912, the world was electrified by the discovery of Piltdown Man.  Forty years later, Piltdown Man was proved to be a hoax: a Comrade Ogilvy of biology.  Had his skull been real, he would have provided convincing new evidence of evolution.  In the same way, new discoveries in history may change our always-provisional understanding of the past: provided that they are authentic discoveries, and not inventions inserted into the historical record by those with an agenda.

 In the film Gladiator there is an archer whose armour gives a new meaning to the word ‘breastplate’. Did female gladiators, in fact, exist?  There are none, for instance, in Gladiator’s predecessor, Spartacus.  A female Roman-era skeleton discovered in London at around the same time the film was made is believed by some – the evidence is circumstantial – to have been a gladiatrix.  Was Ridley Scott inventing, or was he paying tribute to the existent unpersons of a former view of history? 

My own view is that female gladiators probably existed as a rarity.  There is nothing culturally improbable about them when one thinks of Greek antecedents – the armoured statue of Athena and  the story of Penthesilia and the Amazons – or the joint Greek and Roman worship of goddesses.   Juvenal’s Satire VI bans female gladiators; although a ban, of course, can be on something that has happened or that hasn’t.   There is a reference to female fighters in the festivities held by Nero.  If Nero did indeed commit incest, as seems probable, then he would hardly have balked at using women for other unconventional purposes. 

The most convincing case for female gladiators is said to be a marble relief from Halicarnassus.  To a non-expert like me it is impossible to tell the sex of the two figures, and the only evidence is the feminine-sounding names.  If they are female then they are swordswomen, not archers; bare-chested (however hard I look, I can see no evidence of breasts), not armoured; and not involved in mixed-sex combat.  To that extent, Gladiator is a distortion of history.

The question is whether the gladiatrix as a species actually was there in the arena, or whether she merely ought to have been there because anything a man can do, a woman can do better: and in trying to decide the issue, authentic history is still stubbornly loyal to the sources it has.  

At the level of popular culture, however, Comrade-Ogilvy syndrome has simply swept the board. And popular culture is what forms popular views of history.  As a result of Kingdom of Heaven, there are those now firmly convinced that a brotherhood of Christians, Muslims and Jews actually existed until the Crusaders happened along and spoiled everything.

 Those who realise that Shakespeare’s Richard II or Henry V or Macbeth are not the Richard II and Henry V or Macbeth of history are not the problem.  The problem is with those who think, for example, that the film Titanic is an accurate depiction of the events, who do not see Jack and Rose as 1990’s anachronisms, and who are puzzled, when they scour the passenger lists, that they can find no trace of Rose.  

 

In the Appendix to 1984, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’ it states that “reduction of vocabulary was regarded as end in itself”.   And yet the academic language of our time has been the discourse of postmodernism.  Postmodern writing by a really skilled practitioner has a certain glorious lunacy about it: a monstrous over profusion of nonsense that revels in its own freedom from responsibility to anything.  Only the truly mad are this liberated: to expose oneself to extreme examples of the genre is to feel that the inmates have finally taken the asylum, and locked the rest of us inside. 

            Consider this example from Jean Baudrillard:

Our complex, metastatic, viral systems, condemned to the exponential dimension alone (be it that of exponential stability or instability), to eccentricity and indefinite fractal scissiparity, can no longer come to an end. Condemned to an intense metabolism, to an intense internal metastasis, they become exhausted within themselves and no longer have any destination, any end, any otherness, any fatality. They are condemned, precisely, to the epidemic, to the endless ex­crescences of the fractal and not to the reversibility and per­fect resolution of the fateful. 

            Or this from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gautarri:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis.  The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion:  all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism.  

As an example of the perfection of gibberish, my money’s on Baudrillard’s effort; but it’s a near-run thing.  But as an example of the reduction of vocabulary?   Did Orwell get things wrong?

Not at all.  For the sort of intellectual climate in which such writing can exist, and receive academic accolade, must be one that can slide into the mental atmosphere of 1984: “a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain”. (Chapter 4). 

Talk long enough to a seasoned postmodernist, after all, and you will be left doubting your own existence (if your birth date is not a conspiracy, then it must be a matter of opinion); or whether – given the supposed indeterminacy of language – the conversation you have just had was possible in the first place.

This is the atmosphere that breeds the postmodern view of history – no history, only historians; no fact, only opinions – which in turn breeds the mental indeterminacy whereby 1984’s revisionist take on things can thrive.

  The inventors of Newspeak, having used the confusion caused by Postmodernism to put themselves in power, would then proceed to dismantle it.  Once he had done their work for them, the Party would vapourise the likes of Gattauri: just as they vapourise – when he invents the term ‘quackspeak’ after listening to one of them – the mocking Syme.

“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.” (Appendix).   As a definition of Political Correctness, that could not be bettered; and Political Correctness now decides who are the new unpersons of history. 

“Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”  (Appendix).   To bear that in mind, and to then listen to a typical answer from a politician, is to feel that 1984 has finally arrived.           

                                                            

Is 1984  a despairing book?  Yes, if you look at the final sentence; no if you look at the tense of the Appendix.  There, the language about Newspeak is all in the past.

The dying Orwell perhaps left us with this hope: that if Newspeak should come, one day it would go, and take its perversion of history with it.

However close we are to the world of 1984, for the moment the book is still in print and we are still allowed to read it; and that must give us hope that we may keep it still at bay.