Political commentary
Death wishes for 1984
Charles Moore
Here we are in 1984 all writing articles about George Orwell, so the worst has not happened. We are still Britain (though Mr Enoch Powell might deny that, arguing that we are territory disputed between Oceania and Eurasia), and we can still switch off our telescreens. We even — if one can believe the figures put out by the Ministry of Truth — have fewer civil ser- vants than when Orwell wrote his book. Mr Wedgwood Benn, it is true, thinks dif- ferently. In a recent issue of the Guardian, he wrote a detailed and well-researched history of how Britain became a military dictatorship in 1986; but for most of us Mr Benn's absence from power is further con- firmation that 1984 is not 1984.
It has been said often in the past few weeks that it is a vulgar error to imagine that Orwell was prophesying what would hap- pen: he was warning. Therefore you cannot say that he was wrong. But is the distinction really so clear? All prophets expect to in- fluence events by saying what they think those events will be, and their opinions are more respected if their prophecies appear to be fulfilled. Unless you arc a purely com- mercial predicter, like Old Moore's Almanack (no relation), and go no further than to suggest that a male three-year-old will win the St Leger, you aspire both to be truthful about the future and to affect it. This is true of Orwell. By choosing a time 35 years ahead of his own, he was using his skills as a political tipster to make himself more noticed as a political moralist.
He succeeded. Few of us would have paid half as much attention to a book of essays on totalitarianism. His novel has furnished thousands of newspaper articles and hun- dreds of thousands of speeches at debating societies, and it could be said to be one of those books, like Burke's Reflections or Newman's Apologia, which people have us- ed to make up their minds and change their lives.
Without wishing, however, to deny how brilliantly Orwell was able to imagine a totalitarian world, one might ask how useful such prophets are in trying to under- stand the politics of one's own country and what is actually happening in 1984 or any other time. When Orwell wrote 1984, he was dying. That is a suitable situation for a prophet to be in, if locusts and wild honey are not available. It is an unsuitable situa- tion from which to prescribe what should be done, or even to describe what is being done. In fact, the mentality of dying is a terribly dangerous one in politics, because it despises the chores of living in the present. In 1983, the mentality of dying was strong in many minds. Opponents of nuclear weapons often say, as the basis of their position, 'I don't want to die' or 'I don't want my children to die'. Behind such statements is a strange mixture of desires. First, there is a resentment of reality, since we all will die, and second, there is a sort of invitation to death, a determination to believe, without much regard to evidence, that the world is about to be destroyed.
Whether or not these fears prove to have been founded is not relevant here. Even if some lunatic (i.e., if you are a Greenham Common woman, President Reagan) is going to destroy civilisation as we know it, the mentality that lies behind those fears has to be kept out of politics if politics are to continue. For that mentality does not suggest a policy (although of course it makes slogans about what should be done): it is a morbid condition, and it unseats the reason. It is a good omen for 1984 that, in 1983, British voters had the chance to catch the Apocalyptic mental illness which was epidemic in Europe, and most of them proved immune.
The mentality of dying which amounts, in effect, to a death wish, is particularly tricky in politics because it imports language to which politicians are unac- customed. If some members of a church rise up and start proclaiming that the end of the world is nigh, that church will have at hand long-developed theological arguments to show why they might be wrong. But when a similar thing happens to politicians, they tend to stammer out something about the state of the negotiations in Geneva and ask for notice of the question. It took Mrs Thatcher's first Government a remarkably long time to muster the arguments about cruise missiles and more general ones about deterrents. That Mr Heseltine eventually managed to do so was more of a reflection on the confusion of his opponents than anything else.
No such confusion afflicts the other great death wishers of 1983 (holders of the palm for many previous years too), the IRA. In the IRA British politicians are confronted by a phenomenon unfamiliar in mainland politics and one which, as if in some futile attempt at self-protection, they refuse to try to understand. In fact, it is a point of honour over here to regard the actions of the IRA as incomprehensible. Mrs Thatcher said that it was almost impossible to see why men would have wanted to do anything as horrible as plant a bomb in Hans Cres- cent. The Prince of Wales spoke of 'cir- cumstances that defy understanding'. Mr Brittan thought we all should all go on shopping. There was general agreement that it would be wrong to react in anger, i.e. wrong to react at all.
What seems to be so hard for British politicians to swallow is the extreme simplicity of the IRA's aims. Just as democratic politicians in the 1930s could not believe that Hitler really meant all that rubbish in Mein Kampf, so the Priors and Reeses and Thatchers cannot bring themselves to think that the IRA simply wants what it says it wants — the expulsion, violent if necessary, of British troops and government from Northern Ireland, and the destruction of the republic and its replacement by an IRA-run united Ireland. Minister after minister has imagined that the IRA can somehow be lured away from those aims by concessions and softened in its attitudes by the good manners of democratic politics. But the aims, unlike the tactics, do not change, and each minister goes away sorrowing, preferring to blame the Irish for his own stupidity.
The IRA cannot be deflected. It can be defeated, or it can win. There is quite a widespread sentiment which feels that it would not matter much if it did win. This view is seldom expressed in public, except by the hard left, but it is held by people of all political persuasions who believe that Northern Ireland is just another colony, and so, like other colonies, it can, muffled in appropriate ceremonies, be given to the men with guns.
One could point out the objections to the truth of this view, and one could write a book on the problems created by withdrawal — the strategic difficulties, the sort of government likely to arise on the island of Ireland, the effects on our relationship with America, the bloodshed — but all that one needs to say here is that the politics of the death wish would have won their first vic- tory in British politics for 300 years. When Mr Brittan and Mr Prior say that they will never give in to men who pursue their aims by violence they do not acknowledge that every political initiative in Ulster in the past 15 years has represented, though not a final capitulation, a deference to violence and a readiness to answer demands which, if ex- pressed peacefully, would have gone unanswered. The IRA goes on bombing, not because it is 'mindless', but because it knows that British politicians do respect violence.
Respecting violence is not the same as using it and enjoying using it, but it soon produces the same result — the victory of those who want power alone and for its own sake. The results of that victory are what Orwell depicts in 1984. I suspect that he was wrong to believe that any rulers could be as competent and purposeful, and therefore as absolute, as Big Brother and his Party, but he was right that a civilised political culture can decay to the point where power maniacs inevitably replace it. This has not happened, and will not happen in 1984, but it would be nice to think that Mrs Thatcher's government understood the problem as clearly as Orwell did.
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