Nineteen Eighty-Four: An Anti-Utopia

Abstract

In his socialist pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), Orwell contrasted the defeatist attitudes of middle-class intellectuals, who flirted with Communism but had no intention of giving up their class privileges, with the instinctive patriotism and basic decency of the British working man (CEJL, 2.74). Later, in The English People (1944), he remarked that in England people could scarcely imagine ‘the real totalitarian atmosphere, in which the state endeavours to control people’s thoughts as well as their words’ (CEJL, 3.12). And in an essay on his friend Arthur Koestler, a refugee from Fascist and Communist prisons, he noted that England had no ‘concentration camp literature’, like Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1941), a novel that describes the arrest, torture and forced confession of a Soviet commissar.

The mass of the people never get the chance to bring their innate decency into the control of affairs, so that one is almost driven to the cynical thought that men are only decent when they are powerless.

CEJL, 1.336