Opinion: George Orwell

12/12/2014 - 08h01

It is 65 years since the death of George Orwell. He is most famous for his novels "1984" and "Animal Farm" and for the concepts of newspeak, double think, unperson and thoughtcrime.

Room 101, where Winston Smith in "1984" confronts his worst nightmares, was based on Orwell's two years spent at the BBC (1941-1943) which he joined as an talks assistant in the Indian section of the Eastern Service.

Room 101 is named after the airless BBC conference room where according to Orwell "all we do at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless."

Nevertheless the BBC plans to erect a statue in Orwell's memory in 2016. This is despite the fact that Orwell had very little tolerance for bronze statues of dead celebrities. In Orwell's opinion such statues served only to block the view.

Orwell also wrote "Down and Out in London and Paris" and "The Road to Wigan Pier." The "pier" was always a conceit. Wigan is a town in Lancaster far from the sea where he stayed in 1936 to write about the conditions in the industrial north during the Great Depression.

His "Homage to Catalonia" is a harrowing and brilliant account of the bitter internecine struggles within the left during the Spanish Civil War between the Stalinists and the anti-Stalinist left-wing anti-fascist POUM which Orwell joined.

Orwell was his literary name. He was born in Northern India as Eric Arthur Blair and he died at the age of 46 in 1950 of tuberculosis in London at University College Hospital.

He had attended Eton College, the most prestigious of England's private schools, but spent five years thereafter as a policeman in Burma. This experience in Burma made him an anti-imperialist for the rest of his life.

The Spanish Civil War made him a life-long enemy of totalitarianism.

In attacking Stalin Orwell was adopted during the Cold War by the anti-communist ideologues. Both "Animal Farm" and "1984" were widely used as part of the anti-soviet propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union.

And in his last years Orwell secretly denounced friends and colleagues for their supposed clandestine communist sympathies.

Yet in 1998 a massive collection of 20 volumes of the "Complete Works of George Orwell" was published which brought together a collection of his writing that reveiled the full scope and scale of his achievements as an author.

Orwell's phrase "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" still resonates: Even in Brazil.

But it is above all his premonition of the rise of the surveillance state that is more relevant today than ever. Edward Snowdon regards the technologies Orwell describes as being "quaint and unimaginative." Perhaps they are.

But Snowden's revelations of the activities of the national security agency, according to Bloomberg News, saw a single edition of "1984" rise on Amazon's "Movers and Shakers" list in the United States from 11,855th to number three.

"If liberty means anything at all" Orwell wrote "it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."