George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) wrote ‘1984,’ a grim novel of future totalitarianism in 1948. This and his satirical, political novel, ‘Animal Farm,’ described succinctly the mechanisms of oppression and distortion of the truth by the state and the realities of political power. Orwell was opposed to totalitarianism in all its forms, whether Stalinist/Marxist/Communist, fascist or pseudo-democratic. Ironically, Orwell had unknowingly fallen into the clutches of the very propagandists and distorters of truth he vilified and satirised because his British publisher, Fredric Warburg, was a secret CIA asset who would later become notorious for publishing and distributing a CIA propaganda magazine ‘Encounter,’ for one of the CIA’s countless ‘front’ organisations, the ironically named Congress for Cultural Freedom.
‘Animal Farm’ was published in the same month of the German surrender, May 1945, which was the perfect, convenient moment to launch a concerted attack on Soviet policies. The Cold War propaganda campaign embraced Animal Farm, which rapidly became a best-seller.
In 1948, the Information Research Department (IRD) was formed by the British Foreign Office, which was/is covertly controlled by MI-6. The IRD was the brainchild of Christopher Mayhew, who, in 1947, as a junior minister, proposed a ‘propaganda counteroffensive,’ and so for the next thirty years, the IRD exercised its influence through the media, particularly the written word and radio, the BBC. (There were no independent radio stations in Britain until the 1960s.) The IRD published, distributed and translated works by Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and many other noted figures. Timothy Ash, in his 2010 book, ‘Facts Are Subversive,’ investigated the activities of the IRD, known informally as the ‘dirty tricks department.’ According to Ash, it indulged in, “…character assassination, false telegrams, putting itching powder on lavatory seats, and other such cold war pranks … little of which will be found in the files, even if the intelligence-related ones are finally released.”
Animal Farm was in fact a core IRD project. It was broadcast on ‘Voice of America,’ and was translated into dozens of languages and Orwell helped the IRD strategise its worldwide circulation.
“Few books in the history of English literature enjoyed such a rapid diffusion into as many languages as Animal Farm.” ‘Archives of Authority,’ Andrew Rubin (2012)
Among other books that tell the story of ‘Animal Farm and the IRD’ are, ‘Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, 1948–1977’ Paul Lashmar and James Oliver (1998.) Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999,) Frances Stonor Saunders, and ‘British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus’ (2001,) by Tony Shaw.
In 1950, Orwell died of a burst artery in his lung, a complication of his tuberculosis. Four months earlier, Orwell had married Sonia Brownell, fifteen years his junior and following Orwell’s death, Warburg persuaded his widow to unwittingly sell the movie rights to 1984 and Animal Farm to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC,) a creation of Allen Dulles. One version of the story contends that Sonia ceded the film rights to Animal Farm only upon the promise of a ‘date’ with Clark Gable and according to The Paper Trail, Jon Elliston’s Internet discussion of declassified information, CIA official Joe Bryan made the arrangements, ‘as a measure of thanks.’
According to its secret charter, OPC’s activities on behalf of the ‘free’ world include propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, demolition and subversion and its head was none other than E. Howard Hunt, who would later become infamous as a member of the Watergate gang of criminals and later be exposed for his involvement in the assassination of JFK. It was indeed Hunt who personally selected Louis De Rochemont to be the producer of the animated version of Animal Farm for Paramount.
De Rochemont had considerable experience with propaganda, having created The March of Time series for Henry Luce and, during WWII, worked with the US Navy’s propaganda film unit. He had also worked on socially/politically sensitive films for many years two of which were the anti-Nazi spy film The House on 92nd Street (1945,) and Lost Boundaries (1949,) one of the first racially conscious films.
Vivien Halas, daughter of the film’s co-directors John Halas and Joy Batchelor, suggested that the real reason that Halas and Batchelor were awarded the contract is that Louis De Rochemont was a Navy colleague and good friend of screenwriters/producers Philip Stapp and Lothear Wolf. De Rochemont had worked with them in the Navy’s film unit and Vivien’s mother had worked closely with Stapp in 1949 on The Shoemaker and the Hatter, a pro-Marshall Plan film produced by Halas and Batchelor. Eventually Stapp and Lothear were hired to work on Animal Farm’s script which was to be the first animated full-length feature produced in England.
John Halas was born in Budapest and had worked as an animator before moving to Paris. He moved to England in 1936 to work on Music Man, the first British cartoon in Technicolor. Then in 1940 he formed Halas and Batchelor with Joy Batchelor, a British animator and scriptwriter. During the war they were kept busy with training, propaganda and other government sponsored films. They were awarded the contract to create the film in November 1951 and it was completed by a team of eighty animators, in April 1954. De Rochemont had made it plain that the film would not be identical to the book and Vivien Halas confirmed that during the production the script went through several changes before it was finalised.
It was to meet the CIA’s objectives, that the ending was changed to show that only the pigs had become totally corrupt and the film ended with other animals mounting a successful revolt against their rulers. There was no mention of the humans in the film’s conclusion. Had he lived to see it, Orwell would no doubt have been horrified at the way his ideas had been twisted to make political capital.
The film was a box office ‘hit’ and the reviews were favourable, but some critics suggested that people should really read the book to learn what had been left out. It was later distributed around the world by the United States Information Agency (USIA) through their overseas libraries and then produced 1984 in Britain in 1956. Inevitably, Orwell’s message was distorted and perverted once again by the CIA, to suit the goals of the banksters. The CIA’s ironically ‘Orwellian’ sabotage of two of the most powerful political works in literature was a masterstroke of pre-emptive mind control, and as the psychological warfare experts at the CIA are only too well aware, a successful movie, like television, will be seen by tens or hundreds of millions of people worldwide and, consisting of graphic images, is much more powerful and widely assimilated than the written word. By sabotaging the books’ real messages in the movie versions of 1984 and Animal Farm, the CIA effectively prevented the vast majority of people from ever learning of the true relevance of Orwell’s writings, to their own situations.
By 1989, 1984 had been translated into sixty-five languages, more than any other novel in English at the time. Orwell was a hugely proficient linguist, reading and speaking nine languages, English, Greek, Latin, Burmese, Hindustani, Shaw-Karen (an obscure Burmese dialect,) French, Spanish and Catalan. Widely regarded, rightly, as one of the most influential dystopian novels ever written, 1984 has had a profound effect all around the world. Since its first publication in 1949 many of its concepts have entered modern day parlance, ‘Big Brother,’ ‘Doublethink,’ ‘Thoughtcrime,’ ‘Newspeak’ and ‘Room 101’ are all derived from its pages. And perhaps even more significantly, as a result of the book, ‘Orwellian’ has now become a term that describes official deception, secret surveillance, and manipulation of the past by a totalitarian or authoritarian state. Orwell’s vain hope was that by writing 1984 he would help stop such a state ever coming to pass. Oh, the irony of it all.
But aside from being a masterpiece of literature, George Orwell’s legendary 1984, is more than just a story, it is a prophecy and vision of what the banksters have planned for all of us. The invisible, elusive yet ‘all-powerful’ ‘Big Brother,’ is nothing more than a symbol for the New World Order and its surveillance society, which will control everything and everyone. And just like those behind Big Brother, the masses will never know who is really ‘pulling the strings.’ Even more pertinently, the banksters, as well as creating false ‘enemies’ have also even created false resistance movements designed to root out dissidents, exactly as described in the book. 1984, despite being written as a warning to us all, is now unfortunately, actually being used as a blueprint to usher-in the horrors of the New World Order.
As well as George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was another ‘warning from history.’ We may well wonder which of the two were most accurate as we watch our descent into corporate totalitarianism. Would we be, as Orwell warned, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used sophisticated and violent forms of control or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and ‘bread and circuses,’ captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption and thus unwittingly embrace our own oppression?
Actually, Orwell and Huxley were both correct. Huxley recognised the first stage of our enslavement whilst Orwell saw the second. Over the years, how many schoolchildren throughout the world have had to read 1984? This is another aspect to the banksters’ and their satanic/Masonic Illuminati’s deliberate plans to conquer the world. By promoting the prophecy as fiction, they can brainwash millions into believing that their ultimate goals are little more than the product of one man’s vivid imagination.
However, Orwell and Huxley were not blessed with psychic powers, it was simply that they had seen and been instructed in this evil plan. Just as author and futurist H.G. Wells had been, before them. If the banksters and their secret foundations and Tavistock groups, thought for one moment that such revealing works of Orwell and Huxley would wake-up the masses to what was going on, then we would most certainly have never have heard of them.
We have been gradually disempowered by the bankster-corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, has seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, prolific mass-produced trinkets, limitless credit, political theatre and 24/7 entertainment and sports activities. Yet, whilst we are being distracted, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate powers in check are being dismantled, the laws that once protected us are being deleted from history and we are gradually being impoverished. Credit is drying up, plentiful, decent jobs for the ‘working classes’ are gone forever and mass-produced goods are becoming unaffordable and thus do we find ourselves transported from Brave New World to 1984. The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy and it almost time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s ‘feelies,’ the ‘orgy-porgy’ and ‘centrifugal bumble-puppy.’ We are moving from a society where we are skilfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned and Huxley warned of a world where no-one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear whilst Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasures. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished and Huxley warned of a state where the masses, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about politics, truth or information. Orwell saw us overtly scared into submission and Huxley saw us cunningly seduced into submission.
But Huxley’s ‘imaginings’ were merely the prelude to Orwell’s ideas. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement, whereas Orwell understood the nature of our enslavement. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell’s character O’Brien said in ‘1984.’ “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power… We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
The banksters’ corporate state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the mainstream media, the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the materialism of a consumer-based society, devours us from the inside, out. It owes no allegiance to us or our nations and it feeds greedily upon our carcasses. But now the façade is crumbling and as more and more people reach the conclusion that they have been systematically used and robbed, we are moving swiftly from Huxley’s Brave New World to Orwell’s 1984.
‘Newspeak,’ as Orwell referred to it, is the authoritarian government’s weapon of choice for deceit and it works by placing a different meaning, or ‘spin,’ on events by altering words and replacing them with something which softens them and evades the truth. All shades of meaning are removed from language, whilst leaving simple dichotomies which reinforce the control of the state. In 1984, words with opposite meaning are removed as redundant so ‘bad’ becomes ‘ungood’ for example, and as many meaningful words as possible are removed from the language and boiled down to a single word that was a conformation of some sort. An obedient word with which people answered when asked something. The dumbing-down of language was used by the state to prevent effective communication between potential dissident factions and individuals, thus rendering them impotent.
Newspeak’s ‘sibling’ is ‘Doublespeak.’ This is language which appears to communicate but actually does not, serving no useful purpose except to deceive. It makes bad appear good, the negative seem positive, the unpleasant seem attractive and it avoids, shifts, evades, and denies responsibility like an ever-changing desert of verbal, moving sand, as it crawls and slithers around true meaning. It is language which hides or prevents genuinely enlightened thought. It is ‘anti-thought.’
Whilst Newspeak reduces language down to its lowest common denominator, Doublespeak is a language of ‘smoke and mirrors,’ using language to cloak real meanings and empower its users with thought-control of a far more subtle kind than its intellectual brother. The modern government thrives on its heady cocktail of linguistic vacuousness and controls its citizenry with Doublespeak. Modern politicians are without doubt trained in this facility and indeed have become thoroughly expert in its utilisation.
Everything Orwell wrote, from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until his death was infused with a hatred of totalitarianism and when he spoke of life at the bottom of the social pile, he did so from personal experience – he had been there in the gutter along with all the other dregs of humanity, as related in his autobiographical work, ‘Down and Out in Paris and London.’ He had fought in the Spanish Civil War and seen many people die, so he developed a deep suspicion and hatred of authority in all its chimeric guises, and of how it insidiously manipulates, cajoles and obliquely threatens people to do as it wishes, and also of how it uses words to alter meaning and substance to suit its purpose for evasion and obfuscation.