Colin Tudge suggests that the world is now more or less precisely in the state that George Orwell described 80 years ago in one of the greatest of all dystopian works of literature
George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 when memories of World War II and Hitler were still fresh – indeed the full extent of Nazi atrocities was only just coming to light; and Stalin was still firmly esconced in Moscow as head of the enormous, multi-headed USSR. Orwell’s novel is commonly seen as an attack on dictatorships in general, whether of the Right or the Left – and indeed it is. But it is more specific than that. For Orwell envisaged a world carved up between three super-powers, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia – plus a convenient suite of “Disputed Territories” including most of Africa, Arabia, Greenland and a strip of south Asia. The book’s hero, Winston Smith, the thinking everyman who feels that life must have more to offer, is a citizen of Oceania, which is ruled by a totalitarian government with the cosy soubriquet of Big Brother.
Officially the three superpowers were permanently at war, with all three constantly forming new alliances, and breaking them, and changing sides. But in reality, as Big Brother’s representative O’Brian finally explains to Winston Smith, the ostensible war was a sham. Each and all the superpowers’ leaders were interested only in power and in personal aggrandisement; and they perceived, as despots have done throughout all history, that the easy the way to keep their own unruly populations in check was to be at war, or to be seen to be at war, so that the people felt obliged to unite against a common enemy. The three ostensibly warring Orwellian superpowers never actually attacked each other, beyond the odd pot-shot that killed a few people and flattened a village or two, to keep the people fearful, and angry. Serious combat if any was confined to the “disputed” territories, which none of them really cared about, and were valued only for their cheap labour, natural resources, and militarily convenient outposts. For in reality, the officially warring superpowers were all on the same side, or at least were all playing the same game, which they all understood. Their politicking and rhetoric was pure theatre, a perpetual, choreographed stalemate that created fear, and provided an excuse for martial law, and kept the superpowers’ rulers in the constant state of euphoria that comes with wealth and power.
And doesn’t that describe the relationship between Trump’s USA, Putin’s Russia, and Xi Jinping’s China to a tee? Ukraine is the most conspicuously “disputed territory” right now, valued for its vast, fertile lands and its minerals, including the “rare earths” that will play such a role in the age of IT and indeed of AI. But in the minds of the superpower leaders, everywhere else is disputed territory too, including all of Africa, and India, and Brazil, and indeed Europe. The ideological differences that divided “East” and “West” in the decades of the Cold War – a brutalized version of Communism versus capitalism that practiced at least a rudimentary version of democracy – are now largely historical. The world has lurched emphatically to the Right and we’re all neoliberals now. The only substantive question is who can do it best.
Of course the modern world isn’t quite like Orwell’s 1984. Big Brother’s Oceania was in a constant state of contrived austerity and was uniformly grey, or perhaps yellowish grey in the sulphurous light of the street-lights, as East Germany was at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 (I visited East Berlin a couple of times in the 1980s. A very unsmiling place). The modern world by contrast is glitzy in the extreme, and getting glitzier by the week, its mega-cities awash with light and easily visible from space. Probably from the Moon with a big enough telescope. But the slums and favelas are spreading around the oases of glitz, if oases they are — very obviously in Mumbai and Rio but also in Los Angeles and Washington DC (and indeed in the UK too, if not quite as conspicuously as in Mumbai or LA).
And of course as they scrap, or pretend to, the natural world is falling apart, as everyone knows who doesn’t live in a bubble. As Hamlet sighed to Horatio: “That it should come to this!”
PS If Trump gets his way, the land of Ukraine would belong to Russia but the rare earths beneath will belong to the USA. That would be interesting!
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