The following article was broadcast by Radio Tirana, March 13, 1984.
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In the “socialist” campaign against the ideal of communism, the bourgeois propaganda media frequently concentrate attention on particular phenomena such as books, people or events which they immediately transform into myths and proceed to intensively utilize them until a new method is developed. At the end of 1983, efforts were begun to create another such new phenomenon. This was the book entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four by the British writer and BBC journalist Eric Arthur Blair, published under the pen-name George Orwell.
This book was written and published in 1949 at the height of the Cold War and is an offspring of these times. It is one of the most reactionary books ever written against socialism and the working class. This book, which resembles a science fiction novel, describes a glimpse of the year 1984, following the imagined triumph of socialism, in the blackest of colours, full of utter despair. For a long time, the reactionaries of all countries have promoted this book as a banner against socialism. It is only natural that when the year 1984 actually came around, the bourgeoisie could not help but raise the most deafening fuss about this author and his book. Not only literary and artistic journals and newspapers, but also official representatives of reaction such as ministers, presidents and ambassadors, eulogized this work and the name of this infamous writer during the final months of last year and the beginning of this year. The name of Orwell has been mentioned at international meetings, at meetings of the European Common Market, of NATO and the United Nations. It was expected that 1984, the year of the astonishing prophecies of the so-called British journalist who has long been dead, would be proclaimed the Orwell era.
But like everything which is exaggerated to the maximum, this so-called jubilee is not having the success expected. The greater part of the literary-artistic press was obliged to abandon this at the beginning of the year, despite its promise to keep interest alive in the book Nineteen Eighty-Four and its author by publishing articles and other studies. And this is not accidental. The more the press tries to analyze and comment on the grotesque imagination of this journalist, the more the reader is astounded because, in many of the opinions presented by this author, the reader finds characteristics of present-day life under capitalism which have nothing in common with socialism or with its ideas.
For example, Orwell’s description of the whole world or the whole of mankind being controlled by video-technical methods reminds one of the unbridled armaments race of the superpowers, the race to increase the number of spy satellites and other sophisticated inventions of the CIA to control everyone at all times and in all countries. The reader is also disillusioned by the prophecies of Orwell according to which in 1984 the world will allegedly be divided into three parts which are engaged in meaningless battles with one another according to the situation which allegedly changes several times per year. While in the existing political climate of the world today, the rivalry and collaboration of the superpowers play a substantial role, this once again has absolutely nothing in common with socialism or its ideas.
As far as political and social oppression — of which Orwell puts forward many cases in his book — is concerned, his examples in fact remind one of all the dictators and dictatorships beginning from the classical monarchical dictatorships of the Borgia type to the nazi-fascist type of our century. The Western reader who has experienced for himself the consequences of the grave climate of violence and oppression which Orwell describes is quite correct in being astonished when this is dished up as a characteristic of socialist society. This disillusionment of the reader is the main reason why many of the plans to commemorate Orwell have been abandoned or have failed.
(The Marxist-Leninist, Vol. 14, No. 78, March 18, 1984)