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It’s 2008, and today’s youths think Big Brother is only a
voyeuristic reality television contest show. But it is time to know
the man who authored that phrase. And his real name isn’t George
Orwell.
In his timeless novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1984), a totalitarian state watches every citizen’s move with
ubiquitous surveillance and leaves no room for privacy, dissent or
even love. Its incessant slogan: “Big Brother is watching you.”
Through moving pictures citizens are conditioned to hate the enemies
of the state, applaud at the brutality of it own government and
worship its own leaders like idols.
It was published in 1948 as the Cold War began
to heat up and communist Soviet Union and China (as well the US and
old European colonial power’s support of petty dictators)
threatened democracy. It was written under the nom de plume George
Orwell, the same name with which the man had penned previous work
that parodied communism such as Animal Farm.
The author’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair,
born in British colonial India in 1903. And he was a true freedom
fighter.
A committed social democrat, Blair grew to hate
colonialism and saw firsthand its oppression from the wrong
side—as a police officer for the Indian Imperial Police serving
Burma from 1922 to 1927. He resigned and wrote the novel Burmese
Days in 1934 as well as the essays “A Hanging” in 1931 and
“Shooting an Elephant” in 1936.
In that same year, he journeyed to Catalonia and
volunteered to fight for Republican government fighting the fascist
General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In combat, a bullet pierced
through his neck, nearly killing him and forever changed his
speaking voice. It was a war that galvanized every red-blooded man,
including other literary giants such as the Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda and American novelist Earnest Hemingway who was there to
cover it as a journalist.
A journalist himself, Blair himself worked to
improve social conditions through his reportage on such issues as
labor conditions. However, on the advent of the Second World War, he
found himself yet again working for questionable sides—this time
as a radio propagandist for the British Broadcast Company tasked to
convince Indians to join the War and side with Britain—the very
colonial empire that had denied Indians liberty for more than a
century. It was during this time that Blair became acutely aware of
media’s power to effect thought control.
Even up to the end of his life in 1949, he
worked with the British Foreign Office to counter the allure of
communist propaganda.
The man described himself as
“lower-upper-middle class.” At times he lived on borderline
poverty and would dress like a vagabond to better investigate the
living conditions of the masses. He wrote Down and Out in Paris and
London in 1932.
Eric Arthur Blair, George Orwell to you and I,
fought both imperialist capitalism and totalitarian communism with
word and will. In an age where audiences and readers need to be more
discerning of what commercialized and partisan media peddles, the
man’s works remain ominous and relevant.
-- Rome Jorge
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