Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell [4]
Besides the ambivalence within the Left as to Soviet realities, other opportunities for doublethink in action arose in the wake of the Second World War. In its moment of euphoria, the winning side was making, in Orwell’s view, mistakes as fatal as any made by the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War. Despite the most honourable intentions, in practice the present division of spoils among the former Allies carried the potential for fatal mischief. Orwell’s uneasiness over the ‘peace’ in fact is one major subtext of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
‘What it is really meant to do,’ Orwell wrote to his publisher at the end of 1948 – as nearly as we can tell early in the revision phase of the novel – ‘is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into “Zones of Influence” (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Teheran Conference) …’
Well, of course novelists should not be altogether trusted as to the sources of their inspiration. But the imaginative procedure bears looking at. The Teheran Conference was the first Allied summit meeting of the Second World War, taking place late in 1943, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in attendance. Among the topics they discussed was how, once Nazi Germany was defeated, the Allies would divide it up into zones of occupation. Who would get how much of Poland was another issue. In imagining Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, Orwell seems to have made a leap in scale from the Teheran talks, projecting the occupation of a defeated country into that of a defeated world. Though China had not been included, and the Chinese revolution in 1948 was still in progress, Orwell had been in the Far East and knew better than to ignore the weight of Eastasia when arranging his own Zones-of-Influence scheme. Geopolitical thinking in those days was enchanted with the ‘World-Island’ idea of British geographer Halford Mackinder – meaning Europe, Asia and Africa considered as a single landmass surrounded by water, ‘the pivot of history’, whose heartland was Nineteen Eight-Four’s ‘Eurasia’. ‘Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island,’ as Mackinder had put it, and ‘Who rules the World-Island commands the world,’ a pronouncement not lost on Hitler and other theoreticians of realpolitik.
One of these Mackinderites with connections in intelligence circles was James Burnham, an American ex-Trotskyist who around 1942 had published a provocative analysis of the world crisis then current called The Managerial Revolution, which Orwell discussed later in a lengthy article in 1946. Burnham, at the time, with England still reeling under Nazi assault and German troops at the outskirts of Moscow, argued that with the conquest of Russia and the global heartland imminent, the future would belong to Hitler. Later in the war, while serving with the OSS, with the Nazis headed for defeat, Burnham changed his mind in a lengthy afterthought, ‘Lenin’s Heir’, in which he now argued that unless the United States did something about it, the future, actually, would belong to Stalin and the Soviet system, and not Hitler after all. By this point Orwell, who took Burnham seriously but not uncritically, may have sensed that the man’s thinking was sort of on the flighty side