george orwell cold war essay

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You and the Atom Bomb

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of  the Orwell Estate . The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider  making a donation  or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere. 

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb “ought to be put under international control.” But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: “How difficult are these things to manufacture?”

Such information as we – that is, the big public – possess on this subject has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman’s decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)

Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The distinction between great states and small states would have been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman’s remarks, and various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years past.

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon – so long as there is no answer to it – gives claws to the weak.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle . This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans – even Tibetans – could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only three – ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon – or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fighting – not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.

From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose – and really this the likeliest development – that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main argument. For Burnham’s geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states – East Asia, dominated by China – is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.

We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications – that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police State. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”.

Tribune , 19 October 1945

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George Orwell and the origin of the term ‘cold war’

Oxford Dictionaries

• By Katherine Connor Martin
• October 24 th 2015

On 19 October 1945, George Orwell used the term cold war in his essay “ You and the Atom Bomb ,” speculating on the repercussions of the atomic age which had begun two months before when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. In this article, Orwell considered the social and political implications of “a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.”

This wasn’t the first time the phrase cold war was used in English (it had been used to describe certain policies of Hitler in 1938), but it seems to have been the first time it was applied to the conditions that arose in the aftermath of World War II. Orwell’s essay speculates on the geopolitical impact of the advent of a powerful weapon so expensive and difficult to produce that it was attainable by only a handful of nations, anticipating “the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them,” and concluding that such a situation is likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘ peace that is no peac e’.”

Within years, some of the developments anticipated by Orwell had emerged. The Cold War (often with capital initials) came to refer specifically to the prolonged state of hostility, short of direct armed conflict, which existed between the Soviet bloc and Western powers after the Second World War. The term was popularized by the American journalist Walter Lippman, who made it the title of a series of essays he published in 1947 in response to U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s ‘Mr. X’ article, which had advocated the policy of “ containment .” To judge by debate in the House of Commons the following year (as cited by the Oxford English Dictionary ), this use of the term Cold War was initially regarded as an Americanism: ‘The British Government … should recognize that the ‘cold war’, as the Americans call it, is on in earnest, that the third world war has, in fact, begun.” Soon, though, the term was in general use.

The end of the Cold War was prematurely declared from time to time in the following decades—after the death of Stalin, and then again during the détente of the 1970s—but by the time the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the Cold War era was clearly over. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously posited that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such,” with the global ascendancy of Western liberal democracy become an inevitability.

A quarter of a century later, tensions between Russia and NATO have now ratcheted up again, particularly in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis of 2014; commentators have begun to speak of a “ New Cold War .” The ideological context has changed, but once again a few great powers with overwhelming military might jockey for global influence while avoiding direct confrontation. Seventy years after the publication of his essay, the dynamics George Orwell discussed in it are still recognizable in international relations today.

A version of this article first appeared on the OxfordWords blog. 

Image Credit: “General Douglas MacArthur, UN Command CiC (seated), observes the naval shelling of Incheon from the USS Mt. McKinley, September 15, 1950.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

Katherine Connor Martin is Head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

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Orwell and the Atomic Bomb

5th August 2020 by Richard Lance Keeble

George Orwell’s reflections about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August seventy-five years ago – in a wide range of writings – are among his most important and insightful.

His first major statement comes in an essay, ‘You and the Atom Bomb’, published in Tribune on 19 October 1945 where he concentrates on the Bomb’s impact on the state. ‘The discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years at least,’ he says. The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. Most nations could get hold of rifles so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans and Tibetans could fight for independence, sometimes with success. Thereafter, every development in military technique has favoured the state. In 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale – now there are only three – and perhaps only two.

He writes: ‘So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds dividing the world between them. … It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilization. But suppose – and really this is the likeliest development – that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another ? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate ? In that case, we are back to where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.’ The outcome is indefinite ‘peace that is no peace’.

This is Orwell, then, in his bleakest mood. Is there any hope ? Only if cheap and easily manufactured weapons can be developed that are ‘not dependent on huge concentration of industrial plant’.

He takes James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) to task for predicting that Germany, not Russia, would dominate the Eurasian land mass. Yet Burnham’s essential world view has turned out correct. ‘More and more obviously, the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the wider world and each ruled, under one guise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy.’ Without directly saying so, Orwell suggests that most likely some combination of Western Europe and the United States, a nuclear-armed Soviet Union and East Asia, led by China, will dominate this new, permanent state of ‘cold war’. All this clearly anticipates the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four in which three super-states, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, are at constant war. As Dorian Lynskey comments in The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019): ‘Having invented the phrase “cold war”, he also anticipated the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.’

The Tribune essay significantly draws a response from Alex Comfort, the pacifist with whom Orwell has earlier engaged in a controversy in verse over the cases for and against waging war. Following the spat, the two, remarkably, become friends. In an article in War Commentary , just three weeks after the atomic blasts, Comfort condemns them as acts of ‘criminal lunacy which must be without parallel in recorded history’. Now, in his letter to Tribune , Comfort begins by praising Orwell for putting his finger ‘as usual, on the wider analytical point’ that different types of weapons tend to produce particular types of societies. Yet, he stresses, ‘another conclusion is possible besides mere resignation to the omnipotence of tyrants equipped with nuclear energy. Not only are social institutions dictated by weapon-power: so are revolutionary tactics, and it seems to me that Orwell has made the case for the tactical use of disobedience, which he has tended to condemn in the past as pacifism’.

Early in 1946, Orwell gives a talk to the Red Flag Fellowship and again expresses concern over the coming of the atom bomb. If war breaks out between the US and the USSR, he says, he would choose the US, since, despite all the faults of uncontrolled capitalism, they had at least liberty. The Soviet Union was so despotic there was little hope of liberty ever emerging there.

His fears over the emergence of phony wars between a tiny number of super-states, first expressed in ‘You and the Atom Bomb’, appear again in his essay ‘Toward European Unity’ for the July/August 1947 issue of Partisan Review . Within each nuclear-armed state, he says, the ‘necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world and by a continuous phony war against rival states. Civilization of this type might remain static for thousands of years’. As Bernard Crick comments in his 1980 biography: ‘This is Nineteen Eighty-Four .’ But this time a new mood of idealism mixes with the pessimism. There is hope – and it lies in European democratic socialism ‘where people are relatively free and happy and where the main motive in life is not the pursuit of money or power’. ‘Apart from Australia and New Zealand, the tradition of democratic Socialism can only be said to exist … in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, the Low Countries, France, Britain, Spain and Italy. Only in those countries are there still large numbers of people to whom the word “Socialism” has some appeal and for whom it is bound up with liberty, equality and internationalism.’

Atomic warfare plays a crucial role in Nineteen Eighty-Four . On one occasion, Winston Smith meets Julia, the ‘girl from the Fiction Department’, with whom he has a passionate affair, in the ruins of a church destroyed in a nuclear attack ‘thirty years’ earlier – which suggests the revolution which allowed the Party to seize power occurred in 1954. And when Winston reflects on his childhood in London, one of his earliest memories is of a sudden air raid. ‘Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth…’

To a certain degree, Orwell’s retreat to the remote Scottish island of Jura in the last years of his life in order to concentrate, away from the drudgery of journalism, on writing what was to become his dystopian masterpiece, was also inspired by his fear of atomic warfare. As he confides to his friend Tosco Fyvel in December 1947: ‘This stupid war is coming off in abt 10-20 years, and this country will be blown off the map whatever happens. The only hope is to have a few animals in some place not worth a bomb.’ And to his friend, Julian Symons, in December 1948, he writes: ‘If the show does start and is as bad as one fears, it would be fairly easy to be self-supporting on these islands provided one wasn’t looted.’

After the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four on 8 June 1949, in London, and five days later in New York, Orwell discusses with his publisher, Fredric Warburg, who visits him at Cranham sanatorium, his serious concerns over the misinterpretations of his great novel’s focus – in particular, on its warnings about atomic warfare. In Warburg’s follow-up note on the discussion, which appears in Volume 20 of the Collected Works , edited by Peter Davison, Orwell makes clear that the Soviet Union is not the primary target. Rather, ‘the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on Liberal capitalist communities by the necessity to prepare for total war with the USSR and the new weapon, of which of course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and the most publicized. But danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colour.’

So right until near the very end of his life, atomic warfare is a major preoccupation of George Orwell – a fact worth remembering as people all around the country gather to mark the 75 th anniversary of the attacks on Japan.

Richard Lance Keeble was chair of The Orwell Society from 2013 to 2020. His latest books are Journalism Beyond Orwell (Routledge 2020) and George Orwell, The Secret State and the Making of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Abramis, 2020).

2 replies on “Orwell and the Atomic Bomb”

Like Orwell, I’m a rightist from a mode that has more currency in European modes than American as most American “conservatives” really are Classical Liberals or economic Libertarians not traditionalists as the USA broke all ties with traditional governance in its War of Independence that really wasn’t a revolution actually! We on the Right need to assess in the age of Maoist China’s COVID 19 the reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whether it was right in being necessary militarily to make peace with beaten Japan because there was no moral justification as it was aimed primarily at civilians not military targets. Also, the results of Maoist China as the last totalitarian Super Power left to keep their system of organized oppression with no one able to censure them due to their weaponry and wealth for it even when their actions affect the peoples of other nations like they have! We Americans lost all moral high ground we could have because in Hiroshima and Nagasaki we did what no other country has done against a foe’s civilian centers to the extent we did it for what I say objectively were negligible military justifications for it! True rightist historian John Toland and George Orwell would have been in agreement on the action of unleashing atomic destruction on densely populated centers twice especially when once was more than enough as the Japanese were trying to make a honorable truce as Toland proves. Sad reality is that it seems the US authorities of the Harry Truman Administration were genuinely more interested to see the extent of the destruction their weapons could do not so much concerned about beating Japan as they knew it was militarily beaten. The Japanese had no Navy nor Air Force left. Tojo had been overthrown by the Emperor who wanted a peaceful truce. Sir Winston Churchill suggested restraint as he was afraid of China going Soviet if the Japanese were removed without there being any resistance to the Stalin’s USSR forces from the East. Japan had been an ally of the U.K.’s in WWI. Like Orwell’s fear of nukes, Churchill’s fear of a communist victory in China was correct! I would argue that the world today is a more scary place because of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki when negotiations were not utilized in favor of seeing the destructive effects of nukes while paving the way for the Sovietization of Asia which occurred with the Korean and Vietnam Wars as a result! The USSR and all the Powers became interested in acquiring and developing greater nukes once the effects they could do was shown with the atomic effects of nukes not going away with the rubble of explosions like conventional weapons. Is that all a good thing helpful to anybody of any political persuasion? As a Rightist, I’m a Luddite type who says “No”! Personally, as a history researcher and Rightist not happy with Maoist China’s influence in the world, I don’t think the long-term results justified that action when a negotiated settlement could have been pursued for Japan and its anti-communist allies in Asia!

This is a very illuminating article, thank you for publishing it. The Outer Hebrides are a marvelous and (still) quiet place on planet earth. The vision of Mr. Orwell producing his masterpiece 1984 at a rented farmhouse on the Isle of Jura is compelling. Mr. Orwell was unique, perhaps, in that he was able to so clearly and admirably foresee the future. Remember his last words: “It is up to is to prevent it.” IT being the horrific, anti-human, anti-love, anti-sex world painted in the novel 1984. We still have the power to prevent IT, but we must not fail ourselves nor fool ourselves nor turn our backs on our brothers ans sisters.

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Orwell’s 5 greatest essays: No. 4, “You and the Atomic Bomb”

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For anyone interested in the politics of left and right--and in political journalism as it is practiced at the highest level, Orwell’s works are indispensable. This week, in the year marks the 110th anniversary of his birth, we present a personal list of his five greatest essays.

Published a mere two and a half months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Orwell’s “You and the Atomic Bomb” is notable as one of the first efforts to divine the social and political implications of a new weapon of previously unimaginable power. Its fame arises from Orwell’s coinage of a new term for the permanent standoff the bomb would foster between two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union: the “cold war.”

The social and political aspects of nuclear weapons had been debated for a year by physicists working on the Manhattan Project, though even most of them--thanks to the requirements of secrecy within the project--were unaware of how far the overall work had progressed until the bombs were dropped on Japan. With the blasts, the issues were thrown open for public debate.

Orwell places the bomb properly within the historical continuum. “It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons,” he writes. “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”

As for the cold war, that infinite “peace that is no peace,” Orwell foresees that it will not be long before the Soviets join the Americans as sole possessors of the bomb’s secrets.

“From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them.”

In at least one regard, Orwell’s vision was no more farsighted than anyone else’s in 1945: What happens when one of those super-states collapses?

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“A Peace that is No Peace”: The Cold War as Contemporary History

Jeremi Suri is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs the European Union Center of Excellence and the Grand Strategy Program. He is author of four books on contemporary politics and foreign policy, most recently , Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Harvard University Press, 2007). In 2007 Smithsonian Magazine named Professor Suri one of America's “Top Young Innovators” in the Arts and Sciences.) .

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Jeremi Suri, “A Peace that is No Peace”: The Cold War as Contemporary History, OAH Magazine of History , Volume 24, Issue 4, October 2010, Pages 5–6, https://doi.org/10.1093/maghis/24.4.5

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In October 1945, George Orwell warned that “the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.” Orwell foresaw how the emergence of two superpowers on the ashes of fascism, the deployment of new destructive technologies, and the manipulation of terror would deprive the postwar world of many promised freedoms. The second half of the twentieth century would be frozen, Orwell predicted, in “a peace that is no peace,” when war preparation, controlled conflict, and targeted repression became “normal.” The British journalist famously labeled his global diagnosis “a permanent state of cold war” ( 1).

Although many contemporary observers did not share Orwell's dark vision, they adopted his terminology. The Cold War was an era of proliferating conflict short of total war. During the decades after 1945, virtually every corner of the globe was enveloped in competition, intervention, and violence due to a clash of two world systems: liberal capitalism and authoritarian communism. The United States and the Soviet Union were the self-conscious embodiments of these respective systems, and they built alliances of similar states and prepared to contain, attract, and, if necessary, destroy their adversaries. Both Washington and Moscow defended their long-term security and prosperity by spreading their “ways of life,” and undermining alternatives. The superpowers managed to avoid World War III, but they employed almost every mode of competition short of Armageddon ( 2).

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You and the Cold War: Orwell and the Superpowers .repo-zujusq{display:inline-block;transform:translateY(-0.5rem);margin-left:15px;}

.repo-1h6ne0y{background:#ffffff;text-transform:uppercase;padding-right:1.5rem;}.repo-1h6ne0y:after{content:'';position:absolute;background:#adadad;transform:translatey(-50%);top:50%;left:0;width:100%;height:0.1rem;z-index:-1;} abstract.

In 1945 George Orwell coined the phrase “Cold War” and made a number of pessimistic predictions about it. He thought that nuclear weapons would most likely lead to a bleak world enslaved by superpowered American, Soviet, and perhaps Chinese empires, not destroyed by nuclear war. He also argued all resistance to the superpowers by the peoples of the Global South was futile because of the superpowers’ overwhelming military and economic superiority. These Cold War predictions formed the basis for the world of Orwell’s most famous and influential work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The following thesis compares Orwell’s warnings about the Cold War to the historical record of the United States and Soviet Union during it. This thesis concludes that superpower hegemony was not as absolute as Orwell feared because of the importance of popular support in sustaining a nation, winning a guerilla war, and maintaining a hegemony. It also concludes that the hegemony of the Cold War United States was the inverse of the conditions found in Nineteen Eighty-Four and that the Soviet Union’s Cold War empire lacked the level of imperial stability and economic dominance required of an Orwellian super-state. Both real and imagined superpowered rivalry continues to be a historical motif in the twenty-first century, and the illiberal dangers and temptations of hegemony this thesis details remain relevant to the present and future.

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Copyright, Coleman Lee 2019

Dr. Martin Blackwell, Dr. Cristian Harris, Dr. Richard Byers

19 July 2022

MA - History

Master's

• George Orwell
• Superpowers

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Cold War on File

Why did the cold war emerge, teachers' notes, introduction, external links.

About this classroom resource

The majority of the sources in this themed collection have been taken from our Cold War web resource with which many users of the Education Website will be familiar. However, we have upgraded the quality of the images, shown more of the original document in some cases and included additional sources from The National Archives exhibition: Britain’s Cold War revealed: Protect and Survive, April-November 2019.

The purpose of this document collection is to allow students and teachers to develop their own questions and lines of historical enquiry on the Cold War. Students could work with a group of sources or single source on a certain aspect. Teachers may wish to use the collection to develop their own resources or encourage students to ‘curate’ their own ‘exhibition’ of the most significant sources on the topic. Another idea would be to challenge students to use the documents to substantiate or dispute points made in the introduction with this collection. We hope that the documents will offer students a chance to develop their powers of evaluation and analysis and enrich their understanding of this topic.

Alternatively, teachers could use the Cold War website alongside this collection for specific questions or activities connected to these documents.

Students will find more documents in our recommended resources and can also consider film sources as interpretations of these events in relation to the documents by following the links to British Public Information films and British Pathé.

Themes covered in this collection include:

How strong was the wartime alliance, 1941-45?

The records provided here give context for a study of the Cold War, with reference to the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences which bridge the period of wartime co-operation and the post war tensions that followed.

Who caused the Cold War?

The attitudes and responses of important individuals in the early stages of the Cold War – Stalin, Truman and Churchill are explored through various cabinet discussions and foreign office reports.

How did the Cold War work?

Documents for this theme highlight the nature of the Cold War including the conflict over Berlin in 1948, the blockade and airlift. Other sources reflect the conflict in Korea and Soviet actions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) as told through political, military or personal themes.

How close was world nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s?

Records included in the collection relate to the development of nuclear weapons, British defence policy and the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962.

Britain in the nuclear age

For this theme we have included some documents featured in our exhibition called Britain’s Cold War revealed: Protect and Survive which concern civil defence, protests against the bomb at Aldermaston and Greenham Common.

Connections to the Curriculum

These documents can be used to support any of the exam board specifications covering the Cold War, such as:

AQA: GCE History Unit 2R: The Cold War, c1945-1991

OCR: GCE History Unit Y113: Britain 1930-1997: British Period Study: Britain’s position in the world 1951-1997 (Enquiry topic: Churchill 1930-1951) Unit Y223: Non-British Period Study: The Cold War in Europe, 1941-1995

Edexcel: GCE History Paper 3, Option 37.1: The changing nature of warfare, 1859–1991: perception and reality

Edexcel: GCSE History Period Study 4: Superpower relations and the Cold War, 1941–91

AQA: GCSE History BC Conflict and tension between East and West, 1945–1972

Who first coined the phrase “Cold War”? The general consensus among historians is that it was the celebrated author and journalist, George Orwell, in his essay ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ published in the Tribune magazine on 19 October 1945 (though one biographer has traced his use of the phrase back to 1943). In the 1945 article Orwell reflected on the repercussions of ‘a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “Cold War” with its neighbours’. He envisaged ‘the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states’ dominating the world, and possessing weapons which can kill millions in seconds. Orwell concluded that the atomic bomb was likely ‘to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”.

Seeing into the future

Looking back at Orwell’s predictions, he possessed amazing foresight. The Cold War (1945-1991) was a confrontation, both military and ideological, between two superpowers, the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union (and their respective allies), made all the more tense by the threat of nuclear war. This highly charged stand-off was a thread running through historic developments such as the iron curtain, the Cuban missile crisis and the construction and dismantling of the Berlin Wall.

Because there was so much at stake – arguably, the very future of civilisation – the superpowers avoided direct confrontation but fought a series of savage proxy wars, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, supporting local factions. Orwell’s “peace that is no peace” prediction was borne out.

Revelations

Contemplating the Cold War from today’s perspective, one aspect cannot be predicted – the surprises that can emerge from documents you haven’t seen before. Many narratives are available for the Cold War: it is the subject of many books, documentaries and films. However, this package of documents from The National Archives shows us that archives still have the capacity to surprise us about this period in history. There are many instances of this. For example, it is well-known that Churchill’s famous quotation “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent” was part of a speech given in Fulton, Missouri, USA, on 5 March 1946. But did you know that he used the phrase ‘iron curtain’ almost a year earlier, in a personal telegram to President Truman on 12 May 1945? This is a heartfelt message in which Churchill expresses his ‘deep anxiety’ about Russian intentions in Eastern Europe.

Another surprise is a report by the Joint Planning Staff which puts forward a plan, (little known today) entitled ‘Operation Unthinkable’, advocating an attack on Soviet Forces in order to push them out of East Germany and Poland in July 1945. This document has real ‘shock value’: ‘If they [the Russians] want total war, they are in a position to have it’. The strident language of this document is striking: the intention was ‘to impose on Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire’. However, it is acknowledged that ‘to win would take us a very long time’.

Dramatic language is also a feature of a report called ‘The Threat to Western Civilisation’ from the Foreign Secretary to the British Cabinet in March 1948. This refers to the possibilities of the Soviet Union establishing a ‘world dictatorship’ or the ‘collapse of organised society over great stretches of the globe’. The writing style is so powerful, the words leap from the page. Yet another example of vivid writing can be seen in a Foreign Office telegram reporting back to London about the uprising in Hungary on 25 October 1956: ‘the populace are terrified of massive reprisals’.

In some cases, document content is not dramatic in itself but is, none the less, surprising. A great example of this is the last paragraph of Atomic Spy Klaus Fuch’s confession on 27 January 1950, when he suddenly begins to ‘wax lyrical’ about his admiration for English people:  ‘since coming to Harwell I have met English people of all kinds, and I have come to see in many of them a deep rooted firmness which enables them to lead a decent way of life. I do not know where this springs from and I don’t think they do, but it is there’. This incongruous piece of reflectiveness at the end of a confession statement shows how Fuchs was somewhat detached from reality at the time he made it – the does not seem to realise the import of what he had just confessed to, the giving of vital atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

As well as the textual documents, visual sources can also tell a powerful story. Grainy black and white photographs of the early days of the construction of the Berlin Wall make us reflect on the predicament of Berliners, looking on at the partially constructed wall, the barbed wire, the turrets, and the ‘death strip’. For another striking example of visual material, see the illustrations in the leaflet advising householders on protection against nuclear attack (1963), which are strangely cosy, hinting at elements of normality even during fall-out conditions.

Value of archives

The National Archives is the nation’s memory – we preserve the integrity of the public records, stretching back some 1,000 years. George Orwell truly understood the value of authoritative records: Winston Smith, the anti-hero of Orwell’s 1984 , worked in the ‘Ministry of Truth’, falsifying back-numbers of The Times so that the information contained in them corresponded with the current pronouncements of Big Brother’s regime. The corollary of this imagined scenario, of course, is that archives you can trust are essential for a true understanding of the past.

Mark Dunton Principal Records Specialist The National Archives

Pathe Archive film collections covering various conflicts during the Cold War – https://www.britishpathe.com/pages/collections 

Related resources

Leaders and controversies, cabinet papers, fifties britain, public information films.

Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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How George Orwell Helped Cause the Cold War

Following the publication of George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the American public suddenly discovered that the Russians had utterly divergent geopolitical interests from Americans.

The Club’s selection of Animal Farm was probably the single most significant event for expanding Orwell’s reputation in his lifetime, and arguably the most important event in his entire American reputation history. “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of our time,” announced one member of the Club’s selection committee. Extolling the fable’s “worldwide importance,” Club president Harry Scherman issued a special statement: “Every now and then through history, some fearless individual has spoken for the people of a troubled time…. Just so does this little gem of an allegory express, perfectly, the…inarticulate philosophy of tens of millions of free men…. Wherever men are free to read what they want, this book and its influence will spread.”

As if to guarantee that outcome, Scherman also asked subscribers to pick Animal Farm rather than any alternate Club choice. The fable sold 460,000 copies during 1946-49 through the Club and soon became a runaway bestseller. By 1947, it had been adapted as a BBC radio play and translated into nine languages (and titled Comrade Napoleon in at least one language). In 1941, Arthur Koestler had bet some literary friends five bottles of burgundy that Orwell would be “the greatest bestseller” among them in five years’ time: Animal Farm was proving Koestler prescient.

After the special treatment that Animal Farm received from the Book-of-the-Month Club came a rapturous welcome in America. The popular magazines—including Time , Newsweek , and the New York Times Magazine— were all enthusiastic in their admiration. One of the most flattering reviews came from the highly respected Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker. Wilson gave Orwell’s reputation a generous boost by comparing him as a satirist with La Fontaine, Voltaire, and Swift. Naturally, some reviewers missed the point of the allegory. Edward Weeks, writing in The Atlantic Monthly , concluded an otherwise favorable comment by noting that Animal Farm showed a “clever hostility if one applies the analogy to Soviet Russia.” If? To what other country could the analogy possibly have applied?

The political magazines on the left reacted with confusion and anger. They were still committed to the ideal of Soviet-American friendship and thus viewed Animal Farm as a lethal threat to that cause. The winds of the Cold War had not yet begun to blow strongly through the American literary scene. Isaac Rosenfeld in The Nation raised contrived, ideologically motivated reasons for disliking Orwell’s tale, which were more obviously concerned with political than literary factors. He denied, for example, that Orwell’s interpretation had any validity when applied to Russia. Rosenfeld conceded that at one time such a view had some relation to reality. But he argued that offering such an interpretation now made Animal Farm a reactionary work. There was little that Rosenfeld liked about Animal Farm . He believed that it not only failed to explain why the revolution was betrayed but, what was worse in his eyes, told readers things about Russia we already knew. This was a strange view from a journal that had sought to justify every switch of the communist line during the 1930s.

If Rosenfeld found Animal Farm insignificant, George Soule in the New Republic revealed a naiveté and hostility toward it that, particularly in hindsight, is embarrassing. According to Soule, Animal Farm was “dull” and the allegory was “a creaky machine for saying in a clumsy way things that have been better said directly.” He neglected to say where these things were said better. Certainly not in the pages of the New Republic , which had been one of the most consistent apologists for Soviet Russia in the United States. Soule managed the difficult task of confusing the identities of both Snowball and Napoleon. He thought Napoleon was supposed to represent Lenin, failing to recognize Stalin’s character in the successful pig who betrayed the Bolshevik Revolution.

Soule took strong exception to Orwell’s description of the young dogs being trained as secret police, asking if one was supposed to take that seriously as a commentary on Soviet education. He also could not see any relationship between the slaughter of the old workhorse, Boxer, and any event in Soviet Russian history. That claim represents further testimony regarding his understanding, or rather lack of understanding, of Stalin’s USSR in the 1930s, especially the purge of the faithful so-called Old Bolsheviks who had made the revolution a success. Yet such unfavorable reviews in the progressive journals could not offset the impact of the endorsement of the popular magazines.

Quite to the contrary. From the moment of its American launch in August 1946, Animal Farm became a bestseller, ultimately selling more than ten million copies in the United States alone. Three reasons for this are quite clear. First, the story itself was simple enough to be understood by anyone who wanted to understand it. Second, like all artful fables, it could be appreciated on at least two levels: as a children’s tale of how “power corrupts” and as a sophisticated indictment of the Russians’ betrayal of their own revolution. Third, Animal Farm appeared just as the Cold War began to obsess the American public. People suddenly discovered that the Russians had utterly divergent geopolitical interests from Americans. They became aware that the USSR was no longer willing to cooperate with the Western allies—Stalin was no benign Uncle Joe. Orwell’s tale of the venality of the revolutionaries thus found a more responsive audience in America than in Great Britain, which did not have the responsibilities of the United States as a world power and therefore did not come into direct conflict with the Soviet Union.

Even before midcentury, Animal Farm had become a minor classic in the United States. Celebrated as a short, accessible tale of Bolshevik history precisely when the anticommunist “Red Scare” years were reaching their crescendo, the fable’s popularity was aided by the Cold War success of nonfiction counterparts such as the memoirs of Louis Budenz ( Men Without Faces: The Communist Conspiracy in the U.S.A. , 1950) and Bella Dodd ( School of Darkness: The Record of a Life and of a Conflict Between Two Faiths , 1954). Scarcely a high school or college student anywhere in America in the 1950s did not encounter Animal Farm as an assigned reading. Orwell’s cleverness with words and his recognition of the significance of slogans served to create catchphrases that were soon exploited to reveal the reality of Russian communism. “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” was especially effective in capturing the hypocrisy of the Bolshevik Revolution turned into a bureaucratic nightmare.

Orwell’s success with Animal Farm not only made him financially secure but also, according to his good friend British anarchist George Woodcock, mellowed him. He no longer had any problems getting his work published and in fact found himself in demand to write articles and reviews. In America, he contributed to the Atlantic Monthly and even the New Republic , which had finally become suspicious of the Soviet Union. In fact, he soon wrote more for the American than he did for the English audience.

As the literary world commemorates the seventieth anniversary of Animal Farm ’s immense success in the U.S. (and soon thereafter on the wider international scene), our attention is inevitably drawn to another literary anniversary on the immediate horizon: the appearance of 1984  in 1949. (Orwell’s American publisher, Harcourt Brace, retitled the novel 1984 —a diabolically ironic case of what could be termed numerical Newspeak.)

1984 occasioned even greater praise than Animal Farm and came to exert a far greater worldwide impact. In hindsight, it is as if in 1945-46 the atomic bomb of Animal Farm exploded on the cultural front—soon followed by the hydrogen bomb of 1984 , whose arsenal of catchwords detonated three years later. With these two bombshells, Orwell gave Western intellectuals, as it were, an exclusive atomic option ideologically, a first-strike capability against ex-Comrade Napoleon and his pig tyranny, along with all their cultural coconspirators.

As if to confirm the genius of these twin masterpieces and Orwell’s status as the Dr. Frankenstein of the age, the Trotskyist (and sometime Stalin apologist) Isaac Deutscher could bemoan that 1984 had become by 1955 “an ideological superweapon” in the Cold War of words.

Irving Howe noted in his essay on Orwell’s 1984 , “History as Nightmare,” that readers have a reluctance to reread some books, no matter how impressive they are. 1984 is such a work. Its somber forecast of the future is almost too vivid and too horrifying to contemplate. That was not the case with Animal Farm , given its imaginative way of dealing with the cruelties of the Russian Revolution. The world of 1984 was Orwell’s vision of what a totalitarian society would look like after decades of protracted war between the West and the communist world, a war of rationing, shortages, distorting the truth, and the killing of innocent people.

Like Animal Farm , it emerged from Orwell’s personal experience. Always sensitive to the written word, Orwell had seen how the events of the Spanish Civil War and Russia’s role in World War II had been distorted for ideological purposes. In the world of 1984 , ideology was unimportant and history was simply rewritten. Orwell again showed insight into the future superior to that of most of his contemporaries. Hitler had burned books; in the future, Orwell predicted, totalitarian regimes would simply rewrite them, a process already under way in Russia.

1984 also revealed the extent to which Orwell was a product of the bourgeois age. He scorned the regimentation and impersonalization of life in the future and the destruction of the individual under totalitarianism, in a manner that made 1984 broadly fit a conservative interpretation. 1984 was commonly taken as an indictment of communism and not as a tendency of the modern state in general.

When it was published in June 1949, 1984 was another Book-of-the-Month Club selection. “Great Books Make Themselves” proclaimed the August 1949 Book-of-the-Month Club News , in a headline running over ecstatic tributes from Bertrand Russell, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and others.

Nothing, of course, could have been wider of the mark than the headline’s declaration. Already in July, the new Club president had predicted 1984 would become “one of the most influential books of our generation,” a view the Book-of-the-Month Club News now repeated. The Club acknowledged it had solicited the opinions of “prominent persons” like Russell and Schlesinger who now confirmed the Club’s “certainty that Mr. Orwell’s book will be one of the most widely discussed books in recent years.”

Subsequent kudos for 1984 from other “prominent persons” on both sides of the Atlantic (V.S. Pritchett, E.M. Forster, Rebecca West, Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul de Kruif) helped ensure that result. Leading intellectuals compared Orwell with Dostoyevsky, Wells, Huxley, and others in the anti-utopian tradition. Within five months, the novel had sold 22,700 hardback copies in England. Eventually, it rose to number three on the New York Times bestseller list during 1949. It sold 190,000 copies as a Book-of-the-Month Club choice during 1949-52 and became an American bestseller in 1951 when it appeared as a Signet paperback.

1984 was also condensed in Reader’s Digest —a sure sign Orwell had gained wide popular acceptance in America. The reviews were uniformly favorable. Unlike Animal Farm , 1984 was well received even in the leftist journals of opinion. After the Berlin blockade, the communist coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia, and the first signs of Russian espionage, Orwell’s nightmare of the future no longer seemed so unreal to the American left.

Orwell was disturbed by the way both Animal Farm and 1984 were used by conservatives as indictments of British socialism, and he often protested this interpretation of his writings. Yet he did not foresee how his ideas would be expropriated by those with views diametrically opposed to his. There is no doubt he was ingeniously exploited in the service of the most damaging criticism of the left. What made his comments so effective was that they came from a man whose own leftist credentials were beyond dispute. Orwell never found a way of counteracting the conservative exploitation of his ideas and criticism. Though it was never his major purpose to censure socialism for its failures in the modern world, this crude verdict is leveled at his work by many American critics.

The Cold War formed the environment that enabled Orwell to seize the imagination of the American public. Unfortunately, Orwell’s major impact on Americans came essentially through his last two books. As a result, his other work has been relatively neglected. His critical essays—which include pioneering examinations of topics as varied as English postcards, Rudyard Kipling, and the art of the murder mystery—have never secured a large readership in the United States. This is regrettable. In fact, a case can be made that his forte was the essay form, which was particularly well-suited to the crisp, clear prose style that Orwell had mastered. He liked championing unpopular causes and could make a convincing case in the short essay.

Orwell conceived Animal Farm and 1984 as complementary works that would pack a lethal one-two punch against totalitarianism in general and Stalinism in particular, indeed against the betrayal of revolutionary dreams generally and against the Russian Revolution. It often goes unnoticed even by discerning readers that Animal Farm and 1984 form a unified whole. 1984 opens where Animal Farm ends: the pigs are in control. They have become fully humanized. They are now the Inner Party and Outer Party members (with occasional gadfly exceptions, such as rebellious Winston and Julia). Napoleon has morphed into Big Brother, Snowball has become Emmanuel Goldstein, the Seven Commandments of Animalism have been transformed into the catchphrases of Hate Week and the famous slogans in Newspeak. The pigs’ tyrannical fiefdom of Animal Farm is now Airstrip One, the metropolitan capital of the Party’s empire of Oceania. Any reader may easily elaborate on these analogues.

The larger point is obvious. It is all one vision. Orwell’s fable and dystopia both succeed as carefully crafted works that interweave almost seamlessly the artistic and the political, the literary and the polemical. They are the masterpieces of a great writer and political adept, and they are also unforgettable mindscapes of the ultimate horrors to which dictatorial power may lead. Orwell could with complete justice joke not long after the publication of Animal Farm , as he enjoyed the laudatory reviews and the congratulations of colleagues, that readers had not appreciated his achievement sufficiently. He groused in mock disappointment: “Nobody said it was a beautiful book.”

Indeed, it is a beautiful book, and its successor does not warrant that adjective. 1984 is a bleak, horrifying, utterly brilliant artistic and political vision. Hence these final two works ensure Orwell’s place in literature. Like all great writers, he understood human nature profoundly. His honesty and his hatred of all cant—what we today would dub “political correctness”—attract new readers as each generation comes to maturity. If he was originally adopted in the United States for the wrong reasons, time has shown the enduring validity and vitality of his artistic and political mission, as he declared about Animal Farm , “to fuse political and artistic purpose into one whole.”

This is the second essay in a two-part series. The first essay may be found here . Republished with gracious permission from  Modern Age   (Fall 2016).

The Imaginative Conservative  applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider  donating now .

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Thanks for the marvelous background. You mention the historical background to both Animal Farm and 1984. Has anyone written and ‘this is that’ book about them or even a annotated version of either?

This is a fascinating background on Orwell and the history of his two best-known literary works. I love both novels and periodically return to them, especially when I feel I need a fresh infusion of what I think amounts to common sense about things political — at least about things involving “macro-politics”.

I was previously unaware of how Orwell’s works were marketed here in the States; additionally, I didn’t fully appreciate how many consider Animal Farm and 1984 to have been, in some respects, intellectually “weaponized” to indict all varieties of socialist thought (i.e. “lower-case ‘s’ socialism versus capital ‘S’ Soviet-style socialism).

Thanks for an interesting read!

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How The Cold War And George Orwell Helped Make The Internet What It Is

In The Innovators, Walter Isaacson explains that Pentagon officials wanted a system the Russians couldn't attack, and 1984 made the public wary of new technology's Big Brother potential.

Old News, Vintage Photos & Nostalgic Stories

In 1945 george orwell coined the term “cold war” and predicted decades of nuclear anxiety.

George Orwell was an English writer who is best known for his socially engaged literature that satirized totalitarianism and criticized social injustice.

His novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the primary works of dystopian literature, and “Animal Farm” is among the best allegorical critiques of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and social system of Stalinist Russia.

Orwell coined many neologisms that were to become a vital part of cultural theory and the English language itself. He invented the term “Big Brother” to describe an all-seeing government able to control every move of its citizens and was the first social critic to introduce the notion of the “thought police”, an institution that enforces the prohibition of the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press.

The term “Cold War” is used to describe the period of political tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union which lasted for several decades. The term is fitting because there was no major direct military conflict between the two nations, but the threat of a nuclear war was constant. The two sides battled through political conundrums, espionage and regional conflicts known as “proxy wars”.

However, many people are unaware that the term “Cold War” was coined by none other than George Orwell himself. In 1945 Orwell published an essay entitled “You and the Atomic Bomb”, in which he expressed concern over living in a world which is aware of the existence of nuclear weapons capable of immense destruction. Orwell predicted that the second half of the 20 th would be known as the age of nuclear anxiety.

The first person to use the term in connection with the political tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was the famous English journalist Herbert Bayard Swope, who was a three-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

In a speech written for Bernard Baruch, a prominent political advisor to the American Democratic Party, Swope wrote: “ Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war.”

George Orwell’s concerns and predictions expressed in his novels and essays were stunningly accurate. He predicted the age of global nuclear paranoia of the Cold War, the age of police brutality and the mass surveillance of citizens, and the uncontained spread of unregulated neoliberal capitalism.

Sadly, Orwell died in 1950 at the age of 46 and never saw the end of the Cold War.

Here is another story from us: Room 101, the torture chamber in George Orwell’s 1984, was named after a conference room at the BBC where Orwell would have to sit through tortuously boring meetings

He also never witnessed the emergence of the digital age, a development that saw many of his predictions became a reality.

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“1984” at Seventy: Why We Still Read Orwell’s Book of Prophecy

George Orwell’s “ 1984 ,” published seventy years ago today, has had an amazing run as a work of political prophecy. It has outlasted in public awareness other contenders from its era, such as Aldous Huxley’s “ Brave New World ” (1932), Ray Bradbury’s “ Fahrenheit 451 ” (1953), and Anthony Burgess’s “ A Clockwork Orange ” (1962), not to mention two once well-known books to which it is indebted, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “ We ” (1921) and Arthur Koestler’s “ Darkness at Noon ” (1940). “1984” is obviously a Cold War book, but the Cold War ended thirty years ago. What accounts for its staying power?

Partly it’s owing to the fact that, unlike “Darkness at Noon,” Orwell’s book was not intended as a book about life under Communism. It was intended as a warning about tendencies within liberal democracies, and that is how it has been read. The postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe produced societies right out of Orwell’s pages, but American readers responded to “1984” as a book about loyalty oaths and McCarthyism. In the nineteen-seventies, it was used to comment on Nixon and Watergate. There was a bounce in readership in 1983-84—four million copies were sold that year—because, well, it was 1984. And in 2016 it got a bump from Trump.

The fundamental premise of the novel was its most quickly outmoded feature—outmoded almost from the start. This is the idea that the world would divide into three totalitarian superstates that were rigidly hierarchical, in complete control of information and expression, and engaged in perpetual and unwinnable wars for world domination. This was a future that many people had contemplated in the nineteen-thirties, the time of the Great Depression and the rise of Stalinism and Fascism. Capitalism and liberal democracy seemed moribund; centralized economies and authoritarian regimes looked like the only way modern mass societies could be governed. This was the argument of a book that is now almost forgotten, but which Orwell was fascinated and repelled by, James Burnham’s “ The Managerial Revolution ” (1941).

It’s true that, after 1949, the world did divide into superstates—not three, but two—and their forty-year rivalry did a lot of damage around the world. But they were not twin totalitarian monsters, the Fasolt and Fafner of twentieth-century geopolitics. They may often have mirrored each other in tactics, but they were different systems defending different ideologies. Orwell, who had little interest in and no fondness for the United States, missed that.

There are some parts of the novel whose relevance seems never to fade, though. One is the portrayal of the surveillance state—Big Brother (borrowed from Koestler’s No. 1) and the telescreen, an astonishingly prescient conception that Orwell dreamed up when he had probably never seen a television. Another is Newspeak, a favorite topic of Orwell’s: the abuse of language for political purposes.

But “1984” is a novel, not a work of political theory, and, in the end, it’s probably as literature that people keep reading it. The overt political material—such as “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” the (very long) book that the commissar O’Brien gives to Winston and Julia as he lures them into the trap—is likely now skipped by many readers. (The book’s analogue is “The Revolution Betrayed,” Leon Trotsky’s attack on Stalinism, published in 1937, but it is also a parody of “The Managerial Revolution.”)

O’Brien’s interrogation of Winston, though meant to be the climax of the book, and though people still invoke it, is not completely satisfactory. How does O’Brien convince Winston that two plus two equals five? By torturing him. This seems a rather primitive form of brainwashing. In “Darkness at Noon,” which also ends with an interrogation, the victim, Rubashov, though he is worn down physically first, is defeated intellectually. (Both novelists were attempting to understand how, in the Moscow Trials, Stalin’s purge of the Old Bolsheviks, between 1936 and 1938, the defendants, apparently of their own free will, admitted to the most absurd charges against them, knowing that they would be promptly shot. After Stalin’s death, it turned out that those defendants had, in fact, been tortured. So Orwell was right about that.)

But who can forget this moment: “ ‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them”? Orwell created a story that had suspense and had characters whom readers identify with.

When the book came out, some people assumed that the character they were meant to identify with (with horror) was O’Brien. That’s probably what Orwell had in mind, too. O’Brien was the type he wanted to warn people against: the intellectual who becomes sadistically fascinated by power. The O’Brien figure corresponded to a popular understanding of the lure of totalitarianism at the time: that it tapped into some dark corner of the human psyche. “There is a Hitler, a Stalin in every breast,” as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., put it in his liberal manifesto, “The Vital Center,” which was published the same year as “1984.”

Much later, Schlesinger changed his mind and rejected what he called Orwell’s “mystical theory of totalitarianism.” For we are not all O’Briens, waiting for the chance to torture the Winstons of the world. We are more likely all Winstons, knowing that something is wrong, that we are losing control of our lives, but also knowing that we are powerless to resist.

A trivial example is when we click “I Agree” on the banner explaining our app’s new privacy policy. We did not know what the old privacy policy was; we feel fairly certain that, if we read the new one, we would not understand what has changed or what we are giving away. We suspect everyone else just clicks the box. So we click the box and dream of a world in which there are no boxes to click. A non-trivial example is when your electoral process is corrupted by a foreign power and your government talks about charging the people who tried to investigate this interference with treason. That’s Orwellian. And it’s no longer a prophecy. It’s a headline.

George Orwell and the Cold War: A Reconsideration

[From Reflections on America, 1984: An Orwell Symposium . Ed. Robert Mulvihill. Athens and London, University of Georgia Press, 1986.]

In a recent and well-known article, Norman Podhoretz has attempted to conscript George Orwell into the ranks of neoconservative enthusiasts for the newly revitalized cold war with the Soviet Union. 1   If Orwell were alive today, this truly “Orwellian” distortion would afford him considerable wry amusement. It is my contention that the cold war, as pursued by the three superpowers of Nineteen Eighty-Four , was the key to their successful imposition of a totalitarian regime upon their subjects. We all know that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a brilliant and mordant attack on totalitarian trends in modern society, and it is also clear that Orwell was strongly opposed to communism and to the regime of the Soviet Union. But the crucial role of a perpetual cold war in the entrenchment of totalitarianism in Orwell’s “nightmare vision” of the world has been relatively neglected by writers and scholars. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there are three giant superstates or blocs of nations: Oceania (run by the United States, and including the British Empire and Latin America), Eurasia (the Eurasian continent), and Eastasia (China, southeast Asia, much of the Pacific).

The superpowers are always at war, in shifting coalitions and alignments against each other. The war is kept, by agreement between the superpowers, safely on the periphery of the blocs, since war in their heartlands might actually blow up the world and their own rule along with it. The perpetual but basically phony war is kept alive by unremitting campaigns of hatred and fear against the shadowy foreign Enemy. The perpetual war system is then used by the ruling elite in each country to fasten totalitarian collectivist rule upon their subjects. As Harry Elmer Barnes wrote, this system “could only work if the masses are always kept at a fever heat of fear and excitement and are effectively prevented from learning that the wars are actually phony. To bring about this indispensable deception of the people requires a tremendous development of propaganda, thought-policing, regimentation, and mental terrorism.” And finally, “when it becomes impossible to keep the people any longer at a white heat in their hatred of one enemy group of nations, the war is shifted against another bloc and new, violent hate campaigns are planned and set in motion.” 2

From Orwell’s time to the present day, the United States has fulfilled his analysis or prophecy by engaging in campaigns of unremitting hatred and fear of the Soviets, including such widely trumpeted themes (later quietly admitted to be incorrect) as “missile gap” and “windows of vulnerability.” What Garet Garrett perceptively called “a complex of vaunting and fear” has been the hallmark of the American as well as of previous empires: 3  the curious combination of vaunting and braggadocio that insists that a nation-state’s military might is second to none in any area, combined with repeated panic about the intentions and imminent actions of the “empire of evil” that is marked as the Enemy. It is the sort of fear and vaunting that makes Americans proud of their capacity to “overkill” the Russians many times and yet agree enthusiastically to virtually any and all increases in the military budget for mightier weapons of mass destruction. Senator Ralph Flanders (Republican, Vermont) pinpointed this process of rule through fear when he stated during the Korean War:

Fear is felt and spread by the Department of Defense in the Pentagon. In part, the spreading of it is purposeful. Faced with what seem to be enormous armed forces aimed against us, we can scarcely expect the Department of Defense to do other than keep the people in a state of fear so that they will be prepared without limit to furnish men and munitions. 4

This applies not only to the Pentagon but to its civilian theoreticians, the men whom Marcus Raskin, once one of their number, has dubbed “the mega-death intellectuals.” Thus Raskin pointed out that

their most important function is to justify and extend the existence of their employers. ... In order to justify the continued large-scale production of these [thermonuclear] bombs and missiles, military and industrial leaders needed some kind of theory to rationalize their use. ... This became particularly urgent during the late 1950s, when economy-minded members of the Eisenhower Administration began to wonder why so much money, thought, and resources, were being spent on weapons if their use could not be justified. And so began a series of rationalizations by the “defense intellectuals” in and out of the Universities. ... Military procurement will continue to flourish, and they will continue to demonstrate why it must. In this respect they are no different from the great majority of modern specialists who accept the assumptions of the organizations which employ them because of the rewards in money and power and prestige. ... They know enough not to question their employers’ right to exist. 5

In addition to the manufacture of fear and hatred against the primary Enemy, there have been numerous Orwellian shifts between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. Our deadly enemies in World War II, Germany and Japan, are now considered prime Good Guys, the only problem being their unfortunate reluctance to take up arms against the former Good Guys, the Soviet Union. China, having been a much lauded Good Guy under Chiang Kai-shek when fighting Bad Guy Japan, became the worst of the Bad Guys under communism, and indeed the United States fought the Korean and Vietnamese wars largely for the sake of containing the expansionism of Communist China, which was supposed to be an even worse guy than the Soviet Union. But now all that is changed, and Communist China is now the virtual ally of the United States against the principal Enemy in the Kremlin.

Along with other institutions of the permanent cold war, Orwellian New-speak has developed richly. Every government, no matter how despotic, that is willing to join the anti-Soviet crusade is called a champion of the “free world.” Torture committed by “totalitarian” regimes is evil; torture undertaken by regimes that are merely “authoritarian” is almost benign. While the Department of War has not yet been transformed into the Department of Peace, it was changed early in the cold war to the Department of Defense, and President Reagan has almost completed the transformation by the neat Orwellian touch of calling the MX missile “the Peacemaker.”

As early as the 1950s, an English publicist observed that “Orwell’s main contention that ‘cold war’ is now an essential feature of normal life is being verified more and more from day to day. No one really believes in a ‘peace settlement’ with the Soviets, and many people in positions of power regard such a prospect with positive horror.” He added that “a war footing is the only basis of full employment.” 6

And Harry Barnes noted that “the advantages of the cold war in bolstering the economy, avoiding a depression, and maintaining political tenure after 1945 were quickly recognized by both politicians and economists.”

The most recent analysis of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in terms of permanent cold war was in U.S. News and World Report, in its issue marking the beginning of the year 1984:

No nuclear holocaust has occurred but Orwell’s concept of perpetual local conflict is borne out. Wars have erupted every year since 1945, claiming more than 30 million lives. The Defense Department reports that there currently are 40 wars raging that involve one-fourth of all nations in the world — from El Salvador to Kampuchea to Lebanon and Afghanistan. Like the constant war of 1984, these post-war conflicts occurred not within superpower borders but in far-off places such as Korea and Vietnam. Unlike Orwell’s fictitious superpowers, Washington and Moscow are not always able to control events and find themselves sucked into local wars such as the current conflict in the Middle East heightening the risk of a superpower confrontation and use of nuclear armaments. 7

But most Orwell scholars have ignored the critical permanent-cold-war underpinning to the totalitarianism in the book. Thus, in a recently published collection of scholarly essays on Orwell, there is barely a mention of militarism or war.  8

In contrast, one of the few scholars who have recognized the importance of war in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was the Marxist critic Raymond Williams. While deploring the obvious anti-Soviet nature of Orwell’s thought, Williams noted that Orwell discovered the basic feature of the existing two- or three-superpower world, “oligarchical collectivism,” as depicted by James Burnham, in his Managerial Revolution (1940), a book that had a profound if ambivalent impact upon Orwell. As Williams put it:

Orwell’s vision of power politics is also close to convincing. The transformation of official “allies” to “enemies” has happened, almost openly, in the generation since he wrote. His idea of a world divided into three blocs — Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, of which two are always at war with the other though the alliances change — is again too close for comfort. And there are times when one can believe that what “had been called England or Britain” has become simply Airship One. 9

A generation earlier, John Atkins had written that Orwell had “discovered this conception of the political future in James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution .” Specifically, “there is a state of permanent war but it is a contest of limited aims between combatants who cannot destroy each other. The war cannot be decisive. ... As none of the states comes near conquering the others, however the war deteriorates into a series of skirmishes [although]. ... The protagonists store atomic bombs.” 10

To establish what we might call this “revisionist” interpretation of Nineteen Eighty-Four we must first point out that the book was not, as in the popular interpretation, a prophecy of the future so much as a realistic portrayal of existing political trends. Thus, Jeffrey Meyers points out that Nineteen Eighty-Four was less a “nightmare vision” (Irving Howe’s famous phrase) of the future than “a very concrete and naturalistic portrayal of the present and the past,” a “realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials.” And again, Orwell’s “statements about 1984 reveal that the novel, though set in a future time, is realistic rather than fantastic, and deliberately intensifies the actuality of the present.” Specifically, according to Meyers, Nineteen Eighty-Four was not “totalitarianism after its world triumph” as in the interpretation of Howe, but rather “the very real though unfamiliar political terrorism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia transposed into the landscape of London in 1941–44.” 11  And not only Burnham’s work but the reality of the 1943 Teheran Conference gave Orwell the idea of a world ruled by three totalitarian superstates.

Bernard Crick, Orwell’s major biographer, points out that the English reviewers of Nineteen Eighty-Four caught on immediately that the novel was supposed to be an intensification of present trends rather than a prophecy of the future. Crick notes that these reviewers realized that Orwell had “not written utopian or anti-utopian fantasy ... but had simply extended certain discernible tendencies of 1948 forward into 1984.” 12  Indeed, the very year 1984 was simply the transposition of the existing year, 1948. Orwell’s friend Julian Symons wrote that 1984 society was meant to be the “near future,” and that all the grim inventions of the rulers “were just extensions of ‘ordinary’ war and post-war things.” We might also point out that the terrifying Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four was the same numbered room in which Orwell had worked in London during World War II as a British war propagandist.

But let Orwell speak for himself. Orwell was distressed at many American reviews of the book, especially in Time and Life , which, in contrast to the British, saw Nineteen Eighty-Four as the author’s renunciation of his long-held devotion to democratic socialism. Even his own publisher, Frederic Warburg, interpreted the book in the same way. This response moved Orwell, terminally ill in a hospital, to issue a repudiation. He outlined a statement to Warburg, who, from detailed notes, issued a press release in Orwell’s name. First, Orwell noted that, contrary to many reviews, Nineteen Eighty-Four was not prophecy but an analysis of what could happen, based on present political trends. Orwell then added: “Specifically, the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on liberal capitalist communities by the necessity to prepare for total war with the USSR and the new weapons, of which of course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and the most publicized. But danger also lies in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colours.” After outlining his forecast of several world superstates, specifically the Anglo-American world (Oceania) and a Soviet-dominated Eurasia, Orwell went on:

If these two great blocs line up as mortal enemies it is obvious that the Anglo-Americans will not take the name of their opponents. ... The name suggested in 1984 is of course Ingsoc, but in practice a wide range of choices is open. In the USA the phrase “American” or “hundred per cent American” is suitable and the qualifying adjective is as totalitarian as any could wish. 13

We are about as far from the world of Norman Podhoretz as we can get. While Orwell is assuredly anti-Communist and anticollectivist his envisioned totalitarianism can and does come in many guises and forms, and the foundation for his nightmare totalitarian world is a perpetual cold war that keeps brandishing the horror of modern atomic weaponry.

Shortly after the atom bomb was dropped on Japan, George Orwell pre-figured his world of Nineteen Eighty-Four in an incisive and important analysis of the new phenomenon. In an essay entitled “You and the Atom Bomb,” he noted that when weapons are expensive (as the A-bomb is) politics tends to become despotic, with power concentrated into the hands of a few rulers. In contrast, in the day when weapons were simple and cheap (as was the musket or rifle, for instance) power tends to be decentralized. After noting that Russia was thought to be capable of producing the A-bomb within five years (that is, by 1950), Orwell writes of the “prospect,” at that time, “of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them.” It is generally supposed, he noted, that the result will be another great war, a war which this time will put an end to civilization. But isn’t it more likely, he added, “that surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate?”

Returning to his favorite theme, in this period, of Burnham’s view of the world in The Managerial Revolution , Orwell declares that Burnham’s geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years.

Orwell then proceeds gloomily:

The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of equality. Unable to conquer one another they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.

In short, the atomic bomb is likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging ‘a peace that is no peace.’” The drift of the world will not be toward anarchy, as envisioned by H.G. Wells, but toward “horribly stable ... slave empires. 14

Over a year later, Orwell returned to his pessimistic perpetual-cold-war analysis of the postwar world. Scoffing at optimistic press reports that the Americans “will agree to inspection of armaments,” Orwell notes that “on another page of the same paper are reports of events in Greece which amount to a state of war between two groups of powers who are being so chummy in New York.” There are two axioms, he added, governing international affairs. One is that “there can be no peace without a general surrender of sovereignty,” and another is that “no country capable of defending its sovereignty ever surrenders it.” The result will be no peace, a continuing arms race, but no all-out war. 15

Orwell completes his repeated wrestling with the works of James Burnham in his review of The Struggle for the World (1947). Orwell notes that the advent of atomic weapons has led Burnham to abandon his three-identical-superpowers view of the world, and also to shuck off his tough pose of value-freedom. Instead, Burnham is virtually demanding an immediate preventive war against Russia,” which has become the collectivist enemy, a preemptive strike to be launched before Russia acquires the atomic bomb.

While Orwell is fleetingly tempted by Burnham’s apocalyptic approach, and asserts that domination of Britain by the United States is to be preferred to domination by Russia, he emerges from the discussion highly critical. After all, Orwell writes, the

Russian regime may become more liberal and less dangerous a generation hence. ... Of course, this would not happen with the consent of the ruling clique, but it is thinkable that the mechanics of the situation may bring it about. The other possibility is that the great powers will be simply too frightened of the effects of atomic weapons ever to make use of them. But that would be much too dull for Burnham. Everything must happen suddenly and completely. 16

George Orwell’s last important essay on world affairs was published in Partisan Review in the summer of 1947. He there reaffirmed his attachment to socialism but conceded that the chances were against its coming to pass. He added that there were three possibilities ahead for the world. One (which, as he had noted a few months before was the new Burnham solution) was that the United States would launch an atomic attack on Russia before Russia developed the bomb. Here Orwell was more firmly opposed to such a program than he had been before. For even if Russia were annihilated, a preemptive attack would only lead to the rise of new empires, rivalries, wars, and use of atomic weapons. At any rate, the first possibility was not likely. The second possibility, declared Orwell, was that the cold war would continue until Russia got the bomb, at which point world war and the destruction of civilization would take place. Again, Orwell did not consider this possibility very likely. The third, and most likely, possibility is the old vision of perpetual cold war between blocs of superpowers. In this world,

the fear inspired by the atomic bomb and other weapons yet to come will be so great that everyone will refrain from using them. ... It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast super-states, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion. In all probability their structure would be hierarchic, with a semi-divine caste at the top and outright slavery at the bottom, and the crushing out of liberty would exceed anything the world has yet seen. Within each state the necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world, and by a continuous phony war against rival states. Civilization of this type might remain static for thousands of years. 17

Orwell (perhaps, like Burnham, now fond of sudden and complete solutions) considers this last possibility the worst.

It should be clear that George Orwell was horrified at what he considered to be the dominant trend of the postwar world: totalitarianism based on perpetual but peripheral cold war between shifting alliances of several blocs of super states. His positive solutions to this problem were fitful and inconsistent; in Partisan Review he called wistfully for a Socialist United States of Western Europe as the only way out, but he clearly placed little hope in such a development. His major problem was one that affected all democratic socialists of that era: a tension between their anticommunism and their opposition to imperialist, or at least interstate, wars. And so at times Orwell was tempted by the apocalyptic preventive-atomic-war solution, as was even Bertrand Russell during the same period. In another, unpublished article, “In Defense of Comrade Zilliacus,” written at some time near the end of 1947, Orwell, bitterly opposed to what he considered the increasingly procommunist attitude of his own Labour magazine, the Tribune, came the closest to enlisting in the cold war by denouncing neutralism and asserting that his hoped-for Socialist United States of Europe should ground itself on the backing of the United States of America. But despite these aberrations, the dominant thrust of Orwell’s thinking during the postwar period, and certainly as reflected in Nineteen Eighty-Four , was horror at a trend toward perpetual cold war as the groundwork for a totalitarianism throughout the world. And his hope for eventual loosening of the Russian regime, if also fitful, still rested cheek by jowl with his more apocalyptic leanings.

• 1 Norman Podhoretz, “If Orwell Were Alive Today,” Harper’s , January 1983, pp. 30-37.
• 2 Harry Elmer Barnes, “How ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity,” in Revisionism: A Key to Peace and Other Es­says (San Francisco: Cato Institute, 1980), pp. 142-43. Also see Barnes, An Intel­lectual and Cultural History of the Western World , 3d rev. ed., 3 vols. (New York: Dover, 1965), 3: 1324-1332; and Murray N. Rothbard, “Harry Elmer Barnes as Revisionist of the Cold War,” in Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader , ed. A. Goddard (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles, 1968). pp. 314-38. For a similar anal­ysis, see F.J.P. Veal[e] Advance to Barbarism (Appleton, Wis.: C.C. Nelson, 1953), pp. 266-84.
• 3 Garet Garrett, The People’s Pottage (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953), pp. 154-57.
• 4 Quoted in Garrett, The People’s Pottage , p. 154.
• 5 Marcus Raskin, “The Megadeath Intellectuals,” New York Review of Books , November 14, 1963, pp. 6-7. Also see Martin Nicolaus, “The Professor, the Policeman and the Peasant,” Viet-Report , June-July 1966, pp. 15-19; and Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). [6]Barnes, “‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Trends,” p. 176.
• 6 Barnes, “‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Trends,” p. 176.
• 7 U.S. News and World Report , December 26, 1983, pp. 86-87.
• 8 Irving Howe, ed., 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century (New York: Harper and Row, Perennial Library, 1983). There is a passing reference in Robert Nisbet’s essay and a few references in Luther Carpenter’s article on the reception given to Nineteen Eighty-Four by his students at a community college on Staten Island (pp. 180, 82).
• 9 Raymond Williams. George Orwell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 76.
• 10 John Atkins, George Orwell (London: Caldor and Boyars, 1954), pp. 237-38.
• 11 Jeffrey Meyers, A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell (London: Thames and Hud­son, 1975), pp. 144-45. Also, “Far from being a picture of the totalitarianism or the future 1984 is, in countless details, a realistic picture of the totalitarianism of the present” (Richard J. Voorhees, The Paradox of George Orwell , Purdue Uni­versity Studies, 1961, pp. 85-87).
• 12 Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1981), p. 393. Also see p. 397.
• 13 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell , ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 4:504 (hereafter cited as CEJL ). Also see Crick, George Orwell, pp. 393-95.
• 14 George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” Tribune , October 19, 1945, re­printed in CEJL , 4:8-10.
• 15 George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune , December 13, 1946, reprinted in CEJL , 4:255.
• 16 George Orwell, “Burnham’s View of the Contemporary World Struggle,” New Leader (New York), March 29, 1947, reprinted in CEJL , 4:325.
• 17 George Orwell. “Toward European Unity,” Partisan Review July-August 1947, reprinted in CEJL , 4:370-75.

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In his new book on George Orwell, Stanford English Professor Alex Woloch writes that Orwell’s anti-totalitarianism can only be understood in relation to his democratic-socialist political beliefs.

British writer George Orwell’s writing and democratic-socialist political beliefs are the subject of a new book by English Professor Alex Woloch. (Image credit: Eric Arthur)

And much of this is revealed in how Orwell used language, according to Woloch, a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century fiction and literary theory and the chair of the Stanford Department of English . For his book Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism , Woloch studied Orwell’s essays, journalism and documentary writing, especially a series of columns that the British writer penned for the socialist weekly Tribune . Titled “As I Please,” those columns represent a part of Orwell’s writing that scholars have never examined so closely before.

In doing so, Woloch seeks to understand Orwell’s often hard-to-pin-down political views while highlighting the “very complicated texts he crafted to express his political opinions.” If “we all have a responsibility to make political judgments,” Orwell’s work “illustrates how deeply such judgments can be informed by the craft and constraints of writing.”

Political thinking, in this light, can draw on the same resources as literary writing: irony, experiment, variety and imaginative precision, he said.

Perhaps by reading Orwell more carefully, and paying attention to his formal and linguistic subtlety, Woloch suggests, society today can create a more humane political culture.

Beyond 1984

To those readers familiar only with Animal Farm and 1984 , Orwell is one of the greatest anti-communist and anti-totalitarian writers of the 20th century, Woloch noted. To others, he is an avatar of plainspoken common sense.

But Woloch rises above this stereotypical image of Orwell as “a naturally virtuous person,” by examining the author’s writing and reconciling Orwell’s ethics and political vision.

For example, Woloch said, Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” reflects his primary political orientation. In it, Orwell famously stated: “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

Woloch believes that each of the two halves of this statement must be given equal weight, and that we cannot understand Orwell’s anti-totalitarianism if we do not consider it in relation to his democratic-socialist thought.

However, a key Cold War introduction to Animal Farm in the United States simply omitted the last phrase – “ for democratic socialism, as I understand it” – leaving only what Orwell was “against.” The absence of the phrase serves as a metaphor in Woloch’s book for Orwell’s own persistent engagement with the elusiveness and complexity of language, writing and form.

Between theory and politics

Woloch became interested in Orwell in part through his own political commitments and his sense that Orwell’s work speaks to contemporary political concerns. He finds it suggestive, and a little amusing, that the first serious U.S. presidential candidacy of a self-identified democratic socialist (Bernie Sanders) should occur just as his book is being published.

At the same time, the book is motivated by a set of scholarly and theoretical concerns. Much of English literary criticism in the last three decades has been dominated by different strands of deconstructive theory, which, as Woloch puts it, “can find political ideology in almost any writing.” In other words, deconstructive theory looks for the subliminal political ramifications of literature.

While this approach has been fruitful in interpreting any number of written works, it falls short when confronted with an author like Orwell. That is because Orwell’s political commitments are clear to even the most naïve reader, Woloch said. He noted, “Theory doesn’t always know what to do with a writer like Orwell.”

Woloch uses close reading and theory to get underneath the skin of Orwell’s prose, not to reveal hidden political opinions, but rather to show how Orwell’s language informs and makes possible those views.

This new turn is in part made possible by the first complete works of Orwell, published in the 1990s. The complete works, which included his prolific journalism alongside his more well-known novels and essays, made clear to scholars just how important something like the weekly “As I Please” column could be to understanding the writer.

“We want a figure like Orwell, we want that voice to comment on [the terrorist attacks in] Paris or to comment on [Donald] Trump. But my book is about the complexity of bearing witness. It’s about the complex forms of writing that a writer like Orwell would want to enable and foster,” Woloch said.

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George Orwell’s Five Greatest Essays (as Selected by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Columnist Michael Hiltzik)

in English Language , Literature , Politics | November 12th, 2013 8 Comments

Every time I’ve taught George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay on mis­lead­ing, smudgy writ­ing, “ Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage ,” to a group of under­grad­u­ates, we’ve delight­ed in point­ing out the num­ber of times Orwell vio­lates his own rules—indulges some form of vague, “pre­ten­tious” dic­tion, slips into unnec­es­sary pas­sive voice, etc.  It’s a pet­ty exer­cise, and Orwell him­self pro­vides an escape clause for his list of rules for writ­ing clear Eng­lish: “Break any of these rules soon­er than say any­thing out­right bar­barous.” But it has made us all feel slight­ly bet­ter for hav­ing our writ­ing crutch­es pushed out from under us.

Orwell’s essay, writes the L.A. Times ’ Pulitzer-Prize win­ning colum­nist Michael Hiltzik , “stands as the finest decon­struc­tion of sloven­ly writ­ing since Mark Twain’s “ Fen­i­more Cooper’s Lit­er­ary Offens­es .” Where Twain’s essay takes on a pre­ten­tious aca­d­e­m­ic estab­lish­ment that unthink­ing­ly ele­vates bad writ­ing, “Orwell makes the con­nec­tion between degrad­ed lan­guage and polit­i­cal deceit (at both ends of the polit­i­cal spec­trum).” With this con­cise descrip­tion, Hiltzik begins his list of Orwell’s five great­est essays, each one a bul­wark against some form of emp­ty polit­i­cal lan­guage, and the often bru­tal effects of its “pure wind.”

One spe­cif­ic exam­ple of the lat­ter comes next on Hiltzak’s list  (actu­al­ly a series he has pub­lished over the month) in Orwell’s 1949 essay on Gand­hi. The piece clear­ly names the abus­es of the impe­r­i­al British occu­piers of India, even as it strug­gles against the can­on­iza­tion of Gand­hi the man, con­clud­ing equiv­o­cal­ly that “his char­ac­ter was extra­or­di­nar­i­ly a mixed one, but there was almost noth­ing in it that you can put your fin­ger on and call bad.” Orwell is less ambiva­lent in Hiltzak’s third choice , the spiky 1946 defense of Eng­lish com­ic writer P.G. Wode­house , whose behav­ior after his cap­ture dur­ing the Sec­ond World War under­stand­ably baf­fled and incensed the British pub­lic. The last two essays on the list, “ You and the Atom­ic Bomb ” from 1945 and the ear­ly “ A Hang­ing ,” pub­lished in 1931, round out Orwell’s pre- and post-war writ­ing as a polemi­cist and clear-sight­ed polit­i­cal writer of con­vic­tion. Find all five essays free online at the links below. And find some of Orwell’s great­est works in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks .

1. “ Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage ”

2. “ Reflec­tions on Gand­hi ”

3. “ In Defense of P.G. Wode­house ”

4. “ You and the Atom­ic Bomb ”

5. “ A Hang­ing ”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell’s 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources

The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Cir­ca 1921)

George Orwell and Dou­glas Adams Explain How to Make a Prop­er Cup of Tea

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (8) |

Related posts:

Comments (8), 8 comments so far.

You can’t go wrong with Orwell, so I feel bad about com­plain­ing. But how is “Shoot­ing an Ele­phant” not on here?!?!

YES. Total­ly agree!

And “Down and Out in Paris and Lon­don” is one of the best com­ments on home­less­ness EVER!

Good arti­cle. In this selec­tion of essays, he ranges from reflec­tions on his boy­hood school­ing and the pro­fes­sion of writ­ing to his views on the Span­ish Civ­il War and British impe­ri­al­ism. The pieces col­lect­ed here include the rel­a­tive­ly unfa­mil­iar and the more cel­e­brat­ed, mak­ing it an ide­al com­pi­la­tion for both new and ded­i­cat­ed read­ers of Orwell’s work.nnhttp://essay-writing-company-reviews.essayboards.com/

Very thought pro­vok­ing

i am crud­butt

i am crud­butt!

I think Orwell would have been irri­tat­ed at your use of how instead of why.

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Cold War History

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 26, 2023 | Original: October 27, 2009

The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension marked by competition and confrontation between communist nations led by the Soviet Union and Western democracies including the United States. During World War II , the United States and the Soviets fought together as allies against Nazi Germany . However, U.S./Soviet relations were never truly friendly: Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and Russian leader Joseph Stalin ’s tyrannical rule. The Soviets resented Americans’ refusal to give them a leading role in the international community, as well as America’s delayed entry into World War II, in which millions of Russians died.

These grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity that never developed into open warfare (thus the term “cold war”). Soviet expansionism into Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as U.S. officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and strident approach to international relations. In such a hostile atmosphere, no single party was entirely to blame for the Cold War; in fact, some historians believe it was inevitable.

Containment

By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called “containment.” In his famous “Long Telegram,” the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained the policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree].” As a result, America’s only choice was the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

“It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures.” This way of thinking would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades.

Did you know? The term 'cold war' first appeared in a 1945 essay by the English writer George Orwell called 'You and the Atomic Bomb.'

The Cold War: The Atomic Age

The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States. In 1950, a National Security Council Report known as NSC–68 had echoed Truman’s recommendation that the country use military force to contain communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defense spending.

In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. Thus began a deadly “ arms race .” In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or “superbomb.” Stalin followed suit.

As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed radioactive waste into the atmosphere.

The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.

HISTORY Vault: Nuclear Terror

Now more than ever, terrorist groups are obtaining nuclear weapons. With increasing cases of theft and re-sale at dozens of Russian sites, it's becoming more and more likely for terrorists to succeed.

The Cold War and the Space Race

Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveling companion”), the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit. Sputnik’s launch came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to most Americans.

In the United States, space was seen as the next frontier, a logical extension of the grand American tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile–seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space–made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.

In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.

That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) made the bold public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission , became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans. 

U.S. astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

The Cold War and the Red Scare

Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC ) brought the Cold War home in another way. The committee began a series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.

In Hollywood , HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these “blacklisted” writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade. HUAC also accused State Department workers of engaging in subversive activities. Soon, other anticommunist politicians, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), expanded this probe to include anyone who worked in the federal government. 

Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and “loyalty oaths” became commonplace.

The Cold War Abroad

The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad. In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option. Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.

In 1955, the United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made West Germany a member of NATO and permitted it to remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact , a mutual defense organization between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria that set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union.

Other international disputes followed. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial “Third World.” 

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam , where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully “contain” communist expansionism there, they would have to intervene more actively on Diem’s behalf. However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year conflict .

The End of the Cold War and Effects

Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began to implement a new approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, “bi-polar” place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

At the same time, he adopted a policy of “détente”—”relaxation”—toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.

Despite Nixon’s efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine .

Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. In response to severe economic problems and growing political ferment in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia’s relationship to the rest of the world: “glasnost,” or political openness, and “ perestroika ,” or economic reform. 

Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall –the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.

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Home > Open Access Journals > JSS > Vol. 8 > Volume 8, No. 3, Fall 2015 Supplement: Eleventh Annual IAFIE Conference

All Propaganda is Dangerous, but Some are More Dangerous than Others: George Orwell and the Use of Literature as Propaganda

Samantha Senn , Marymount University

http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.8.3S.1483

Subject Area Keywords

History, Information operations, Intelligence studies/education, National security, Strategy

The true battles of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union were fought on the ideological front: pitting democracy and capitalism against totalitarianism and communism. The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed in the late 1940s to help combat the spread of Communism across Europe and in the United States. Part of the “psychological warfare” included the use of propaganda. Around the same time, British author George Orwell had recently published Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four . Both novels, due to the anti-Communist overtones, were adopted by the OPC as part of a larger anti-Soviet campaign. By examining the use by intelligence agencies of Orwell’s works during the Cold War and the potential use of those works in a post-9/11 global society, this paper aims to illustrate the fickle nature of literary works as propaganda.

Recommended Citation

Senn, Samantha. "All Propaganda is Dangerous, but Some are More Dangerous than Others: George Orwell and the Use of Literature as Propaganda." Journal of Strategic Security 8, no. 3 Suppl. (2015): 149-161.

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• HISTORY & CULTURE

What was the Cold War—and are we headed to another one?

The 45-year standoff between the West and the U.S.S.R. ended when the Soviet Union dissolved. Some say another could be starting as tensions with Russia rise.

As World War II dragged to an end in 1945, the leaders of the “Big Three” allied powers—the United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain—met in Potsdam, Germany, to hash out   terms to conclude the bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen. The great powers split Germany into occupation zones, recognized a Soviet-backed government in Poland, and partitioned Vietnam, monumental decisions that shaped the postwar global order. The talks were meant to forge a lasting peace, but within 18 months, a Cold War began that lasted more than four decades.

One of the most important moments at Potsdam was not captured in a memo or proclaimed at a press conference. Late in the conference, U.S. President Harry Truman took aside Soviet premier Joseph Stalin to share some explosive news: The U.S. had just successfully tested a weapon of “unusual destructive force.” It was a nuclear weapon capable of destroying entire cities, the most dangerous and powerful armament the world had ever seen.

( Subscriber exclusive: For Hiroshima's survivors, memories of the bomb are impossible to forget .)

Within weeks, the U.S. used the atomic bomb to force Japan’s surrender. With a devastating and proven weapon in its armory, the U.S. suddenly had the upper hand among the powers who were allies in the war. What followed was a dangerous struggle for supremacy between two superpowers, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Though the two nations were technically at peace, the period was characterized by an aggressive and costly arms race; bloody proxy wars fought across Latin America, Africa, and Asia; and competing bids for world dominance between U.S.-led capitalist governments and the Soviet-led communist bloc.

The Cold War lasted nearly half a century. Here’s a look at why it began, how it escalated, its legacy today—and why some analysts think another Cold War is already underway.

Why’s it called the Cold War?

The term “cold war” had existed since the 1930s, when guerre froide was used in France to describe increasingly fraught relationships between European countries. In 1945, shortly after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, British writer George Orwell used the term in an essay that explored what the atom bomb meant for international relations.

The atom bombs killed more than 100,000 Japanese citizens, unveiling a destructive power so terrifying that Orwell predicted it would discourage open warfare among great powers, creating instead “a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.”

Orwell’s prediction of a “peace that is no peace” came true as seeds of distrust between the former allies grew.

Okay, so how did the Cold War begin?

The U.S.S.R. had borne the highest number of military and civilian casualties in the war— an estimated 24 million —while liberating huge swaths of Eastern Europe from Nazi control. Soviet leader Josef Stalin was dissatisfied with the postwar division of Europe, which he felt didn’t fairly reflect his nation’s contribution.

In the U.S., diplomat George Kennan outlined the Soviet Union’s growing distrust in the 1946 “Long Telegram,” as it is now known. Kennan warned that the U.S.S.R. was illogical and insecure and would not cooperate with the West in the long-term. In response, Washington began to pursue a policy of “containment” to prevent the spread of Soviet ideology and influence.

The U.S. soon got an opportunity to flex its new policy. In 1947, Britain announced it would withdraw aid from Greece and Turkey, which were both battling communist uprisings. President Harry Truman seized the occasion to ask Congress for funds to assist both countries, establishing what became known as the Truman Doctrine —the principle that the U.S. should support countries or people threatened by Soviet forces or communist insurrection. Stalin saw the move as the opening shot of a shadow war.

The term “Cold War” became a shorthand to describe the ideological struggle between capitalism in the West and communism in the East.   American journalist Walter Lippmann popularized the term in a series of articles in 1947 as nations chose sides in the standoff.

Why was NATO created?

The U.S. wasn’t alone in worrying about Stalin’s push to extend Soviet influence westward and bring other states under communist rule. In 1948, the U.S.S.R. backed a communist coup in Czechoslovakia and launched a blockade of west Berlin, which had been divided into occupation zones controlled by communists in the east and capitalists in the west.

To demonstrate a united front, the U.S. and its allies formed a transatlantic mutual defense alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. On April 4, 1949, the U.S., Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the U.K. signed a treaty agreeing that “an armed attack against one or more…shall be considered an attack against them all.”  

The U.S.S.R. responded by creating a defensive alliance of its own. Signed in 1955, the Warsaw Pact included the Soviet Union and seven satellite states, including Poland and East Germany, reinforcing the ideological and military barrier between Eastern and Western Europe that Winston Churchill had dubbed the “ Iron Curtain ” in a 1946 speech.

How close did the world come to nuclear war?

As the two sides faced off across that Iron Curtain, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. engaged in an arms race, pouring trillions of dollars into accumulating nuclear arsenals .

The U.S. had an advantage at the start of the arms race. But once the U.S.S.R. built its own nuclear arsenal, the two sides were at a standoff over “mutually assured destruction” —the idea that if either side attacked, the other would retaliate, unleashing apocalyptic consequences for both parties.

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Both countries had missile defenses pointed at one another, and in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the countries closer to the brink than any other event in the Cold War. The U.S. detected Soviet missile bases and arms in communist Cuba, just 90 miles south of Florida. Demanding they be removed, President John F. Kennedy declared that a strike on U.S. territory would trigger an immediate nuclear strike on the U.S.S.R.

The threat of imminent nuclear war hung over nearly two weeks of tense negotiations. Finally, the U.S.S.R. agreed to dismantle its weapons facilities if the U.S. pledged not to invade Cuba. Behind the scenes, the U.S. agreed to remove nuclear weapons from Turkey; that agreement did not become public until 1987.  

Nevertheless, both sides’ nuclear arsenals continued to grow exponentially. By the late 1980s, the United States had an estimated 23,000 nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union’s 39,000.

How else was the Cold War fought?

Over more than four decades of Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet Union waged multiple proxy wars across the globe. In the Korean War , the Vietnam War , and other armed conflicts, the superpowers funded opposing sides or fought directly against communist or capitalist militias. Both sides funded revolutions, insurgencies, and political assassinations in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

The U.S. and Soviet Union also jockeyed to prove technological dominance in a 20-year Space Race . The Soviet Union scored first with the 1957 launch of Sputnik-1, the first artificial satellite, while the U.S. was first to send a man to the moon in 1969. Only in the mid 1970s did the two nations begin to cooperate on joint missions.

( 50 years after Apollo 11, a new moon race is on .)

How did the Cold War end?

By the mid 1980s, life behind the Iron Curtain had changed. Democratic uprisings were percolating in Soviet bloc nations, and the U.S.S.R. itself struggled with economic and political chaos. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. forged a more open relationship, even brokering a nuclear treaty in 1987 that eliminated a class of particularly dangerous ground-launched missiles from the nations’ arsenals.

By 1991, the Soviet Union had lost most of its bloc to democratic revolutions, and the Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the U.S.S.R., opened his country to the West and instituted economic reforms that undercut institutions that relied on nationalized goods. In December 1991, the U.S.S.R. was dissolved into separate nations.

What does all this mean now?

The U.S.S.R. is gone, and nuclear arsenals have dramatically decreased thanks to nonproliferation treaties between Washington and Moscow in the 1980s and 1990s. In recent decades, the U.S. and Russia have cooperated on a number of global issues, including Afghanistan and the war on terror.

But the Cold War still affects modern geopolitics. Both nations still have divergent geopolitical interests, large defense budgets, and international military bases. NATO still wields political power and has grown to include 30 member states. The alliance now stretches to Russia’s borders and includes former Soviet states and Warsaw Pact members, such as Poland and the Baltic States. Since the 1990s, Russia has seen the eastward expansion of NATO as a threat to its security .

Tensions between Russia and the West reached a new high point following the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which had applied to take the first steps toward NATO membership in 2008, before a new president shelved the plan two years later. Some commentators have likened the current crisis to the beginnings of a new Cold War.

( Follow Ukraine's 30-year struggle for independence with this visual timeline .)

Is a 21st-century Cold War already being waged? It remains to be seen. Though historians say the decisions at Potsdam set the stage for a long post-World War II rivalry, we may not recognize the beginnings of a new Cold War until it’s visible in history’s rear-view mirror.

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