Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’

Thisses title might be a bit confusing, coming as it does straight after the last one, so this might end up being even less read than usual due to people thinking it’s the same post. It isn’t. I’m also doing all of this from memory without re-reading or re-watching anything, so I’m hoping I’ve got it right.

There was a time before I read ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and it was before 1984. My image of it was very different from what it delivered. I imagined it would be futuristic and somewhat like ‘Brave New World’, which I think I read first. There are ways in which it is, from Orwell’s perspective anyway, and there is advanced technology in it, though not often in the way that might be expected. I think for someone who’s read neither, at least in the 1970s CE, the two novels are conceptually smushed together and are just weird high-tech dystopias without much distinction between the two. In fact I once came up with a fan theory to convert Orwell’s world into Aldous Huxley’s, which went on to become H. G. Wells’ ‘Time Machine’ world of the Eloi and Morlocks, but that’s not very literary tinkering of which I’m fond but probably bores most people and can’t be done without altering details of Huxley’s back story unless that’s unreliable in-universe. Once I’d read it, I had to rewrite history with authentic memories.

Winston

With the exception of ‘Coming Up For Air’ and presumably ‘Animal Farm’, which I haven’t read, Orwell’s central characters are generally similar to himself both psychologically and physically. Winston Smith is no exception. In fact, since Orwell was basically dying at the time, Winston is also not a well man. His varicose ulcer in particular gets mentioned a number of times. However, he’s also transposed down in history and some of his experiences are therefore inevitably different. He’s divorced, feels guilty about betraying his mother and sister and is living in the aftermath of a nuclear war. He’s also complicit in the regime, like all Outer Party members, his job being to rewrite history to accord with the current party line. Orwell was involved in the wartime BBC propaganda effort, working from Room 101 of course, and I presume this reflects his ambivalence about this work. However, Winston is far more heavily coerced than the author. He’s constantly surveilled, like all of the Outer Party. Incidentally, it’s notable that the proles are not surveilled to the same extent and seem to have a lot more fun than he and his colleagues have. It’s been said that fascist regimes rely very much on the middle class to succeed, so this may be it, and the low level of education among the poorest is accompanied by lack of political awareness. The working class don’t come across very positively in this novel, and unfortunately given the attitudes stereotypically associated with them in England today, the contempt for them continues. Orwell has seen their lives from the inside and it’s made him pessimistic about the idea that they can be the source of any revolutionary activity. This doesn’t sit well with me even while I suspect it’s often true. However, they’re not a monolith and different people have different attitudes and values.

Novel-writing machines

Julia, Winston’s love interest, works on the novel-writing machines and is of course mainly seen from his perspective in the novel. Recently, the novel ‘Julia’ has attempted to tell the same story from her viewpoint, which also helps the reader see Winston from outside. Julia disguises herself as an enthusiastic member of the Anti-Sex League, and this among other things provokes the thought that the whole society is built on dishonesty and bad faith. Everyone is encouraged to think that everyone else loves Big Brother. The concept of the novel-writing machine is interesting because it doesn’t seem like it fits technologically. The trope arises repeatedly in science fiction and outside it – I think Roald Dahl uses it and Jonathan Swift does too – and I suppose it’s the author’s nightmare and since Orwell seems to have been trying to cram everything he hated into the world of ‘1984’, it finds its place there. At the time of writing, though, it must’ve seemed completely impossible and it seems out of place in the general grimy, low-tech atmosphere of Airstrip One. The solution to this, I think, is that the Party invents anything it needs to keep the populace in check, whether propaganda or some other kind of technology, so where there’s a will, there’s a way. It also makes me wonder if technology is potentially much more advanced than is seen in day to day life by the common people but they only get to avail themselves of it when it helps Ingsoc. This theme is also visited in ‘Brave New World’ where it’s openly admitted that technology is deliberately held back. Focussing on the very obvious thing which hasn’t been said yet, yes this is AI chatbots and they absolutely can produce stories of poor quality with lots of cliches and stereotypes in them, which is exactly what writing in ‘1984’ does. Song lyrics are also written by machine if I remember correctly. Like the real world, the fun creative thing which people actually want to do is taken away from them and they’re left with drudgery. Creativity would be subversive of course. Another aspect of this is that Newspeak is quite mechanical in nature and it might be easier to mechanise textual production in it than in English, but I’ll return to that later.

Telescreens are the most obvious bit of tech in the novel. Supplemented by microphones, they ensure that nobody outside the Inner Party can go unobserved in that manner. In a humorous note, the gym instructor can see Winston failing to do his physical jerks and criticises him through the telescreen. Anthony Burgess, incidentally, provocatively stated that “‘1984’ is essentially a comic book”, but what he seems to have intended by that, apart from being edgy which I think is probably his main motivation, is that Orwell takes the immediate post-war situation in Britain with its austerity and rationing and extrapolated it over almost four decades, leading to a caricature which might not have been meant to be taken entirely seriously. In my desire to make sense of the technological minutiae of the novel, which is never entirely absent from my mind, I’m given to wonder if telescreens use cathode ray tubes like the televisions of the time or whether they’re flatscreens which work in a handwavy way, because there are enormous public telescreens in places like the one in Victory Square which suggests to me that there must be a massive long tube behind them the size of Nelson’s Column or something.

The other notable bit of technology in the book is the machine used to torture Winston during his interrogation. Probably like you, I’m not sure I want to go there in too much detail but it seems able to read his mind and there’s a quantitative rating system which reminds me of electric shock therapy for some reason. I get the impression that the machine can fix transitory thoughts in the mind before doubts set in.

The nature of truth

My English teacher once observed that the novel is as much a philosophical treatise as a work of fiction. This was before I’d formally studied philosophy, so it was presented to me at a time before I had fully formed and thought-through ideas about that, but the main issues seem to be those of history and truth, or perhaps the relationship between language, thought and experience. There’s an incident during Winston’s interrogation where O’Brien burns a piece of paper and says he doesn’t remember it. Winston has some difficulty conceiving of how he can refer to something which he claims is not remembered. This is of course doublethink: being able to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. The idea seems to be not only that one outwardly expresses contradictory propositions but that the actual mental activity involves sincerely embracing the contradiction. It isn’t even a question of some thought being required to reveal the contradiction: it’s just there, blatant, as an object of one’s attention. There’s a theme throughout the novel that the indoctrination goes all the way to the centre of the mind.

This relates to the Party’s hostility to orgasm. An orgasm is a subjective experience, often ecstatic, over which the Party has no control. It can make the outside world as drab as it likes, but because orgasm is generally seen as pure pleasure, often shared between people, it has to be eliminated. There’s no control over it. It’s also possible that the existence of orgasms in such a stark world would reveal that things could be better in other ways too because of the contrast. Beyond this though, it seems to be control for its own sake, and it’s what the Anti-Sex League is about. It’s therefore a particularly telling contrast that Julia of all people is in that organisation. She is using doublethink against Big Brother.

Then there’s history. Winston is aware of the Party rewriting history to attribute the invention of the steam engine to Big Brother. He is himself involved in this activity. O’Brien’s burning of the paper is a reference to the immediate past.

Bad Faith

Parsons is Winston’s neighbour and colleague, and is scarily conformist in a very bad faith kind of way. His wife and he, though not his daughter, have a deeply buried aversion to the regime but cover it not only with a veneer of approval but one which penetrates most of the way to the centre of their identity, though not quite all the way, though they won’t even admit it to themselves. Ingsoc has had more success with their daughter, who is no “oldthinker”. She bellyfeels Ingsoc because they have moulded her from birth, and she’s reminiscent of both the Hitler Youth and the children who were to emerge in East Germany who used to report their own parents to the government. She hardly belongs to the family and is really there as living surveillance. In a somewhat similar move to Winston’s as a boy, she betrays her father to the authorities by telling them the possibly fabricated tale that he said “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep. Although this may be her lie, it could also be that this is really what Parsons said because only in an unconscious state can he admit to his abhorrence of his situation. Whatever actually happened, Parsons praises his daughter for turning him in before the rot had truly set in, that is, before he had to admit the truth to himself.

‘The Place Where There Is No Darkness’

The above is my favourite quote of the entire novel. Winston has previously dreamt that his boss O’Brien is his saviour and he later appears to demonstrate this by letting him into the inner circle of the Party but also the illusory inner circle of the resistance. He imagines that this place is one of hope, but in fact it’s the Ministry Of Truth, where the lights are on all the time to prevent prisoners from sleeping, and also the light penetrates their minds to reveal their secrets, deepest wishes and worst fears. Darkness in this context is simply anything Big Brother wants to get rid of such as sexual pleasure and happiness in general. Although it’s not his intention, I feel very much that this metaphor of light as evil and darkness as good is very productive, and also reflects the fact that Oceania is an ethical photographic negative, also shown by slogans such as “Freedom Is Slavery” and “War Is Peace”.

Maintenance of hatred to distract and unify

A very familiar aspect of the novel is its emphasis on the need for an external enemy, whether Eurasia or Eastasia. Dorothy Rowe, the psychotherapist, used to concentrate very much on this idea and I once went to a talk from her on this subject where she pointed out that soon after the Cold War ended and many people expected a new era of peace, the first Gulf War ensued and we all of a sudden had a new enemy to distract us. During the real 1984, one recent manifestation of that enemy had been Argentina. Nowadays many people would say it was immigrants and asylum seekers, and here I have a question. Some people use this novel to defend what they see as the Free World against other agents and forces such as what they call communism, and then on the Left we would tend to see it as about the likes of totalitarianism and fascism in a more right wing sense. It’s interesting that it should work so well in such a double-edged way. Orwell leads us to see that Ingsoc calls itself socialist when it clearly isn’t, and that would seem to accord with the general left wing view of state capitalism as manifested in the Soviet Union and China, but it seems to work just as well the other way around. Recently we’ve had the “War Against Terror”, which is more abstract but the same thing. Big Brother also regularly retcons the constant alternating wars with Eastasia and Eurasia, more or less entailing that the other two powers constantly shift between alliance and war. Each needs the other two as enemies. This is a particularly vivid and relevant aspect of the novel today.

Newspeak

English is called “Oldspeak” in Oceania. The idea of Newspeak is twofold. One aspect of it is within the regime, to close down thought and reasoning subversive to Ingsoc, but it also serves the purpose for Orwell of being ugly and unpleasant, and also kind of mechanical, not requiring deep thought but rather doublethink. There’s a third aspect to it which I’ll come to in a bit. I’m not entirely sure about this but I have the impression that there are no capital letters. Winston doesn’t use them in his diary, which is in Oldspeak, and there are also no capital letters in Minitru memoranda. Winston observes that someone using Newspeak speaks like a block of text with no spaces between the words, or it may be an aspect of simplifying the language while losing nuance – destroying it actually. However, there are some capitals, such as “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” and “INGSOC”. I’m sure I don’t need to go into much detail about the language if you’ve read the book. Orwell seems to buy very much into the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language shapes the world, and therefore that restricting language is restricting freedom of thought. I don’t agree with this and in fact the hypothesis is, I think, largely discredited nowadays. Interestingly, to me, Suzette Haden Elgin tried to do the opposite by creating Laadan, a constructed language specifically geared to women’s experience, but later decided that it wasn’t actually any harder to articulate that in natural languages although other women have taken and developed her conlang and disagree. It does appear to be true that we think of things differently to some extent depending on the language we’re able to use: I found it much harder to express philosophical ideas in Gaidhlig than English and I don’t think that was my lack of competence in the language.

The extra aspect of this I mentioned, and I’m not sure whether it’s intentional, is that the simplicity of Newspeak reflects Esperanto, which had reached its peak about fifteen years previously. In fact I have written a short story in Newspeak to explore this, set in a community where only Esperanto is spoken. I’m not aware of any other fiction written in Newspeak. In general, Esperanto was considered progressive at the time, so I have some difficulty reconciling this, but then Orwell was also like that – he engaged in doublethink himself to an extent, so maybe he was externalising a habit of mind. Zamenhoff’s popular conlang had its momentum destroyed by fascism and Nazism.

Film Adaptations

To be fair, this should be called “The Film Adaptation” because although several have been made I have the 1984 version in mind. I found it very faithful in terms of the events. It would have been difficult to reproduce Winston’s thoughts verbatim there, but at one point O’Brien bends down next to him in the torture chamber looking old and tired and the text in the book reads ‘you are thinking. . . that my face is old and tired.”. I was of course primed by having read it, but that does, I think, get very clearly communicated in the film. Mike Radford, the director, said that there was nothing in the film that wasn’t happening somewhere in the world that year, a very similar claim to Margaret Atwood’s concerning ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that nothing in that had not been done to women somewhere. Orwell seems to have anticipated that one day the technology would exist to keep tabs on people minutely, which by the time of the real 1984 had already seemed to have gone too far and since then has only gone further. In a review of the film from the time of its release, “Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted” was said to be the “real” version of “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”. That year, the Met had set up a bank of cameras at Brent Cross which could recognise number plates of cars leaving and entering London by that route and cross-referenced them with DVLA records in Swansea. That was over forty years ago now. There were also concerns about computers keeping track of credit card transactions and cheques. Nowadays of course everything is done by card or bank transfer and those worries seem trivial, which just shows how much we’ve normalised all this. MI5 had also just bought two ICL mainframes with 20 Gb of storage, which doesn’t sound like very much now but compared to the 5 Mb which many hard drives could accommodate at the time, it was a heck of a lot and this had been done secretly – why? Another notable aspect of the film is that it shows nothing which didn’t exist in Orwell’s lifetime, so for instance IT is still based on valves. This leads to a little distortion in the story, particularly in the interrogation scenes, as they were clearly supposed to be more advanced than is shown on screen. Since Orwell’s central characters are self-inserts, John Hurt must have resembled him quite closely physically at the time, and I get the impression he must have starved himself to achieve that gaunt appearance. Apparently Orwell’s inspiration for the idea of altering back copies of ‘The Times’ originated from the editing of ‘The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia’ in the 1930s under Stalin’s orders, where articles on, for example, Trotsky were deleted and photos of scenes from the Russian Revolution airbrushed. Radford points out that for all the disquiet and woe of his situation, created by the Party itself, Winston actually genuinely seems to enjoy his job. Another character, possibly Symes, says that the destruction of words is a beautiful thing, and given that O’Brien has said that the only source of pleasure the Party wants to continue is the pleasure of a jackboot stamping on a face forever, much more overtly Symes but Winston also, both enjoy that aspect of their work in different ways. Symes is part of an effort to shrink English vocabulary to a size convenient for Ingsoc’s ideology and Winston destroys words printed on paper by burning them. Other sources of pleasure are denied them. During a break in filming, Radford watched a news item showing the Queen laying a wreath on the tomb of Jomo Kenyatta, who fought to liberate Kenya from the British in the ’50s. At the time he had been painted as Satan incarnate by the media, but all of a sudden he was rehabilitated and revered. Not that he should or should not have been, but the complete volteface is rather familiar. The year 1984 also saw the computerisation of much political campaigning, with for example the targetting of election leaflets on education to addresses of parents of school age children. All the stuff about our data being used to manipulate us is not new at all, although of course it’s become all-pervasive today.

A bit of an aside: there were two annoying pubic hair incidents in 1984, one connected with Nena’s armpits (okay, not pubic hair but you know what I mean) and the other Suzanna Hamilton’s, which was visible on screen. I didn’t give it a second thought at the time, but apparently more recent audiences have found it quite shocking and worthy of comment. To be honest this reminds me of the incident with the fillings in the mouth of the screaming woman, who had been born into the post-nuclear world where there was presumably no dentistry, at the end of ‘Threads’, in that it really seems like a distraction from the real point of the film, but if you like you can actually shoehorn it in, in that women in Airstrip One don’t want to squander their paltry wages on using razors to remove body hair but in fact I very much doubt anyone at all in Britain was doing that in 1948. A few other things: Richard Burton’s health was failing at the time and took forty-five takes to do one of the scenes because he couldn’t remember his lines, so he was in fact very old and tired at that point. He actually died two months before the film was released so I’m guessing it was his last movie. The scenes generally kept pace with the diary dates in the book, so the opening scenes, for instance, were filmed on 4th April. This meant, of course, that it couldn’t be released until late in the year. In connection with both the theme and the insistence on using technology contemporary with Orwell’s life, Radford wanted to film it in black and white but Virgin refused, so instead the footage was put through bleach bypass to give it the washed-out appearance it had in theatres. This added to the cost of production because it meant that silver couldn’t be reclaimed from the negative or positive prints.

Then there’s the peculiar issue of the music. The initial plan had been to use David Bowie because of his album ‘Diamond Dogs’, but he was too expensive, so the Eurhythmics were approached instead and there is of course an album of their music for the soundtrack. However, all of that was Richard Branson’s idea and he hadn’t told Radford, who had hired Dominic Muldowney to do it, who ended up scoring the entire movie. Branson then vetoed Radford’s choice and the result is that in the initial theatrical cut most of the music is the Eurhythmics’, although it does seem rather quiet and brief most of the time, but some of it, for instance ‘Oceania, ‘Tis For Thee’, which plays in the opening scene in the cinema after the Two Minutes’ Hate, is by Muldowney. Some versions of the film on Blu-Ray give viewers the option of choosing between soundtracks but there’s also a DVD which only uses Muldowney’s, which I guess is much sought after because it’s out of print. Personally I like the Eurhythmics soundtrack but think it reflects the kind of impression one has before one has read the book and the Muldowney version is much more in keeping with the atmosphere of the film because Orwell didn’t forsee popular music going in the direction it in fact did.

The other thing about the film is its influence on other near-contemporary works. In particular, Terry Gillam’s ‘Brazil’ shares a very similar aesthetic, and Apple’s initial ad for the Mac is also self-consciously very similar to the first scene.

To conclude, it probably doesn’t need saying that there’s a lot that did need saying about this novel. When I tried to write an essay about it at school, I ended up just giving a detailed synopsis because I felt it said what it did so well that it was practically impossible for me to rephrase it in any way which would be helpful, which is, I think, a general problem with literary criticism of sufficiently high-quality works. There may never have been a point when ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ couldn’t’ve been taken to describe the world outside the window, but that’s equally true now and that’s a true mark of the universalism of a great work of literature.

Nineteen Eighty-Four and 1984

There you go: don’t say I don’t listen to my readers! I don’t want this to seem self-indulgent, so before I start I want to point out that this is a response to a comment, that someone would like me to do something like this, so that’s what I’m doing.

Without tinkering with HTML, it seems difficult to provide links within a document in WordPress, so for now I’ll just give you a table of contents in order to prevent you being overwhelmed with the length of this post:

1. The Eternal Present

2. The Never-Ending. . .December?

3. George Orwell Is Better Than War-Warwell

4. My Secret Diary, Aged 16¾

5. A Collision With The Great White Whale

6. Armageddon

7. The Stereophonic Present

8. Harvest For The World

9. The Ending Story

10. Life Off The Fast Lane

11. Green Shoots

1. The Eternal Present

To me, the year 1984 CE is a kind of eternal present. I sometimes joke about this, saying that all the years after that one were clearly made up, and someone pointed out to me that that was highly Orwellian, but in fact it really is the case that all years are made up and we just have this arbitrary numbering scheme based on someone’s incorrect guess about the birthdate of Jesus, and yes, here I’m assuming there was an historical Jesus, which considering I’m Christian is hardly surprising.

2. The Never-Ending. . . December?

There is a fairly easy if absurd way to make it 1984 still, which is just to have a never-ending December. It’s currently Hallowe’en 2025, in which case it’s the 14945th December 1984. This wouldn’t be a completely useless dating system and I sometimes think we can conceive of time (in the waking sense: see last entry) differently according to how we choose to parcel it up. Another way of making it 1984 would be to date years from forty years later, and no that’s not a mistake as there was no year zero in the Julian or Gregorian calendars. There was one in a certain Cambodian calendar of course, from 17th April 1975, where it was inspired by the French revolutionary Year One, the idea being that history started on that date because everything that happened before that was irrelevant, being part of capitalism and imperialism I presume. My insistence that it’s always 1984 is the opposite of that, as I’m affectedly sceptical about anything happening afterwards. Coincidentally, I use a day-based dating system starting on 17th July 1975 in my diary, and I don’t actually know why I do this, but it’s only ninety-one days after the start of Year Zero (there are other things to be said about Pol Pot which would reveal the over-simplification of this apparent myth). It’s based on the first dated entry in any notebook and my mother’s suggestion that I keep a diary which I didn’t follow. It’s actually the second dated entry, as the first one is of a series of measurements of a staircase, which isn’t really about anything personal. I’ve also toyed with the idea of Earth’s orbit being a couple of metres wider, which would make the year very slightly longer but which would add up over 4.6 aeons (Earth’s age) to quite a difference, but if that were so, asteroid impacts and mass extinctions wouldn’t’ve happened which did and other ones which didn’t might’ve, so it totally changes the history of the world if you do that. If the year was a week longer, it would now be 1988 dated from the same point, but a lot of other things would also be different such as the calendar. It’s quite remarkable how finely-tuned some things are.

3. George Orwell Is Better Than War-Warwell

Although I could go on in this vein, I sense it might irritate some people, so the rest of this is going to be about my feeling of the eternal present, how 1984 actually was to me and thoughts about George Orwell. I’m just telling you this if you feel like giving up at this point.

I have habitually said that “George Orwell is better than War-Warwell” as a reference to Harold MacMillan’s paraphrase of Winston Churchill, and I wonder if Churchill is one of those figures who is always having quotes misattributed to him, like Albert Einstein. The trouble is, of course, that this is a practically meaningless phrase which I can’t do anything with, although Sarada has published a story with that title. I’ve read a lot of Orwell, although unlike most people who have that doesn’t include ‘Animal Farm’. It’s been suggested that if he’d lived longer, he would’ve gone to the Right and become a rather embarrassing figure like David Bellamy or Lord Kelvin, but of course we don’t know and I don’t know what that’s based on. He was known to be quite keen on the idea of patriotism though, so maybe it’s that.

Within the universe of his novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, we don’t actually know that it is that year. It does seem to be about that time, because Winston Smith was a small boy just after the end of World War II. The Party is constantly revising history and is now claiming that Big Brother invented the steam engine, so it seems easily possible that it isn’t exactly 1984 and that either new years have been written into history or removed from it, and just maybe it’s always 1984 and has been for many years by that point. Maybe they just want to save on printing new calendars or are trying to perfect the year by repeating it over and over again, for example. Maybe ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is like ‘Groundhog Day’, and what we read is merely one iteration among many of that story. I’ve heard, although appropriately maybe this can’t be trusted, that Orwell simply came up with it by transposing the last two digits of the year he wrote it. Whereas it’s possible to play with this, the truth is probably simply that he needed to give Winston enough time to grow up and reach his forties so he could tell the story.

It interests me that there was a somewhat jocular, artsy attempt to claim that a period called the 19A0s existed between the late ’70s and early ’80s which has been edited out of history, which is similar to the Phantom Time Hypothesis. Just to cover these, I’ve written about this before, and the Phantom Time Hypothesis, so if you want you can read about it there.

A slightly puzzling aspect of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is why its title is spelt out rather than written as figures, but it seems that this was common practice at the time. It’s one thing that everyone gets wrong about the book, as it’s almost always referred to as ‘1984’. I should point out that one reason I didn’t get any further than A-level with English Literature is that I experience an impenetrable thicket of associations whenever I consider mainstream creative works which make it difficult to respond meaningfully to them. In the case of Orwell’s novel though, since it’s arguably science fiction it might be more appropriate than usual to do so, since that’s also how I respond to that genre but find it more in keeping with that kind of imagination. I’m not alone in this it seems: Orwell’s novel is analysed in such a manner by the YouTube channel ‘1984 Lore’. I myself used Newspeak to write a short story about a kibbutz-like community on another planet where everyone actually spoke Esperanto to explore whether language restricts thought, portraying it in terms of the idea that it does.

4. My Secret Diary, Aged 16¾

My personal experience in the year 1984 represents a peak in my life. Note that it’s just one peak, neither the biggest nor the only one. It doesn’t overshadow the year of my wedding or the births of our children, grandchildren or anything like that. ’82 and ’83 are also significant in their own ways. ’82 I thought of as the “endless summer” characterised by the nice pictures of young people in yellow T-shirts and long blond hair on the envelopes you got back from the chemists with the photos in them, and ’83 had been particularly poignant, but the year after those had been highly focussed on for a long time in various circles by many people. 1984 opened for me hiding under a table in a suburban living room in Canterbury whispering to my friend about when midnight came. I was wearing a navy blue M&S sweatshirt whose inner flock was worn on the inside of the left elbow, a blue and white striped shirt with a button-down collar which I was only wearing because she liked it, and jeans which annoyed me by not having any bum pockets, and she was wearing jeans which did have bum pockets and a white blouse with yellow check-line lines on it, but it was completely dark so neither of us could see anything. I was sixteen and had had a lot to drink considering my age, naughtily, as had she. We eventually conjectured that midnight must have passed and I rang my dad, who came to pick me up and whom I immediately told I’d had some alcohol (Martini, Cinzano and a Snowball) which my friend saw as not only typical of my impulsiveness and indiscreetness but also liable to get me in trouble but it didn’t. The street lights looked rather blurry on the way home. Thus opened my 1984. A few days later I was back in the sixth form and my friend Mark Watts, who was later to go on to found an investigative journalism agency and uncover a number of cases of child sexual abuse, informed me that it was vital that we didn’t fall for whatever spin the media were likely to put on it being the year named after that novel and that whenever he referred to George Orwell it would be under the name Lionel Wise (Eric Blair – Lionel Blair; Eric Blair – Eric Morecambe – Ernie Wise), which was quite clever if also rather adolescent, which is what we were. We were all very conscious that it was 1984 at last. Anne Nightingale played David Bowie’s ‘1984’ and Van Halen’s ‘1984’ on her request show on the evening of New Year’s Day. I didn’t have a hangover, because I don’t get them. I asked my brother to record something off Anne Nightingale because I was about to go out again to see my friends, and it happened that the next track was Steve Winwood’s ‘While You See A Chance, Take It’, which I’d wanted to get on tape for years but he cut it off halfway through the first verse. The machine on which that was recorded was a rapidly failing mono Sanyo radio cassette recorder which my mum was annoyed was deteriorating so fast seeing as it was less than four years old and I’d got it for my thirteenth birthday. Incidentally, I’m writing all this without reference to diaries or any other kind of record. I just remember it, plainly, clearly, in great detail, and I don’t know how this compares to others’ memories. My memories of much of the ’80s are as clear as flashbulb memories because they occur within my reminiscence bump. There are errors, such as the exact name of the Steve Winwood record, but also a lot of clarity. Anyway, later that year on my seventeenth birthday, 30th July, I got a stereo boom box possibly from Sony which I first recorded on on 8th August, namely Tracey Ullman’s ‘Sunglasses’, followed by ‘Smalltown Boy’. In September, I got my first job, as a cashier at the new Safeway, which looked enormous to me at the time but on returning to the Waitrose which it now is seems really tiny nowadays, and lost it after eleven weeks due to being too slow on the till, not assertive enough to turn people away from the “Nine Items Or Less” (now “fewer” apparently) queue, and £2 out on the cashing up on two occasions. Apparently this was a lot stricter than other places, such as Lipton’s where my sister worked and who was much further out than I on many occasions when she first worked there. I could say more about her situation there but probably shouldn’t. Anyway, I got £1.41 an hour from Safeway which I saved up to buy the first big item I’d ever got for myself, which was a Jupiter Ace microcomputer. Which brings me to computers.

I was very into computers in the early to mid-’80s, but also deeply ambivalent about them. At the start of the year, the family had owned a ZX81 for a year and a bit. I found this annoying because it was such a low-spec machine, but restrictions fuel creativity so it was in fact not a bad thing. I was spending a lot of my time reading computer magazines and wishing I had a better computer, which I resolved late in that year, and also writing software, mainly graphically-oriented, which was difficult considering that our computer only had a resolution of 64×48, although I was later able to increase this to 192 on the Y-axis by pointing the I register on the Z80A somewhere else than the character set, so I could make bar graphs which looked quite good. I did also write a computerised version of Ramon Llull’s ‘Machine That Explains Everything’, a couple of primitive computer viruses and an adventure game. Later on, after I got the Jupiter Ace, I got it to display runes and produce screeds of nonsense words in Finnish. As I said though, I was ambivalent. I’ve never been comfortable with my interest in IT for several reasons, and for more reasons at this point. One reason was that at the time I was communist, and also kind of Stalinist, and felt that the use of IT and automation as fuelled by the microchip boom would create massive unemployment and reduce the power of the workers to withdraw their labour. However, it isn’t clear to me now why me not having a ZX81 would’ve made any difference to that. In the middle of the year, I decided that communism was over-optimistic and there was a brief period during which people were very eager for me to adopt their views, but I quickly opted for Green politics. I was not yet anarchist and believed in a Hobbesian state of nature. Besides this perspective, I was also uncomfortable about my interest in computers because it seemed nerdy, something very negative at the time, and unbalanced – obsessive and not “humanities” enough to my taste. It felt too much like my comfort zone and not challenging enough. It did, however, become apparent that I had spent so much time studying computers, with text books as well as mags and experimentation, that I could’ve easily aced the O-level, which was another example of how my formal educational focus was outside educational institutions at the time, and it was also suggested that my aforementioned friend with whom I hid under the table and was trying to learn BASIC at the technical college, would’ve welcomed me teaching her. This got to the point where I helped her with her homework. On another occasion, an acquaintance was trying to write a FORTH programming language interpreter in Z80 assembler and I had a look through it with interest. One of my other friends later went on to write parts of the major GNU text editor “religion” Emacs, already almost a decade old by ’84, which I still use today. However, I found my interest in computers made me feel embarrassed and self-conscious and I felt somewhat ashamed of it. I think I found a lot of my interests at the time to be very personal and not something I felt comfortable sharing with others.

It was also the year of my perhaps most significant cultural shift. I entered the year enthusiastic about mainstream literature and poetry. I had been warned, though, by my O-level English teacher, that A-level English Lit was likely to spoil my appreciation of reading, and this did in fact happen. Early in the year my enthusiasm continued and I came to enjoy reading poetry and literature. I planned to continue my writing on the works of Samuel Beckett as part of my A-level and the fact we were studying Joyce gave me optimism in that regard. We had a fair bit of freedom to do that kind of thing. In the summer exams, my practical criticism of a particular poem was chosen as a model answer for others to emulate and I was able, for example, to uncover themes in poetry which my teacher hadn’t noticed, which was mainly due to my insistence on maintaining a wide education. I was applying to university in the later part of the year, having researched them in the earlier part, and having opted for degrees in English and Psychology or Philosophy and Psychology, I was clearly sufficiently committed to English at the time to consider it as a first degree. However, all of that was about to go to shit.

5. A Collision With The Great White Whale

It may be worth analysing what went wrong in some depth, but the simple facts of how it happened were as follows. My A-levels were in English, RE and Biology, which I want to stress is a very popular combination. At the end of the first year, around June, there was a marine biology field trip which was in itself quite formative for me because I didn’t relish getting stuck in the stinky, sticky black tarry mud encouraged by the anaerobic respiration in Pegwell Bay, an estuary on the edge of Thanet. It was cold and wet, and the water was of course salty, and I thought I’d ruined that sweatshirt I’d mentioned earlier which I was once again wearing. My dissatisfaction was palpable. Anyway, it was assumed by the English department that those who were off on the field trip would, possibly from their friends, learn their summer reading assignments, which were to read James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ anthology and Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. I didn’t get that information, didn’t talk about the assignments with my friends because it wasn’t a priority for us and consequently was confronted with reading an absolute doorstep of a book plus much of the Joyce one, which was less problematic because being short stories it was easy to catch up with that one. I was then confronted, on reading Melville’s novel, with a load of American men murdering whales for a living. Right then, I wasn’t even vegetarian but I did, like a lot of other people, believe in saving the whale. Over my childhood, I’d read a lot of story books about animals, like ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘All Creatures Great And Small’, ‘Incredible Journey’, ‘Bambi’, ‘Watership Down’ and ‘A Skunk In The Family’. Of course there was peril in these and also horrible deaths on occasion, not to mention sad endings, but the focus was on the otter, the bovines, dogs, cats, deer, rabbit and skunk. There is no problem with depicting them being treated badly, suffering and so forth. But in ‘Moby Dick’, there is never any sympathy or focus on the experience of the whales or acknowledgement of them as victims, in a similar manner to the people who had lived in North America before White colonisers turned up. It was all about something else, and there wasn’t just an elephant in the room but a whale. I was unable to bring myself to step into Ishmael’s or anyone else’s shoes. The only bits I could tolerate were the encyclopaedic sections. I could go into more depth here. I think Melville was probably trying to make a whale-sized book, was using the whale as a metaphor for the intractable and incomprehensible nature of, well, nature and the world in general and as a tabula rasa, them being white like a piece of paper, and there’s the angle that the whale is in some way a phallic symbol. Ahab also anthropomorphises the whale, seeing them as a rival in a battle with him when in the end the whale is just the whale and doesn’t even realise the tiny figures above lobbing harpoons at them are even conscious beings. From the novel’s perspective, the whale probably isn’t even a conscious being. Hence I was confronted with what I read as a hostile, nasty and animal-hating, actually animal-indifferent story where I couldn’t work out whether any of the characters were supposed to be sympathetic and,moreover, the only chapters I could actually garner any interest in were dismissed as mere padding by my teachers. I also found, for some reason, that the same approach I’d been taking to poetry up until the summer no longer seemed to work. It probably didn’t help that one of my teachers was a frustrated Classics teacher who later left and taught that at the King’s School, although I was interested in the classics she managed to shoehorn into the lessons such as Oedipus Tyrannus, the Oresteia and Antigone. I would say, though, that I really didn’t get on with the Oresteia because I felt very much that it lacked universalism. None of that was in the exams of course, but I wasn’t ever very oriented towards those. I was more just interested or not.

The autumn of the year was marked mainly by anxious procrastination about submitting my UCCA form, which I handed in a month later than I was supposed to due to indecision about what to put in my personal statement, which wasn’t up to much partly because of not wanting to admit what I was interested in, and partly because of not pursuing it in a public way due to the shame I felt about admitting it. I also got annoyed with universities insisting on being put first, so rather than selecting places I actually wanted to go to, although my first choice, Keele, I was very keen on due to the balanced and eclectic nature of their educational approach, I deliberately listed Nottingham, Reading and Exeter, followed by Sheffield in which I was in fact fairly interested in. I got rejected by all of them except Keele and Sheffield, Exeter apparently by return of post. Among the polys I applied for Hatfield, Oxford and NELP, and would’ve got into NELP in fact. I liked the modular nature of the course at Oxford, which appealed to me for the same reason as Keele did.

6. Armageddon

Another association which arrived in 1984 and which has been with me ever since is the idea of “proper Britain”. I may have mentioned this before, but the notorious nuclear holocaust drama ‘Threads’ was broadcast on 23rd September 1984, notable for being the first depiction of nuclear winter in the mass media, and I remember being edgelordy about it by saying to my friends that it was over-optimistic. I was ostentatiously and performatively depressive at the time. I did not in fact feel this, but my takeaway from it was probably unusual. There’s a scene at the start where Ruth and Jimmy are canoodling on Curbar Edge above Hope Valley which really struck me. It was grey, drizzly and clearly quite cold, even though I think the action begins in May. There’s also the heavily built up large city of Sheffield, where I might be going in a year or so, and it suddenly crystallised my image of what Britain was really like. Not the South with its many villages and small towns densely dotted about with relatively dry and sunny weather, which I was used to, but the larger block of large post-industrial cities with redbrick terraced houses, back-to-backs, towerblocks and brutalist municipal architecture set against a background of rain, wind and greyness. I relished that prospect, and it felt like real Britain. This is how the bulk of the British population lives, and it becomes increasingly like that the further north you get, hence my repeated attempts to move to Scotland, which in a way I feel is more British than England because of many of those features. By contrast, if you go from Kent to France it’s basically the same landscape and climate with different furniture. Maybe a strange reaction to a depiction of a nuclear war, but there you go.

I did, however, also feel very much that it would be strange and foreign to move away to an area dominated by Victorian redbrick terraced houses. I couldn’t imagine that they’d ever feel like home to me and I couldn’t envisage settling down there. I was still very much a Southerner at that time. I was also, however, fully aware of the privileged bubble I was living in and it made me feel very awkward.

Nor am I ignoring the actual content of the film. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction was very high in many people’s minds at the time and it almost seemed inevitable. This made even bothering to make plans for the future seem rather pointless and almost like busy work. We all “knew” we were going to die horribly, as was everyone around us, so doing the stuff I’ve mentioned, like applying to university, seemed more like something I did as a distraction from that worry than something with an actual aim sometimes, depending on my mood. This had a number of consequences. One is that I wonder if a lot of Gen-Xers underachieve because they missed out on pushing themselves into things in their youth, expecting the world to end at any time. Another is that as the ’80s wore on, pop music and other aspects of popular culture began to reflect that anxiety. Ultimately even Squeeze (basically) ended up producing an eerie and haunting post-nuclear song in the shape of ‘Apple Tree’. Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ particularly captures the attitude and is widely misunderstood. The reason we’d be forever young is that we’d never get a chance to grow up and live out full lives. That single was released a mere four days after ‘Threads’ was broadcast.

7. The Stereophonic Present

Speaking of music, there were something like four bands in the Sixth Form at that point, the most prominent being The Cosmic Mushroom, clearly influenced by the Canterbury Scene even in the mid-’80s. My own attitude to music was to concentrate on cassettes because I didn’t trust myself to take care of vinyl properly. The advent of proper stereo in my life was on my birthday at the end of July, and there’s something vivid and recent-sounding about all stereo music I own for that reason. This is in fact one factor in my feeling that 1984 is current rather than in the past. The present is characterised by clear, stereophonic music, the past by lo-fi mono, and that switch occurred for me in summer that year. This is actually more vivid than the earlier shift between black and white and colour TV. Incidentally, CDs were out there for sure, but only for the rich, having been first released two years previously. Like mobile ‘phones, they were a “yuppie” thing, like jug kettles. Back to music. Effectively the charts and my perception of them that year were dominated by ‘Relax’, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. This was released in November the previous year and entered the charts in early January. This got banned as it climbed the charts, which boosted its popularity enormously and got it to number 1. It stayed in the Top 100 until April the next year. We played it at the school discos, the other standard being ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’, which we all used to sing along and dance to. My personal preferences included The The, Bauhaus and The Damned at the time, although the ongoing appreciation of the likes of Kate Bush continued.

8. Harvest For The World

On 24th October, the famous Michael Buerk report on the famine in Ethiopia was broadcast. This led in the next couple of years to Live Aid and Run The World, but from that year’s perspective it only just began. There’s been a lot of justified criticism of media framing of the famine, but as a naive teenager I didn’t have much awareness of that and simply saw it as a disaster which required a response from me, which was initially in the form of a sponsored silence for the whole school in the sports hall, then later a sponsored 24- or 36-hour fast supervised by one of my biology teachers in which I also participated. Although I can’t really mention this without pointing out that the whole thing was dodgy, it did start a ball rolling which continued in much later political activism on my part and a passionate youthful idealism to make the world a better place, which I felt confident had to come soon and meant action from me. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ was a further effort in that campaign, satirised by Chumbawumba as ‘Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records’ and roundly criticised by the World Development Movement, but at the time I knew nothing of this. By the way, it’s remarkable how the unpopular Chumbawumba cynicism managed to get from the political fringe into the mainstream in just a few years with the Simpsons parody ‘We’re Sending Our Love Down The Well’ only eight years later, although that was also linked to a Gulf War song it seems, which however is in that tradition, which I first became aware of, superficially, that year. In fact I can’t overestimate the importance of this sequence of events, even with its grubby and cynical connotations, and my support of it has a simplicity and innocence which I wish in a way I still had. I want the world to be one in which something like that works straightforwardly and simply. As I’ve said before, nobody is Whiter or more middle class than I am.

A rather different aspect of this is that I and someone called Louise almost got the giggles during the sponsored silence and we both spent most of our time doing it, which was I think a whole hour, trying not to laugh. A while after that the same thing happened with the two of us in an English class, though on that occasion we gave into it and there was actually nothing provoking it at all. It then spread through the whole class. Once again, in an English class shortly after that, the teacher, discussing Moby Dick of course, took out a model of a sperm whale on wheels unexpectedly and rolled it up and down the desk, which again led to uncontrollable laughter. This was Thatcher’s Britain, yes, and most of us hated her, but it wasn’t grim or joyless, at least for seventeen year olds, and I actually managed to get some pleasure out of Herman Melville’s writing!

CND was very active at the time. I, however, was not, for a couple of reasons. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of unilateral disarmament, and in fact that was the last of the standard lefty/Green causes I committed to, but I had a feeling they were right and wanted to go on the demos but never actually did. This is by contrast with the Miners’ Strike. Kent, like Northern France, was a coalmining area and the strike was very close to us because several of my friends were in coal miners’ families. I asked what I could do but nothing really came to mind. I was also aware of hunt sabbing but was unable to work out how to find out about it. Had I got involved in that, I might’ve gone vegan years earlier than I did.

9. The Ending Story

Then there was cinema. My aforementioned friend under the table rang me up one day and just said we should go and watch ‘Champion’ at the ABC. That cinema, incidentally, was managed by someone I later got to know when he and I both coincidentally moved to Leicester. I was surprised my friend just spontaneously bet on the horses when I’d never dreamt of doing that, at the time because it was gambling. The film, in case you didn’t know as it may be quite obscure, was based on a true story about a famous jockey who has cancer and survives. One impression I got from it was that he looked like Lionel Blair, which is the second time I’ve mentioned him today. At this time it was still possible to sit in the cinema for as long as you wanted while the same films, yes, films plural, played over and over again. This was actually the last year it was possible. The year after, I’d just finished watching ‘Letter To Brezhnev’ and the ushers chucked us all out. It was a real shock, and you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It meant that parents could use cinemas as babysitting services, though this may have been somewhat reckless by today’s standards. They did the same with swimming pools: Kingsmead had this going on, although specifically in ’84 I didn’t exercise much apart from walking eight miles, to school and back, every day. This lazy year ended immediately with my New Years’ resolution to go running every morning from 1st January 1985.

‘Ghostbusters’ was also quite memorable. I took my younger brother to see it and I wasn’t expecting the whole audience to shout the song when it came on. It’s a good film, with a memorable scene involving a fridge and an unforgettable line which is usually cut towards the end. It also mentions selenium for no apparent reason, and has Zener cards at the start. At the time, rather surprisingly, it seemed to be generally accepted even in academia that some people were psychic. I often wonder whether it’s really good-quality research which has led to received opinion on this changing or whether it’s just a reputational thing that psi is now widely rejected by academic researchers. The other major film I remember watching was ‘Star Trek III’, which is also very good, and at the time there was no plan to bring Star Trek back. It was considered a sequel too far by one of my friends, so at the time it looked like the show was completely defunct and they were trying to revive it beyond all reason. I also saw ‘2010’, which I liked for incorporating the new findings about Europa, but it definitely lacks the appeal of the original. Incidentally, the long gap between Voyager visits to Saturn and Uranus was underway and the remaining probe wouldn’t get there for another two years. The original ‘Dune’ also came out this year, and although I wanted to see it, I don’t think it came to Canterbury. I wouldn’t’ve liked it at the time, having seen it since, and oddly I had the impression it was in a completely different directing style and that it was also a 3-D film. It may also have been the most expensive feature film ever made at the time. ‘1984’, of course, also came out then, but that deserves its own treatment. As other people I’ve since got to know of my age have commented, ‘Neverending Story’ marked the first time I perceived a film as definitely too young for me, and in a way that realisation reflected the twilight before the dawn of adulthood to me.

10. Life Off The Fast Lane

Speaking of marks of adulthood, many of my peers were learning to drive and passing their tests at this point. Although I got a provisional licence that year and my parents strongly suggested I learn, I refused to do so for environmental and anti-materialistic reasons. Although I’ve had lessons since, I’ve never in fact got there and I’ve also heard that an ADHD diagnosis can bar one from driving in any case, if it affects one’s driving ability. I’m not sure mine would but I do think my dyspraxia is a serious issue there. 1984 is in fact the only year I’ve independently driven any motorised vehicle, namely one friend’s scooter and other’s motorbike. Like the underage drinking, it’s apparent that we didn’t take certain laws particularly seriously at the time and I’m wondering if that was just us, our age or whether that’s changed since. I was dead set against learning to drive, and this was probably the first thing which marked me as not destined to live a “normal” adult life. It has on two occasions prevented me from getting paid work.

Television didn’t form a major part of my life at the time. We couldn’t get Channel 4 yet, so the groundbreaking work done there was a closed book to me. ‘Alas Smith And Jones’ started in January and incredibly continued to run for fourteen years. I’d stopped watching ‘Doctor Who’ two years previously when ‘Time Flight’ was so awful that I decided it was a kid’s show and put it away. Tommy Cooper died on stage. The second and final series of ‘The Young Ones’ broadcast. ‘Crimewatch UK’, which would eventually become compulsive but guilty viewing for Sarada and me, started. In a somewhat similar vein, ‘The Bill’ started in October, which I used to enjoy watching years later due to the handheld camera work, which made it seem very immediate and “real” somehow. NYPD Blue is like that for other reasons incidentally. ‘Casualty’ was still two years in the future and ‘Angels’ had just ended, so I was in a wilderness of no medical dramas.

11. Green Shoots

Also, of course, the Brighton hotel bombing took place, and many of my friends felt very conflicted because on the one hand there was the general sympathy and empathy for people being attacked, injured and killed, but on the other they were very much hated for what they were doing. I’m sure this was a widespread feeling, and there is of course the band Tebbit Under Rubble, which very much expresses one side of that sentiment. Greenham Common was in progress and a major eviction took place in March. Although I was later to become heavily involved in the peace movement, at the time I was still very much on the sidelines although some of the people I knew were connected, and I do remember thinking that computer and human error were major and unavoidable risks which meant that the very existence of nuclear arsenals was too dangerous to be allowed to continue.

Then there was the Bishop of Durham, and since I was doing an A-level in RE at the time, his stance was highly relevant. The Sea Of Faith Movement was in full swing, which promoted a kind of secularised Christianity which was largely non-theistic or even atheist in nature, and the foundations were being laid in my mind which I’d later extend but allow the high-control group I became involved in to demolish, almost inexplicably. Over that whole period, I was expected to read a newspaper of my choice and take cuttings from it on relevant religious and moral issues to put in a scrapbook, so my long-term readership of ‘The Guardian’ began a few months before this and persisted through the year. It was either 25p or 30p at the time, and this was before colour newspapers had come to be. I had also been an avid Radio 4 listener since 1980, but unlike later I also listened to Radio 3 a bit, never really managing to appreciate classical music to the full.

This was also the year I finally decided I wanted to become an academic philosopher, and I still think I could’ve followed that through though it didn’t happen. This is the end of a kind of winnowing process probably connected to my dyspraxia, where I became increasingly aware of practical things which I simply couldn’t do, I’d been put off biology by the griminess and unpleasantness of field work and therefore philosophy was the way forward. That said, like many other people I was also very motivated to study psychology in an attempt to understand myself, and as you probably know a lot of psychology undergraduates begin their degrees by being concerned about major issues in their own personalities, so in that respect I’m not unusual. I also presented two assemblies, one on existentialism and the other on the sex life of elephants as a parable of romantic love.

I feel like this could go on and on, so I’m going to finish off this reminiscence in a similar way to how I started. My emotional world revolved around the friend I was hiding under the table with at the beginning of the year and our significance to each other was important to both of us. About halfway through it, having just visited her she became concerned that she and I were going to be found together alone in the house by her parents who were coming back unexpectedly, so I left the house by the back door and crept surreptitiously over the front garden, only to be stopped and “citizen’s arrested” by their next door neighbour. This turned out to make the situation more embarrassing for her and me than it would’ve been if I’d just left when they came back. I don’t know if anything can be made or a picture can be drawn of who she or I was at the time by putting those two incidents together.

I’m aware that I haven’t talked about Orwell’s book and its adaptations as much as I’d like, so that’s something I’ll need to come back to, and there are huge things I’ve missed out, but I hope I’ve managed to paint a portrait of my 1984 and possibly also yours. I may also have portrayed someone who peaked in high school, but I do also think tremendous things happened afterwards. 1984 is, though, the first foothill of my life, which makes it significant. It’s sometimes said that the reminiscence bump is only there because fifteen to twenty-five is the most eventful period of one’s time here, but maybe not. It’s hard to say.

The Continuation Of Political Theory By Other Means

There are certain issues with certain people’s opinions of certain works. Consequently I’m going to push the details of what this post is about exactly beyond the fold, but not beyond the pale.

The only thing I know about Carl von Clausewitz is that he said “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. He also said “the best form of defence is attack”, “the enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan” and “to secure peace is to prepare for war”. However, this post is not about von Clausewitz. It’s about two fairly famous related works, one based on the other, both fairly thoroughly misunderstood and one also unfairly dissed: ‘Starship Troopers’.

Up front I’m going to say that I disagree strongly with the political philosophy of Heinlein’s novel although I do have quite a bit of sympathy with the idea. As for the film, something terrible seems to have happened to its reputation, and bearing in mind that Verhoeven is also reponsible for ‘Robocop’, also quite misunderstood, and ‘Total Recall’, it’s fairly obvious that if you think he meant for it to be a pro-totalitarian or pro-Fascist film, you’ve got it completely wrong. There’s also the issue of identifying what Heinlein intended with Fascism or even totalitarianism and whether it’s a thought experiment or direct advocacy for his political beliefs. The whole thing is a bit complicated really.

Just to introduce the two then:

Robert A Heinlein is a front-ranking English language science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century CE along with the politically very different Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. Among other things, he wrote military science fiction, and I’ve found everything I’ve read by him to be very readable and a page-turner. However, I haven’t read much of his work because he has a reputation for being right wing. Asimov is a liberal and was even invited to join the Communist Party, which he turned down. Arthur C Clarke has a religious bent and was heavily influenced by Stapledon, and is of course British. Heinlein supported the Vietnam War, although he also ran for office as a Democrat as a young man. He’s influenced, as are many other SF writers, by his experience of the Second World War. He served in the Navy during the previous decade and as an engineer in the War itself. Like many other people, he drifted to the Right as he got older but unlike some others, he was always politically active, from his Democratic years in the 1930s at least up to 1959’s ‘Starship Troopers’. He believed very much in military government. However, weirdly, his ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ was very popular with hippies and the counterculture, and he regarded himself as a libertarian who was close to being anarchist. He has a beguiling talent for making his worldbuilding seem believable and reasonable to the reader. I have a sneaking admiration for his work even though his politics are in some ways very distant from my own. He’s also very character-centred and “human”. A better word borrowed from this century’s parlance might be neurotypical.

‘Starship Troopers’ is one of a series of his works driven by a political perspective, and it’s arguable whether it’s his or not. He may simply be setting up an idea and seeing how it works through the plot as a thought experiment, but my impression is that he takes it pretty seriously and I think it probably is what he actually believes. I’m not familiar enough with his writing or life to say too much from an informed perspective. I’ve read ‘I Will Fear No Evil’ and ‘The Door Into Summer’, ‘Beyond This Horizon’, ‘The Number Of The Beast’ and I’m not sure what else. The first is actually quite a strong influence on my view of the nature of personal identity, so there we have it, a right wing author forms a plank of one of my most fundamental philosophical stances which has a major influence on my life and those of the people around me. That novel is the reason I disagree with Derek Parfit’s views. He’s considered the most important and seminal writer of genre SF, establishing many of the central tropes of what outsiders tend to think of as science fiction. Heinlein’s heroes tend to balance the physical and the mental in that they don’t shrink from using violence but are also powerfully intellectual. Being close to pacifism, I hope I don’t need to state that I disagree strongly with the specifics here but also consider one of the major virtues of Yoga that it does the same, though very differently.

‘Starship Troopers’ is influential in two different ways. As well as its political theory, it was a factor in the establishment of the Mecha subgenre of Anime, although Gerry Anderson is also an influence here. Besides that, I would say it promoted military SF, although in a way that’s part of the same thing. The powered exoskeleton, a wearable machine that enables one to exert greater strength than one would alone, already existed before 1959, the year the novel was published, but would probably not have been so widely adopted without his work, for better or worse. But today I want to talk about the other influence.

I get the impression I’ve mentioned this before on this blog, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself (apparently I am to some extent). The basic premise of the novel is that in order to vote, one must serve in the military for at least two years, and violence is seen as a legitimate solution to problems. The reason for this is that liberalism ruined society and it was basically scientifically established that violence had a rightful place in human affairs. It’s probably obvious that I completely disagree with this but at the same time I find his views and the way he illustrates and argues for them fascinating. The novel is partly a propaganda piece defending the Cold War and using the aliens as a symbol for Red China, but it goes deeper than that. Heinlein clearly maintains that there is something central to human nature which makes it impossible for Communism to work, and that for us, a species for which Communism would work would seem utterly abhorrent and a threat. It’s like our instinctive dislike for insects is linked to an innate repulsion to socialism. And that’s interesting, because apparently research has shown that Right wing people make a stronger connection between disgust and moral judgement than Left wing people. I would disagree with this to some extent because I think there are different ways to be Right wing and some of them have nothing to do with prejudice against marginalised groups, at least consciously, and to say they have subconsciously is to presume to know the minds of the people with these views better than they know themselves, which is quite an arrogant position unlikely to lead to empathy and therefore any kind of helpful dialogue. It is nonetheless interesting that Heinlein makes this equation.

I’m not interested in defending a slave-owning democracy. That said, the democratic nature of ancient Athens meant that the people voting for or against war were doing so in the full knowledge that it would be their own lives on the line if they chose to pursue a belligerent policy. This is no longer the case in Western democracies. Nowadays, people who join the military are unlikely to get anywhere near the levers of power unless they’re already privileged. There was a time when the monarch led their troops into battle, but this seemed to end because of the risk to a particularly valued member of society, and at a time when the fate of millions was tied up in that individual’s fate it did make sense to stop doing this, regardless of the wisdom of having such a social order exist in the first place. If that’s a given, it is a rational decision, but it means that the choice of life and death can be made without personal risk. This is the central issue in the novel. In order to earn the right to vote, one must be prepared to put one’s life on the line to defend the body politic.

It’s also light years away from my political beliefs, but precisely because it’s so radically different, the questions asked are in the same realm as my own. My personal belief is that political obligation cannot be derived legitimately but is instead imposed by force, by a government holding a monopoly on the threat of violence. We’re born in territories claimed by governments which most people have never freely consented, because there is no way of opting out without severe personal cost in financial or other terms. There is no hospitable place to which one can move in order to avoid the coercion of government. There are the high seas, Antarctica and war zones, and that’s probably it for this planet. Of course, one reason those places are inhospitable is that there’s no state or other organisation making them more habitable, but when that happens, there are strings attached. It’s a valid argument to say that your life depends on the state, because for example one might be born in a hospital run by the government, go through schooling provided by it, be protected from the threat of violence by a police force and eat food brought to you by road and rail built by them. There’s also the question of compromise, because the chances are nobody will agree with you politically 100%, so you have to comply with the law of the land even if you weren’t a member of the party which brought a particular law into being and would never vote for them. The law also often coincides with morality. I don’t actually think it would be okay to kill or steal, or for that matter drive dangerously, which in my case actually means driving in any way at all. Nevertheless, there is no other choice, and the absence of that choice means that the only ultimate reason to obey the law is that it’s enforced by potential violence and loss of freedom, and in some countries loss of life.

Heinlein poses the right question but gives the wrong answer. His answer is diametrically opposed to mine. He has one of his protagonists express the opinion that violence is often the answer, which I disagree with, but I agree with his opinion that exercising the franchise is in a sense a form of violence. I do vote. In doing so, I’m not entirely pacifist (and incidentally therefore not entirely vegan, which is close to pacifism) because I am engaging in action which endorses the state’s monopoly on violence. Heinlein, amazingly, has got this absolutely right. Of course, the alternative of not voting is irresponsible and the powers that be can sometimes be very keen on the idea of people not voting and therefore it may be in their interests to encourage cynicism about politicians as public servants, because that way one loses the ability to discriminate between better and worse politicians and the actual point of having a democracy, such as it is. However, I’m not completely pacifist anyway because I honestly believe violence was the only way Nazism could be defeated and I don’t want to impose my values as a privileged White Westerner on other, more heavily oppressed people whose experience has led them to conclude that armed insurrection is the only effective answer. After all, it doesn’t actually make their violence less legitimate than that of the armed forces, and there’s moral complexity in both.

Heinlein’s system works in detail like this: you are not born destined to have the right to vote. At the age of eighteen, everyone of sound mind can make the free choice to serve in the armed forces for at least two years, during which they have no freedom. If war breaks out during this period, this is extended for the duration of the conflict. Even a blind paraplegic can serve, although it would be hard to find tasks for which they’re suited. Because of the wide range of abilities, the government has had to provide some kind of work, usually dangerous and unpleasant but always necessary, for every potential citizen. Once one’s term of service is over, provided you haven’t been killed, you not only have the right to vote but the obligation to do so unless you break the criminal law. However, any interruption of service will permanently lose you the opportunity even if you sign up again.#

Now, this has been compared to fascism, and the absence of possible other forms of service which can’t be integrated with the armed forces is ignored. It means that a pacifist has no right to vote, which to Heinlein’s mind is entirely fine because a pacifist doesn’t have the defence of a democratic government as their highest principle. Of course it isn’t actually fine and it assumes that every member of society benefits enough from the social order to defend it. To be fair, the society in question is depicted as having no racism or sexism as Heinlein understands it, although of course this is to the mind of a White male American living in the mid-twentieth century and in fact there are sexist and racist elements in the book as written. In some situations, women are seen as more suitable for particular front line rôles in the military, such as spaceship pilots, because they’re more able to stand the G forces involved and are usually smaller than men, but they also need to be good at maths to do this, and again there’s no suggestion that they wouldn’t be just as capable as men. Racism is seen as small-minded and excessively focussed on local concerns. I mean, he does try, and his society is in fact one where ethnicity and gender are not barriers to success or enfranchisement so this could be fair given his assumptions. Whether it’s possible to get there from here is another question.

Non-citizens are not considered intellectually or morally inferior. These are people who can’t vote because they have not done military service. They do, however, pay tax, so this is taxation without representation. That said, being a taxpayer does give one some rights as to how the government spends one’s money and you can be wealthy and entrepreneurial, and have high status without also having the right to vote. Non-citizens may regard involvement in politics as a dirty business they don’t want to be involved in, and this is quite a common attitude in liberal democracies generally. The government and armed forces don’t encourage people to join up. If anything, they discourage them. They’re given forty-eight hours leave as a cooling off period immediately and many of them never bother coming back, which bars them forever from citizenship. They place severely injured ex-combatants as recruiting officers in order to demonstrate the potential price of service. Future citizens absolutely go into this with their eyes open, so to speak, and it’s very much a free choice.

This is also very much a society in which veterans are respected, which contrasts starkly with our own. There aren’t likely to be any homeless vets here, for example. Not only is a very large component of adult society ex-forces, as was the case with men in the post-war era probably somewhat formative in Heinlein’s thought in preparing the novel, but also they’re generally fairly respected, except for the fact that politics is considered by many non-citizens as getting one’s hands dirty and therefore not particularly worthy of respect. Also in this society there are as many female veterans as male, so there is less balance there among those who can vote. The brutalising effect of being trained to kill and the tendency to make irrational decisions in the heat of the moment which then become set in stone because of the high price paid for them, such as the death of one’s friends or one’s own serious injury. People who haven’t been through this psychologically damaging experience have no say in how the world is run.

On the other hand, Paul Addison’s ‘The Road To 1945’ made the case for the Second World War causing the rise of the welfare state and the NHS. Rico, in the novel, is from a rich background but is treated just the same as everyone else, and it’s been claimed that the mixing of people from different social strata led to a fuller appreciation on the part of the more privileged of the lot of the lower orders. There was also more trust in giant publicly-funded projects. One thing I’m interested in but haven’t looked into yet is whether there’s a connection between the large governmentally-organised hospitals and public servant healthcare workers who must have existed at the time, and the establishment of the NHS. Maybe a society run entirely by veterans would have this aspect to it as well. It led to a historic Labour victory.

This society, then, doesn’t seem fascist. Even so, the implicit attitude to pacifism does come close. One’s supreme duty is seen as being to the state, which is the simple definition of fascism I feel most drawn to, although I admit that’s because it’s simple and not because it’s accurate. But as far as I know we don’t get to find out if it’s pluralist or not. It’s possible that there are no longer political parties because government aims at unity of purpose, which means in a sense that it’s a one party state. We do, however, know that it isn’t Communist, because the Pseudo-arachnids are portrayed as Communist and suited to it, and there are clearly private big business ventures. Pseudo-arachnids are contrasted with humans. They are portrayed as a perfectly communist society and were a stand-in for the Maoist Chinese government and possibly people in the book, except that in reality Heinlein seems to have seen Communism as unsuitable for the kind of organism which human beings are, so if anything Pseudo-arachnids are more Communist than any human group could ever be. The novel also has the Skinnies, humanoids in league with them initially but possibly through mind control rather than willingly and who switch sides later on.

The Bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like . . . a giant, inteliigent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites: they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive. Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo.

Hence Heinlein, or at least Juan Rico, believes that humans are not adapted to thrive under a communist system. As an ex-Stalinist, I can remember sympathising with Stalin’s idea that it was worth sacrificing a whole generation of the human race for utopia, but I don’t believe that he was trying to do that. That is, I’m sure he was persecuting a generation of the Soviet peoples (plural) but not for the sake of utopia in the long term.

The Pseudo-Arachnids (I’m not calling them “bugs”) have certain features which makes it “okay” to be speciesist against them. I’m pretty sure Heinlein is on record as saying that we will find that there are intelligent life forms in the Universe whom it’s practically our duty to exterminate because they will be essentially inimical to the human race. Making something look and behave like a giant arthropod stimulates the human disgust instinct as expressed in Torah with its list of treyf animals (but for locusts, probably because they eat all the crops so we may as well eat them). If you start with a real human target for racism and use it for propaganda purposes to distract and divide the populace, you have to impose negative stereotypes on a pre-existing set of individuals, and it’s therefore important to prevent people from getting to know them and realising they aren’t as they’re portrayed or a mass of individuals, but the Pseudo-Arachnids are carte blanche. Heinlein can write whatever he wants about them and they plainly are the “yellow peril”. But this presumably means that back in the twentieth century, in his real world, he can see that Communism isn’t working for them because they’re human and have the same proclivities and instincts as WASPs. For the purposes of the novel we can be confident that Red China could not endure because of human nature, which not only prevents Communism from functioning properly but also leads to its downfall. This is actually quite historically deterministic, which is a fixation of Marxism. For the Federation, history does have a direction and a scientific basis. It just doesn’t go in the direction of Communism.

There is plenty more to say about the novel, but its influence means that it’s also worth moving on. It’s said to be responsible for the Mecha (メカ) subgenre of anime, also known as ロボットアニメ (robotto anime) such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, and of course it also has a manga version. Indigenous Mecha pre-dates ‘Starship Troopers’ by a couple of decades, but was clearly influenced by both ‘Thunderbirds’ and the novel. There is, for example, an OVA mecha anime based on it called 宇宙の戦士 – Uchuu no Senshi – ‘Warriors of the Universe’. There’s also a board game released in 1976 and re-released as a tie-in to the film, a tabletop game, possibly an RPG, and of course the film and its apparently execrable sequels, a TV series and a 21st century video game. The only one of these I’m familiar with is the first film. I don’t want to judge the sequels without watching them but I also don’t want to watch them. The first sequel has a rating of 3.6 on IMDb, which isn’t encouraging, but of course everyone else can be wrong. I suspect what they’ve done with the sequels is cash in on the misinterpretation. I also think there’s a myth established that when the first film came out, it was misinterpreted as pro-fascist. This didn’t happen in my recollection, and I think I’m going to have to address this before anything else.

2020s fans of the film seem to make the claim that it was initially seen as almost fascist propaganda and a bit brain-dead. This, I think, is a kind of superiority thing we get nowadays where, to quote Professor Frink of ‘The Simpsons’, “No you can’t play with it! You won’t enjoy it on as many levels as I do.”. This is pretty sucky, and doesn’t reflect how it was actually received at the time. When it was first released, it was seen in the context of other Vehoeven films such as ‘Robocop’ and ‘Total Recall’. They all have a kind of grey clunky look to them, which I don’t think is merely due to contemporary influence. His films do seem to have a tendency to be misunderstood though. They’re kind of brainy action films. ‘Robocop’ is about the dehumanisation brought on by masculinity, rampant capitalism and corporate power. ‘Total Recall’ is about identity, capitalism and the nature of reality. There are other films of his I haven’t seen with more sexual themes and I don’t know about those but ‘Starship Troopers’ is in the same vein as the two just mentioned. Verhoeven has said that a major theme is that “war makes fascists of us all”. That was also how it was understood by many viewers at the time, though not all.

In a sense, the film isn’t so much about Heinlein’s philosophy as expressed in his novel as the circumstances likely to give rise to belief in such an ideology, or perhaps the result of a society run along those lines. It basically makes you root for fascists, then confronts you with the fact that it’s done so and gets you to ask yourself why. It brings out one’s inner fascist and criticises her. Several interludes in the film take the form of propaganda films modelled after ‘Triumph des Willens’ and ‘Why We Fight’. Like the novel, it’s a Bildungsroman, or rather a coming of age film in this case, following several teens out of high school, all of whom enroll in the forces and pursue their careers very successfully. Verhoeven only read something like the first two chapters of the book, so some people argue that it can’t be a real adaptation. It’s also been compared to ‘Full Metal Jacket’.

One of the major influential innovations in the novel, the powered armour, is completely absent from the film. There are many other differences, but there would probably have to be because the novel is a lot more cerebral. The film definitely goes for deliberate corniness. The initial flashforward is to the barren Pseudo-arachnid homeworld Klendathu rather than an urban Skinny environment. The mobile infantry are lower-tech. Carl is not psychic but is an electronics genius. Dizzy is female and doesn’t get killed in the first chapter. This actually changes things quite a bit as in the book the women are pilots, not ground forces. Rasczak survives well into the second half of the film rather than having died in the backstory and is merged with the teacher character Dubois. The film Johnny Rico is from Buenos Aires along with his family and both his parents get killed in an asteroid impact, along with the rest of the population of the city, giving Rico, Dizzy, Carmen and the rest a major personal grudge against the Pseudo-arachnids. In the novel, Juan’s father joins up because his wife was killed in the attack on Buenos Aires and Rico ends up as his commanding officer. The Pseudo-arachnids are generally less intelligent although there is a more intelligent caste.

It feels to me very strongly that in the film, the asteroid strike on Buenos Aires is a false flag operation to start an aggressive war against the Pseudo-arachnids. Klendathu is on the opposite side of the Galaxy to Earth so the asteroid would have to travel 80 000 light years to get to us, leaving ample opportunity for interception, and it doesn’t make sense that the asteroid would be sent from their system rather than be perturbed in this one to hit Earth. The attack on Klendathu, I also suspect, was deliberately lost. They engineered an attack on the home world in order to guarantee three hundred thousand deaths and provoke the human race into hatred and xenophobia. But maybe not. Maybe the government simply underestimates the abilities of the aliens due to its own xenophobia.

The young and central characters are all pretty people and we’re made to care about them. This establishes a deliberately superficial æsthetic contrast between them and the Pseudo-arachnids, so there’s an implicit criticism of the audience’s prejudice. What appear to be tactical shortcomings in the film may not be. There’s a planetary asteroid defence system which is not used against the asteroid which destroys Buenos Aires. The news report is deliberately gory. The Federation clearly doesn’t want the war to end. However, the society itself is remarkably egalitarian. The new Sky Marshall (i.e. Federation president) is a Black woman, there’s a mix of ethnicities who are clearly equally treated and the mix of women and men in the military and society is clearly not gender-based, less so in fact than in the novel. Violence between humans is considered normal and acceptable. There are public executions. Perhaps one of the interesting differences in the film is the emphasis on media manipulation.

Social Darwinism is a theme. One of the catchphrases is a quote from a real soldier in the book:

Come on you apes! Do you want to live forever?

– Unknown platoon sergeant, 1918.

The battle wipes out less suitable soldiers and the upper ranks of the military carry out their own eugenics by using live ammo in training exercises and shooting cowards in the battlefield. The centrality of the heterosexual romantic relationships is also about breeding in the long run. A parenthood licence is also mentioned, which is a bit strange since Rico’s parents are non-citizens.

It’s never clear what one should do when one produces a cultural artifact which is open to being taken in a way which conflicts with one’s values. One doesn’t want to talk down to one’s audience, viewership or readership, and Verhoeven doesn’t, but the result is that it has tended to be taken in a way which is opposite to his beliefs. Two other films seem to stick out as fitting into that category quite easily. There’s ‘V For Vendetta’, which seems to be taken as a rallying cry by Conservatives, and an older film, ‘They Live’, which is taken by neo-Nazis as an allegory for a Jewish conspiracy to run the world. It’s difficult to know what to do with these takes. In some cases, they might expose common ground between different political perspectives. It’s like the film is an equation which different variables can be plugged into, but perhaps the misinterpretation of ‘Starship Troopers’ is more about being overtaken by the propaganda-influenced direction than seeing it as a metaphor for different political views.

By forcing us to inhabit the minds of what is arguably fascist, both works probably help us understand one’s enemy, and that kind of empathy is in short supply right now. Consequently, Heinlein’s and Verhoeven’s talents are universally useful and could help us to have a more mutually respectful dialogue about things which matter deeply to us. Therefore, I don’t think it’s going too far to say that both the novel and the film achieve a kind of universality which makes them great and they escape from the prejudices of the author and director. At one point in the film, the Sky Marshall says that we must understand the Pseudo-arachnids in order to destroy them. Maybe we should forget about the second bit and just do the first.

The Peace Movement And Me Part I – Prelude

I can’t remember when I first heard of CND, but I can remember when I first became aware of Hiroshima. It was in 1973 and I found it absolutely horrifying. I wasn’t aware at the time of the Cold War or the arms race, although I did know about Vietnam and the rivalry between the Russians and Americans, particularly in the context of the Space Race. The issue of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came up for me due to my interest in nuclear physics. I didn’t then fully understand how nuclear fission worked, but it was clear to me that the Bomb was a stupendously destructive weapon compared to any chemical explosive by many orders of magnitude.

My focus as a child, however, was not on these issues. If anything, my interest in political terms would probably have been centred on environmentalism and endangered species. At some point I will come back and look at my life as a prelude to becoming vegan in 1987, but not today. It could also be said that you don’t get a bigger threat to the environment than a nuclear holocaust, and I was concerned about nuclear power and also the possibility of fusion power, which for some reason I saw as dangerous in the same way as a fission power station was, but not particularly the Bomb.

This was in the days before the Nuclear Winter theory had emerged. That did so in part because of the Viking missions to Mars, when attempts were made to model the influence of particles in an atmosphere on surface temperature, although some evidence was noted from the early ’50s. Consequently, the threat of nuclear war seemed a little less serious in the ’70s than it would in the ’80s, and Détente in the previous decade seemed to take the pressure off. The first dated diary entry I ever wrote is from 17th July 1975, the day of the Apollo-Soyuz test project, and so at the time things seemed very hopeful. They would get a lot less so in the coming decade.

The fundamental issue about any weapon with the potential of causing human extinction which comes within easy reach of any power in the species is that once it’s been invented, it can’t be “un-invented” unless some calamity befalls us which either causes us to lose knowledge or changes the infrastructure in such a way that the technology becomes unfeasible. Since either of those things is pretty close to actually being human extinction, the existence of weapons of mass destruction requires us to re-invent how human beings as a whole relate to each other, such that the knowhow to produce the weapons might exist but it becomes psychologically unfeasible to use them. With the advent of easily available genetic engineering or nanotech and the Grey Goo Scenario (which is actually unfeasible), this gets quite a bit more dangerous because it puts such technology within the reach of the likes of moody teenagers (and I was a moody teenager – this is not ageism) or sociopaths who end up destroying the human race on a whim. Although it is possible to build a nuclear reactor in the garage, as the teenage David Hahn in Michigan did in the 1990s, this was only a local problem. I’m not about to spell out how to produce either a nuclear weapon or a deadly bacterium here, but there is an issue with the information being freely available online and it really isn’t that hard, so the rational response, unless you’re happy with the extinction of Homo sapiens, is to address the possibility of people being willing to do such a thing. You can’t just leave it and hope for the best.

Many would say that the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction is in a way an organically-developed situation which did prevent nuclear holocaust. Again, I don’t know what people know and don’t know, so just in case you don’t, the justification for the Warsaw Pact and NATO stockpiling nuclear arsenals was that in order to maintain peace, there needed to be enormous amounts of nuclear missiles aimed at the enemy on both sides so that using them would be inconceivable. This sounds to me like a rationalisation of a situation which had arisen already although perhaps surprisingly I’m not aware of its history. That is, I don’t know if we went from a situation where we had few nuclear weapons to one where both sides had many as a deliberate policy or not. This kind of organic development, from NATO’s viewpoint, is in accord with conservative politics, where the practices which have grown up without planned intervention are often seen as things which have worked okay and should therefore be kept. However, it also assumes, like many other policies, that the system will work perfectly in spite of being maintained by imperfect human beings, and that imperfection is a central part of conservative political theory, so it’s a bit odd really. It would be interesting to know how the Soviet Union saw it though, because it’s a question of conscious planning versus a situation arising through some kind of “invisible hand”-type process, so maybe the USSR actually did plan it, or maybe they saw it as an inevitable operation of the forces of history. Again, this is a gap in my knowledge.

By about 1980, I was aware of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust, but had a firm division in my mind between that threat and the use of nuclear power for peace. Not everyone maintains that position, and I didn’t, but there are people who take it much further than I and even see the likes of the LHC as a threat to peace. I think this goes too far, although I do think the LHC is probably a waste of money and resources, and in that sense a threat to peace. I was, however, very much opposed to nuclear power, although by that time I also believed that fusion power was a good solution. At this point I was unaware of the constant deferral involved in the development of fusion power because I simply hadn’t lived long enough to notice, but I definitely saw it as benign. Although it probably isn’t, the issue isn’t a live one because it seems to be unattainable.

My belief in unilateral nuclear disarmament took a lot longer to develop than my agreement with any other left-wing or Green issues. By this I mean that although I felt emotionally committed to the idea of supporting CND, which is how I saw unilateral nuclear disarmament at the time, I was also concerned that this was a merely emotional commitment rather than one I could base on rational argument, and there was also a question of mild peer pressure. The 1979 Afghanistan situation had rekindled the Cold War and brought the issue to the fore again, to the extent that one of my big worries about the Falklands/Malvinas in ’82 was that it could provoke a nuclear confrontation in some way simply because of the very delicate balance in international relations. The Greenham Common peace camp began in 1981 and there were large CND marches into central London in the early ’80s which some of my friends went on, but I didn’t and felt guilty about it. At the time, my approach to demos was that they could directly change government policy. As you will know if you read this, my approach has considerably changed since then, and in fact had done so by the end of the decade. My attitude, though, was somewhat paradoxical because although I felt like supporting the peace movement was the right thing to do, I didn’t feel their arguments were convincing. This I would attribute to the heavy governmental propagandising against it.

If you examine at the popular culture of the time, you’ll see a resurgence in songs, films and TV programmes expressing the widespread fear at the threat of nuclear war. As my adolescence wore on, this kind of merged with my general teenage angst and I can’t distinguish between them. I thought that nuclear war was inevitable at that point, an attitude which reached its peak in about 1984. Even so, and it amazes me to look back on this now, I was still not convinced that M.A.D. was the wrong policy. Although I didn’t think about it much at the time, Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ sums up my and many other youths of my generation’s philosophy of life at the time:

The general idea was that we would never see even middle age because by then we’d’ve been killed in a nuclear war, so from our perspective we would indeed be “forever young”. This intimation may be missed by the youth of today when they hear this.

It’s also true that I got it into my head that I was going to die at twenty-seven, in fact live exactly 10 000 days, and therefore die on 19th December 1994. People who are trying to deduce my personal details will of course enjoy that I’ve just shared that date. Although I had various reasons for supposing that to be the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those was subconsciously the expectatio that sooner or later there’d be an apocalyptic exchange of missiles. It was not a good thing to live under the shadow of this prospect. Even now, I would expect people who were young in the early 1980s to have nightmares about this. It must also have consequences for aspiration. We were facing the prospect of unemployment or annihilation, and neither of these were very motivating for bothering to do very much academically or vocationally. On another note, Gen-Xers are known to have poorer employment prospects and underachievement in their careers due to the conditions into which they entered the job market in the ’80s. Maybe nuclear armageddon also had something of a hand in this.

Even though I was communist up until about 1984, I continued to find the arguments for unilateral disarmament unconvincing. I had peers who only voted Conservative because of the Labour Party’s unilateralism and were otherwise left wing, and they continued to do so into the late ’80s when I lost touch with them. It’s astounding how powerfully persuasive the Tory propaganda on this was. In ’84, I abandoned communism because I considered it to be too optimistic and began to gravitate towards the Green Party although I wasn’t particularly aware of doing so because at the time I thought of them as a single-issue party and didn’t realise how left wing they were. It being 1984, there’s a sense of doublethink in all this because on the one hand I feared nuclear war and wasn’t in the “better dead than red” camp, but nevertheless was unconvinced by unilateralism.

Then I left home and went to university, substantially because it was an opportunity for political activism. It wasn’t until the start of my second year that I felt comfortable enough with the policy to join CND itself, but I wasn’t active in it. Once you’ve done something like that, you become emotionally invested in it and tend to rationalise your decision by bending your opinions in that direction, and since I’d joined the Green Party, Greenpeace Supporters, Lynx and Friends of the Earth, three of which were also unilateralist, sometimes to the chagrin of some of their members, that was probably a factor in my persuasion. I also studied Game Theory as part of my degree, which is famously applicable to the M.A.D. situation.

In January 1987, I went on an anti-Sizewell B protest. This was partly organised by the local CND group as well as FoE, so by that time I was beginning to make the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. However, at that time at least a certain kind of rhetoric was used, particularly focussing on the half-lives of radioisotopes, which was not particularly scientific as it made it appear that the half-life was a measurement of the period during which it would be dangerous, which isn’t at all how it works. I am, however, still convinced that one reason nuclear fission is so popular as an energy source is that it provides material for nuclear weapons. This was also a few months after the Chernobyl disaster on 26th April 1986, which had made nuclear power exceedingly unpopular. Like M.A.D., nuclear safety’s weak point is the human factor. Fortunately, in the case of the former, we were all rescued from certain death by Colonel Stanislav Petrov on 26th September 1983 when he decided an apparent US missile launch must be a false alarm and didn’t “retaliate”. There seemed to be many other pressing issues though, so I still didn’t really engage. However, another thing that happened around that time was that I became a committed pacifist. Nowadays I’m not so convinced of that position for several reasons, mainly to do with the idea that it may be very easy for a middle class White person in the developed world to commit to pacifism, but not so much for, say, a Third World peasant. I’ve also never been convinced that the Nazis would have had any problem with a pacifist Britain, and I think it’s entirely feasible that certain despotic orders would just continue slaughtering their pacifist opponents until there were none left without that leading to any kind of effective resistance. However, it should also be said that if future Nazis had committed to pacifism the Third Reich would never have happened either, so the principle of universalisability could operate there.

In October ’87 I went vegan, which again I see as closely allied to pacifism. I also managed to set up a university CND group which unfortunately only really served as a register of those who were sympathetic to the issue. From early ’88 onwards my psyche, some might say my mental health, fell down the Vicky crevasse and it’s hard to say much meaningful about that period, except that on 22nd January 1988 I joined the Labour Party. This was also around the time of the “Labour Listens” campaign, which was of course a way of surreptitiously dumping the radical policies which had lost them the last two elections, including unilateralism. I didn’t become politically active again until the autumn of that year. The next few years involved being rather cynical about CND for a couple of reasons. One was that I was persuaded of the argument that they were pro-imperialist and I was uncomfortable with the Christian involvement in the group. Someone also claimed they were “a front for the Labour Party”, which is obviously absurd at that point in time. I was committed at this stage to rotating my activism between different groups with an aim to finding employment in a pressure group in the long term, although I was also interested in an academic career. I began to move away from the idea of direct action into a means of addressing the problem of a scarcity-based economic system via psychological means: “the revolution starts from within”, as one of my friends put it. This put much of my approach to politics on a more spiritual basis, though not by any means within any religious tradition or group.

Then came a second emotional crisis linked to the imminent first Gulf War, where I was frankly disgusted and traumatised by the apparent fact that so much of the British public were so easily manipulated into supporting a war for the fossil fuel industry. Since the most prominent group involved in opposing the outrage was CND, I became active in the anti-war movement and CND itself. This marked the start of more than two decades of intense involvement in the peace movement, mainly CND but also other things less associated with the central issue of unilateralism. But I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

Living In The Past One Day At A Time

In this blog, I’ve made occasional references to what I call my “Reënactment Project”, which is a long-term ongoing thing I’ve been doing since about 2017. The idea is that every day I make an at least cursory examination of the same day thirty-nine years previously. The reason for choosing thirty-nine years is that for the initial year I planned to do it all the dates were on the same days of the week, meaning that the years concerned were substantially similar. The very basic arithmetic involved is of some interest and I’ll be returning to that later in the post. A side-effect of the thirty-nine year difference is that I am thirty-nine years younger than my father, so he would’ve been the age I am now back then, which focusses me on ageing, life stages and how to stay as young as possible by doing things like addressing my balance through Yoga so it doesn’t deteriorate as fast as it has for him. I can see the end result and know some of the things to avoid, which means that if I do reach his current age I’ll probably have a completely different set of health problems from which my own hopefully not estranged descendants will in turn know what they should avoid. And so on.

My motivation for doing this stems from the disconcerting awareness that we edit our memories, and are also only able to experience things as we are at the time. Also, various media and popular misconceptions lead us to forget and mutate the memories we do believe ourselves to have, and this was particularly important for 1978 as it included the famous Winter Of Discontent, also the Winter Of Discotheque, and I feel we may have been usefully manipulated into seeing this particular season in a particular way to justify everything that came after it. I also want to know how I was as a child and adolescent and pay attention to things which are the seeds of how I am now, and also that which was in me which I didn’t end up expressing. There is of course a bit of a risk here because I’m living in the past and to some extent dwelling upon it, but I do have a life outside this project and find it quite informative and enriching for today’s experiences. However, in general it’s just interesting.

I’ve now reached 1982, and am in the depths of the Falklands War, which was a significant historical event in securing Margaret Thatcher a second parliamentary term. Well, I say “in the depths”. In fact an end to hostilities was announced on 20th June and the Canberra was almost home by 7th July, which is when I’m writing this. I more or less stand by the position I had by the mid-’80s on this subject, which is that Galtieri and Thatcher were both aware that a war would be likely to boost their popularity, although at the time I thought it was an actual conspiracy between them whereas now I just think they were both aware of its expediency. It came as something of a shock to me, a year later, when I realised we didn’t have fixed-term parliaments and therefore the Tories could take advantage of their victory by calling an election whenever they wanted. ‘Shipbuilding’ is redolent of the time:

Although I know Elvis Costello wrote and performed the song, the Robert Wyatt version is the one I associate most closely with the incident. Robert Wyatt was part of the Canterbury Scene and an early member of Soft Machine, so I’m obviously more likely to associate it with him. Just in case you don’t know, Wyatt got drunk and fell out of a window in 1973, paralysing himself from the waist down. Jean Shrimpton, my second cousin once removed, gave him a car and Pink Floyd raised £10 000 for him in a benefit concert. Tommy Vance once described him as “a man who has had more than his share of bad luck in life”.

Another association I make with the Falklands from the time is a play about an Irish barman who was accepted as a member of his community in London until the breakout of the war. He finds himself sandwiched between Irish Republicans and his customers, with racism growing against him which culminates in his murder. This was originally a radio play but later appeared on TV. Although the Troubles were significant and also a spur to creativity, there was a long period during which practically every new play was about them, and it became tedious and annoying. This wasn’t yet the case in ’82 though. There’s also the 1988 BBC TV drama ‘Tumbledown’.

1982 was probably the last year there was really any hope that the previous pattern of alternating Conservative and Labour administrations we were used to would continue into the decade. In fact, this had been a relatively recent development. The first Labour government after the Second World War had been followed by thirteen years of Tory rule, and it was only after that that an alternation of parties in power had begun, lasting only fifteen years. Nonetheless, up until 1982 that’s what most people seemed to expect, and that alternation had held policies and the general timbre of the country in the political centre because the next government could be expected to come along and undo much of what the previous one had done, and so on. This was satirised on the Radio 4 comedy programme ‘Week Ending’ which depicted the future of privatisation and nationalisation as permanently oscillating ad infinitum every five years, which was probably one reason I thought we had fixed terms.

I was communist in ’82, and when I say “communist” I mean Stalinist. I took it seriously enough that I attempted to learn Russian and listened regularly to Radio Moscow, and I was very upset when Leonid Brezhnev died. I was completely convinced that what the Soviet Union was saying about us and themselves was accurate and that the BBC and the like was nothing more than propaganda. I was also very concerned indeed about unemployment, racism and homophobia. I considered being called racist to be the worst insult imaginable, which of course misses the point. I was, however, still a meat eater and was, as you can probably tell, quite naïve. I was also a lovesick teenager in love with the idea of being in love.

However, this isn’t just about 1982 and the events of that year, for me or the world, but also the value of the exercise. It’s often been suggested that I have autistic tendencies and I imagine that this kind of meticulous rerun of the late ’70s and early ’80s is going to come across as confirmatory evidence for that. Clearly people do do things just because they want to and then come up with reasons for doing so to justify themselves to other people. My novel ‘1934’ covers a community where they have chosen to relive the mid-twentieth century over and over again in an endless loop because the leaders think everything has gone to Hell in a handcart ever since, and this would not be a healthy attitude. I made the mistake, a few years ago, of re-reading my diary in a particular way and found myself falling back into the mindset I had at the time in a way which felt distinctly unhealthy. Nonetheless, I consider this activity to be worthwhile because our memories are re-written, and history is written by the winners, in this case the winners of the Falklands War, so our memories are re-written by the winners.

It’s been said that films set in the past usually say more about the time they were made than the period they’re supposed to have happened in. Hence ‘Dazed And Confused’ is really about the 1990s, for example. We generally have a set of preconceptions about a particular period within living memory which turn into a caricature of the time which we find hard to penetrate to reach the reality, and it isn’t the reality in any case because it’s filtered through the preconceptions of the people at the time, even when those people were us. This much is almost too obvious to state. However, there’s also continuity. Time isn’t really neatly parcelled off into years, decades and centuries. People don’t just throw away all their furniture at the end of the decade, or at least they shouldn’t, and buy a whole new lot. We’re all aware of patterns repeating in families down the generations. It isn’t really possible to recapture the past as if it’s preserved in amber. But it is possible to attempt to adopt something like the mindset prevalent at the time, or the Zeitgeist, to think about today, and the older you get the more tempting it is to do so. Since the menopause exists, there must be some value in becoming an elder and sharing the fruits of one’s experience, even when one is in cognitive decline. And of course the clock seems to have been going backwards since 1979, making this year equivalent to 1937. World War II was so 2019.

How, then, does 2021 look from 1982? On a superficial level, it tends to look very slick and well-presented, although airbrushing had a slickness to it too. The graphic at the top of this post is more ’87 than ’82, but it does succeed in capturing the retro-futurism. Progressive politics was losing the fight with conservatism at the time, but the complete rewrite of how we think of ourselves had not yet happened. Nowadays, people are wont to parcel up their identity and activities into marketable units because they have no choice but to do so. The fragmentation there is as significant as the commodification. The kind of unity of experience which existed in terms of the consumption of popular culture back then is gone, although it was gradually disintegrating even then. We were about to get Channel 4 and video recorders were becoming popular among the rich, although they were still insisting that there was no way to get the price below £400 at the time, which is more like £1 400 today. It’s hard to tell, but it certainly feels like the mass media, government and other less definable forces have got better at manipulating public opinion and attitudes. This feels like an “advance” in the technology of rhetoric. However, we may also be slowly emerging from the shadow of the “greed is good” ethic which was descending at the time because we’ve reached the point where most public assets have been sold off and workers’ rights have been eroded that reality tends to intrude a lot more than it used to, and I wonder if people tend to be more aware of the discrepancy between what they’re told and what their experience is. Perhaps the rise in mental health problems is related to this: people are less able to reconcile their reality with the representation of “reality”, and are therefore constantly caught in a double bind.

It isn’t all bad. It’s widely recognised now that homophobia, sexism, racism, ableism and other forms of prejudice are bad for all of us and people seem to be more aware that these are structural problems as well. Veganism is better understood but also very commercialised, taking it away from its meaning. Social ideas which are prevalent among the general public today may have been circulating in academia at the time and their wider influence was yet to be felt. This is probably part of a general trend. There was also a strongly perceived secularisation trend which has in some respects now reversed. The West was in the process of encouraging Afghan fundamentalists and they may also have begun arming Saddam Hussein by this point, although that might’ve come later. CND was in the ascendancy, and the government hadn’t yet got into gear dissing them.

Another distinctive feature of the time was the ascendancy of home microcomputers, although for me this was somewhat in the future. I’ll focus more on my suspicions and distrust here. To me, silicon chips were primarily a way to put people out of work and therefore I didn’t feel able to get wholeheartedly into the IT revolution with a clear conscience. I had, however, learnt BASIC the previous year. I don’t really know what I expected to happen as clearly computers were really getting going and it seemed inevitable. There was also only a rather tenuous connection between a home computer and automation taking place in factories. However, by now the usual cycle of job destruction and creation has indeed ceased to operate, as the work created by automation is nowhere near as much as the work replaced by it, or rather, done by computers or robots in some way. My interest in computers was basically to do with CGI, so the appearance of a ZX81 in my life proved to be rather disappointing.

1982 was also the only year I read OMNI. Although it was interesting, and in fact contained the first publication of ‘Burning Chrome’ that very year, it also came across as very commercialised and quite lightweight to me compared to, for example, ‘New Scientist’. It was also into a fair bit of what would be called “woo” nowadays, and it’s hard to judge but I get the impression that back then psi was more acceptable as a subject of research for science than it is today. This could reflect a number of things, but there are two ways of looking at this trend. One is that a large number of well-designed experiments were conducted which failed to show any significant psi activity. The other is that there is a psychologically-driven tendency towards metaphysical naturalism in the consensus scientific community which has little basis in reason. I would prefer the latter, although the way the subject was presented tended to be anecdotal and far from rigorous. From a neutral perspective, there does seem to be a trend in the West away from belief in the supernatural, and the fact that this was thirty-nine years ago means that trend is discernible on this scale.

Then there’s music, more specifically New Wave. For me, because of my age and generation, New Wave doesn’t even sound like a genre. It’s just “music”. This may not just be me, because it’s so vaguely defined that it seems practically meaningless. It’s certainly easy to point at particular artists and styles as definitely not New Wave though, such as prog rock, ABBA, disco and heavy metal, but I perceive it as having emerged from punk, and in fact American punk just seems to be New Wave to me. It’s also hard for me to distinguish from synth-pop at times. British punk could even be seen as a short-lived offshoot of the genre. By 1982, the apocalyptic atmosphere of pop music around the turn of the decade was practically dead, although I still think there’s a tinge of that in Japan, The Associates and Classix Nouveaux. The New Romantics had been around for a while by then. I disliked them because I perceived them as upper class and vapid. I was of course also into Art Rock, and to some extent world music.

In the visual arts, for me 1982 saw a resurgence in my interest in Dalí, who had interested me from the mid-’70s onward, but this time I was also interested in other surrealists such as Magritte and Ernst, and also to some extent Dada. As with New Romantics, Dalí was a bit of a guilty pleasure as I was aware of his associations with fascism. This was all, of course, nothing to do with what was going on in the art scene of the early ’80s, although I was very interested and felt passionately positively about graffiti. I felt that the destruction of graffiti was tantamount to vandalising a work of art. To be honest, although I’m concerned that people might feel threatened by it and feel a lot of it is rather low-effort and unoriginal, I’m still a fan of it, although I wouldn’t engage in it myself.

1982 was close to the beginning of the cyberpunk æsthetic. I’ve already mentioned William Gibson’s ‘Burning Chrome’, which first appeared in OMNI this month in 1982, and there was also ‘Blade Runner’, which was already being written about, again in OMNI, although it wasn’t released until September. The influence of the genre can be seen in the graphic at the top of this post. To a limited extent even ‘TRON’, from October, was a form of bowdlerised cyberpunk, with the idea of a universe inside a computer. Cyberpunk is dystopian, near-future, can involve body modification, does involve VR and has alienated characters and anarcho-capitalism, with a world dominated by multinationals. ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ had been published, also in OMNI, the year before. The question arises of how much today’s world resembles that imagined by cyberpunk, and to be honest I’d say it does to a considerable extent, and will probably do so increasingly as time goes by.

On a different note, although the days and dates match up between 2021 and 1982, this will only continue until 28th February 2023, after which a leap day for 1984 will throw them out of kilter again. It can almost be guaranteed that years twenty-eight years apart will have the same calendar. One thing which can’t be guaranteed is the date of Good Friday and the other days which are influenced by it. This means that there is almost always a difference between calendars even when the days of the week match up. I also said “almost be guaranteed”. Because the Gregorian calendar skips leap days when they occur in a ’00 year whose century is not divisible by four, we are currently in a lng run of matching twenty-eight year cycles which began in 1900 and will end in 2100. Hence up until 1928 the years of the twentieth century don’t match up on this pattern, and likewise from 2072 onward there will be another disruption of the pattern down into the future. There are also other periods which match between leap days, such as the thirty-nine year one I’m currently exploring, which began last year and includes two complete years as well. This also divides up the years a little oddly, because since I was in full-time school at the time, academic years were also quite important to me, and in fact continued to be so right into the 1990s. This makes a period between 29th February 1980 and the start of September 1980 and will also make a further period between September 1983 and 29th February 1984. Finally, astronomical phenomena don’t line up at all really. Solar and lunar eclipses, and transits of Venus and Mercury, for example, won’t correspond at all.

So anyway, that’s one of the possibly pointless things I do with my time at the moment. It does bring home to me how slowly time does in fact go, because to be honest doing this seems to have slowed the pace of the passage of time back to how it was when I was fourteen or fifteen. What other effects it has on my mind I’m not sure, although I think there must be both positive and negative influences.