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.

Landlocked And Double-Landlocked

Humans effectively live out our lives on a non-Euclidean plane. Although the third dimension is sometimes employed to our advantage, for example in warfare via tunnelling, air raids and submarines, the political map of this planet is projectable onto a flat surface and countries are generally two-dimensional. This has various consequences for us all as Iain M Banks once noted in depth.

We’re also terrestrial. We can’t fly on our own and to be frank the prospect of flight in vehicles from point A to point B on the surface is not terribly exciting because great vistas of discovery do not lie in that direction. Most of the land surface of the planet was known, if not thoroughly explored, by 1903 when the Wright Brothers launched their first plane. The ocean is another matter, as only five percent of it has been explored. Some time in the 1970s, the National Geographic said that the year on the Continental Shelf of North America was 1492, meaning that it had only just been discovered. A Eurocentric view to be sure, and in fact it’s more like the first time humans left Afrika. The sea is both an opportunity and a threat to us. It enables us to move heavy goods relatively easily, unfortunately messing up the planet in the process, and beyond a certain limit it doesn’t belong to anyone, meaning that there are no legal barriers to trade across it past territorial waters.

Not all countries have coastlines. Britain has been particularly fortunate historically in having shipping, a navy and a number of relatively easy routes to other lands, which probably explains the existence of the British Empire. It has little to do with national character except insofar as it’s been formed by the fact that we know we’re on an island or several and what follows from that, and a lot more to do with the fact that we’re near the centre of the Hemisphere Of Land. We’re just lucky: that’s it.

Other countries are not so lucky. Some of them have coastlines, but only along lakes. Some have no coastlines at all. Two don’t even have coastlines with countries which do: Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan. The former can hardly be seen on the above world map but the latter is a big purple blob in Eurasia. It’s notable that the continent with the most landlocked countries is Afrika. North America and Australasia have none. South America has Bolivia and Paraguay. South East Asia notably has Laos, which for most people not living in that area is perhaps one of the least-known countries in the world, quite possibly because it’s landlocked. Bolivia is also quite obscure. Bhutan and Nepal are considered remote mountain countries, which Bolivia also has a claim to be.

These look at first to be merely curioisities of geography with no real world consequences, although one might expect the countries concerned to be more likely to be arid and mountainous. Arid because they’re more likely to be far from the sea, and mountainous because the sea is low down and they’re far from the low down bits. In fact the landlocked status of a country has big economic consequences, which I’ll come back to.

It seems to me that landlocked countries tend to be less familiar to the outside world beyond their neighbours. For instance, Kazakhstan has long stuck in my mind, even before its independence from the Soviet Union, as a vast but unfamiliar country, and is in fact the largest of all landlocked territories. It’s the ninth largest country in the world, the largest country other than Russia in the former Soviet Union and eleven times larger than the “U”K including the relevant part of Ireland. It’s bigger than any country in Afrika, and contains the centre of global human population. That is, it includes the location which minimises the mean distance each person would have to travel to reach. As such, I used it as the location of the world capital in my as yet unfinished book ‘1934’. Unsurprisingly, it’s arid to semi-arid and the capital, Nursultan, is the second coldest in the world, the coldest being Ulaanbaatar in the second-largest landlocked country (Outer) Mongolia. Also unsurprisingly, both are on the largest continent, and Kazakhstan has a particularly high mountain, Khan Tengri, just short of 7 km above sea level.

Hence there are various stochastic reasoning processes which can be used to draw probable conclusions about the characteristics of landlocked states. The probabilities of the following facts about the largest are high:

• Located in Asia
• Arid
• Very cold in winter
• Extremes of temperature
• Includes a high mountain
• Contains the point farthest from the ocean in its continent

It’s almost like Deep Thought being able to deduce the existence of income tax and rice pudding from first principles, except that the last isn’t quite so, although it is near the Kazakh border with China. The only thing is, Kazahstan is also a new country. Although it has a long history as the Kazakh Khanate, it was more or less annexed by the Russian Empire around two centuries ago and therefore became part of the USSR after the Revolution, becoming the last Soviet Republic to declare independence in at the end of 1991 CE, ten days before the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Nonetheless Kazakhstan is a probable country. If there are any other planets with intelligent life and territories, there will probably be Kazakhstan-like countries on them.

It’s also possible to identify various locations in this way. For instance, the world’s highest mountain is likely to be on a border and partly in a landlocked state, and if that’s Everest then it is, on the border of Nepal and China. However, Mount Chimborazo, the point on the surface of the planet furthest from its centre, is in Ecuador, although it’s more probable that it would be near the Equator so there is a cause for it being there. Deserts are also likely to be partly in landlocked countries, and this is true of Bolivia, Kazakhstan and the double landlocked country Uzbekistan, as well as several Afrikan states in the Sahara. Liechtenstein, Austria and Switzerland are also all mountainous, as are Armenia, Lesotho and Andorra. I also have a hunch that landlocked countries are more likely to border larger numbers of other countries than those with coastlines because the latter would not be surrounded by borders. However, large countries, such as China, are also likely both to have coastlines and lots of borders, so maybe not. Another guess, which I can’t justify, is that landlocked countries are also likely to be smaller.

They have several advantages. For instance, they’re immune to damage from the sea such as tsunami and they’re less likely to suffer from hurricanes, which are fed by the sea, and it’s easier to control borders. However, landlocked countries are usually also poor, with the exception of those in Europe, because they have transportation difficulties for international trade and have to pay customs duties and the like to their neighbours and beyond unless they’re in a customs union, and in order to trade efficiently they also have to maintain good relations with countries nearby, whereof there may be many due to the longer land border. Europe is, as I say, an exception. Liechtenstein is fine even though it’s double-landlocked, and Switzerland is one of the richest countries per capita in the world. The number of landlocked countries has also increased in recent years because there are more independent countries. Ethiopia, for example, the world’s most heavily populated country of this kind, has a population of around a hundred million, and lost its coastline to Eritrea. When Czechoslovakia split, that increased the number by one, although there was a time when Bohemia had access to the sea.

In toto there are forty-nine such countries in the world, 11% of the land surface and seven percent of the world’s population, which implies of course that their population is lower than average, which considering their terrain and climate makes sense. Surprisingly, they have a right to a maritime flag and some have navies. Bolivia lost access to the Pacific after a war with Chile in the nineteenth century, but still has a navy with more than a gross of ships and five thousand sailors. It also has a national Dia del Mar, which commemorates its former coastline and focusses on regaining access to it. Since it has part of the Amazon within its borders, the navy mainly operates on that river and is involved in drug trade reinforcement. The Swiss merchant navy has a remarkable history. It has just over three dozen ships. During the War, when it was surrounded by fascists and countries occupied by fascists, it was able to continue trade with the Allies by sending ships up the Rhine and using Rotterdam as its port. Its own port is Basel. Mongolia also used to have a vast empire and reached the sea, so it too had a navy and even invaded Japan with it, but it now consists of a single ship with six sailors on Lake Khövsgöl, which just transports oil across the lake. Finally, a number of landlocked countries border the world’s biggest lake, the Caspian Sea, and therefore have a navy in connection with that body of water. Then there was the Sea of Aral, which bordered Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has now mostly dried up, leading to the collapse of fishing and the onset of economic hardship in both countries. The Aral is also heavily polluted, and is worth considering on its own.

I first noticed the Sea Of Aral on maps as a child when I was wondering what the third largest lake in the world was. The topic of lakes, particularly the chain of Eurasian ones across the former Soviet Union, deserves a post of its own, but briefly, they’re the remnants of the Tethys Ocean along with the Mediterranean, which closed up from the mid-Oligocene into the Miocene around 23 million years ago. They also include Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake at 1600 metres, the largest freshwater lake by volume at 23 000 square kilometres and it’s also the size of Belgium and the oldest lake in the world, being a remnant of the Tethys. These inland seas are all undergoing a gradual drying upo process which even affected the Med, and will do so again in future, in a trend towards the disappearance of the final traces of the Tethys, but it’s still underway and the drying up of the Sea of Aral is more to do with the fact that it’s vulnerable to this happening due to that fact, but was exacerbated by the Soviet plan to irrigate land to grow cotton for export in the 1960s. It became two separate lakes about twenty years ago. It was also used for weapon testing and the rivers which do still drain into it are full of pesticides. Its ecosystem has basically collapsed due to human interference. This was part of the Soviet план преобразования природы – “Plan for the Transformation of Nature” – which could be linked back to the East German emphasis on plastics I mentioned the other day. There’s also pollution from industrial chemicals.

Apart from Kazakhstan, the Aral also borders the other doubly-landlocked state than Liechtenstein, Uzbekistan, and bearing in mind the problems landlocked states have in general, Uzbekistan could be expected to have them worse. It has five neighbouring countries. The climate is, as could be expected, fairly extreme, varying between 40°C in the summer and -23°C in the winter, and much of it is the Kyzylkum Desert. None of the rivers in Uzbekistan lead to the sea, so it can’t even in principle do what Switzerland does to trade, another likely consequence of being doubly landlocked. It has suffered considerably from the damage and destruction of the Sea of Aral, and unlike Kazakhstan, which is rich in mineral resources because of being very large, it has less recourse to other sources of wealth.

Turkmenistan borders both of the aforementioned states and is of course also landlocked. It’s considered a totalitarian state and is famed for renaming its months after the adopted name of the leader and the title of a book he wrote, as well as various other national symbols. These names were removed in 2008, but it’s not as extreme as it sounds when one considers that two of our months are named after Roman emperors. It’s just not the kind of thing one would expect to happen two millennia later. Turkmenistan is also a neutral state, which may be favourable to landlocked states for which good relations with their neighbours are particularly important, such as Switzerland.

Liechtenstein is the other double landlocked state and also has in common with Luxembourg, San Marino and Vatican City the distinction of being a landlocked European microstate. The imperatives other landlocked and microstates experience are very evident here, since it’s in the Schengen Area and has a monetary union with Switzerland, and like Switzerland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a distinction it shares with many other microstates.

Two other landlocked European microstates are surrounded entirely by Italy: Vatican City and San Marino. To be trainspottery for a second, these are two of the three landlocked states completely surrounded by a single country, the other being Lesotho with South Africa. Lesotho, like many other such countries, is mountainous and high enough to have a temperate climate, which makes it quite distinctive in being a developing country with a temperate climate. It may even be the only one. Eswatini is the other country of this kind bordering South Africa, and with that I’ll turn to the situation of landlocked Afrikan states.

Afrika has the highest proportion of landlocked states even though none are doubly landlocked. Out of a total of fifty-five countries (not sure about disputes so some may disagree with that number), sixteen are landlocked, and of those sixteen, fourteen have a low Human Development Index, the exceptions being Botswana and Zambia. This means life expectancy, schooling and average income (that can also be misleading, see Angola) are all low. There is a correlation between proportion of sea borders and success, although this doesn’t always apply because Madagascar, for example, is extremely poor, and it makes me wonder what would happen if Ireland became unified because then both Britain and Ireland would only have sea borders. The difficulty created for international trade makes the manufacturing sector smaller and many Afrikan landlocked economies therefore rely on mineral resources, exported without being made into products, which means they have no added value in the countries concerned. This also means they rely on relatively few commodities. Their market value tends to vary a lot. It’s also been claimed that the isolation of these countries, with relatively little contact with the outside world, tends to make the national character inward-looking, leading to a drift towards totalitarianism. It almost doesn’t need saying that the borders of these countries were usually initially drawn by the colonial powers with little regard for the needs of their inhabitants.

A country which has long bugged me, and which I have for some reason not bothered much to find out about, is Laos, which from my doubtless racist perspective as a White Westerner seems to be one of the most obscure countries in the world. It’s the only example in Southeast Asia and has five borders. It suffered a lot from the Vietnam War and is full of unexploded bombs. Since it’s on a peninsula and near the Equator, it bucks the trend of many other territories by having substantial rainforest. It is the least developed country in the region. For instance, it only has a couple of kilometres of rail leading in from Cambodia to the capital Vientiane, which is near the border, although a second line from China over four hundred kilometres in length is under construction.

The existence of these countries is a combination of our willingness to divide ourselves and identify locally, and of geography. Our planet is 71% covered in water with five inhabited continents out of six, and we live on land. There have been times in the history of this planet when there was just one supercontinent, and that time will eventually come again. In such a situation, assuming territorial claims existed, the number of landlocked nations would probably be much higher and they would be more arid, have more extreme climates and more extreme problems with trade. If, on the other hand, this planet was almost all water and largely covered in small islands, there would probably be no landlocked countries. Finally, in a situation where this planet had less water it would usually only have one landmass and therefore, once again, many landlocked nations, although since it might then have landlocked oceans there could be more countries like the US, Canada and Mexico with coastlines on two oceans. Finally, on a world like Mars with no oceans at all, if nations or other political entities ever came to exist on it, they would all be landlocked and all suffer from the disadvantages of that situation. Fuel for fiction I think.