JOIN USThe intriguing company of two dead authors
It’s eerie how great, late authors emerge from the grave to intone their messages every now and then. It may be from an innate desire to help, or a compulsion to instruct, or just the good old human tendency to say, “I told you so!”
There’s nothing ghoulish about this, no Ouija board or medium involved. The two gents who spoke to me across the decades were reasonably pleasant folk with a dry sense of humour, and their monologue was through the pages of their well-loved books, which fell into my searching hands: dog-eared, musty and evocative of other times as only the best books are.
Next year marks 75 years of George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm. A first India connection with Orwell is easy to establish: He was born in Motihari in Champaran district of Bihar. His short life was marked by beautiful, minimalistic writing: precise, neat and biting, never a word out of place, it is a primer for journalists of any age. Indeed, if he hadn’t been busy speaking to me, he could have been teaching today’s young scribes how to write news for the Web.
Less known is a German writer called Sebastian Haffner, born four years after Orwell in 1907. He wrote several books, but the one I refer to is Defying Hitler, a memoir translated into English by his son: It’s a tale less of defiance than of how a civilised people capitulated to a regime that spoke to their innermost insecurities and hatreds.
Animal Farm is described as a satire on Communism, but it could equally be a satire on any authoritarian regime. The animals on an English farm, led by the most intelligent among them, the pigs, overthrow the humans. Their two leaders, Napoleon and Snowball, fall out, and Snowball is driven off the farm. Napoleon, his message carried to the rest of the animals by a persuasive pig called Squealer, proceeds to become supreme leader. The rest of the animals lead increasingly miserable lives while the pigs rule the roost and eventually become exactly like the humans, the idealism of the revolution well and truly buried.
Orwell must have been incredibly prescient, or today’s voters incredibly impervious to the lessons of history, or both. For, the regime of Napoleon and company is characterised by:
Galvanising public opinion by holding out the threat of a common enemy, the humans. This the animal equivalent of religious polarisation.
Constantly blackening the character of the absent Snowball, denying his achievements. This is akin to erasing a former prime minister from public memory.
Falsifying data. As conditions deteriorate on the farm, Squealer produces stats to show how the animals are better off in every way – they have more to eat, work less and live longer.
All the while, food rations are being ‘readjusted’, i.e., cut. To paraphrase the pigs, there is no economic slowdown.
Reducing ideas to slogans simple enough for the stupidest animals to understand. The whole philosophy of animalism is condensed into “Four legs good, two legs bad”. Catchy acronyms and slogans, anyone?
Driving terror into the hearts of the other animals by punishing ‘traitors’ severely. In the end, no one dares speak out. Modern-day industrialists seem to identify with this sentiment.
Building a cult around the leader, marked by shock and awe (in Napoleon’s case, he is surrounded by snarling dogs) and fawning courtiers (a poem extolling his virtues replaces the animal anthem).
Haffner’s book tells the story of his early life in Germany between the years 1914 and 1933. A lot has been written about the Nazis, but this is something more fundamental: It describes, through German eyes, how common people change. At one level, it is more chilling than the out-and-out horror of the concentration camps. There is no one like Hitler in the modern day, but weird, en masse changes in public discourse play out in front of our eyes.
A couple of passages stand out. “In that year (1923), an entire generation of Germans had a spiritual organ removed: the organ that gives men steadfastness and balance, but also a certain inertia and stolidity. It may variously appear as conscience, reason, experience, respect for the law, morality, or the fear of God.”
Later in the book, Haffner describes what happens when he speaks out in a group of fellow trainee civil servants against mass murders by the SA (a paramilitary group and precursor of the notorious SS).
“You are always niggling and wilfully ignoring the monumental developments in the resurgence of the German people that are taking place today,” says one of them. “You grasp at every little excess and split legal hairs to criticise and find fault.” He proceeds to term Haffner and his ilk as a latent danger for the State. In today’s lingo: Anti-national.
All good things must come to an end, and Orwell and Haffner returned to their shelves, having noted drily that any resemblance to modern-day reality was purely coincidental. Why intrude then on a lazy weekend, I mused, and returned to surfing my phone, wading into the familiar cesspool of hate that social media has become.