In 1942 on June 4, Adolf Hitler visited Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim on the occasion of his 75th birthday.
The secretly recorded Hitler-Mannerheim tape is part of the Finnish War Museum archives and photos of the event were released in 2013. The audio provides an insightful first-hand account of Hitler and his thinking at this stage of the war.
Photographs and story:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fyle.fi%2Fuutiset%2F3-10362257
Hitler to Finland
On June 4, 1942, the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor four-engine passenger plane carrying Adolf Hitler took off from Wilhelmsdorff Airport, located near Hitler's headquarters, 20 minutes late because the plane's left landing gear wheel had failed. In his book Mannerheim and Hitler , Jukka Partanen tells how Hitler had admired the Finnish forest and the large number of lakes during the trip. "Wie schön das alles ist!", Hitler had said to General Paavo Talvela , who was a passenger on the plane .
The plane landed at Immola airport Ruokolahti at 12:25. At that time, Immola still belonged to Ruokolahti municipality. Today, Immola is part of Imatra.
According to a persistent rumor, when the plane carrying Hitler arrived in Ruokolahti, it almost collided with the 126-meter-high chimney of the Kaukopää factory. However, this is not true. According to Jukka Partanen's report, the plane carrying Hitler arrived at the current Immola airport in an east-west direction, and the distance to the barrel was about two kilometers. Instead, the plane's pilot-captain Hans Baur flew near the barrel later in the day. He made a test flight with the plane after repairing the brake problem.
When the plane had landed, Adolf Hitler stepped out of the plane and was the first to greet the president of the republic, Risto Ryti . After inspecting the company of honor, the leader couple continued their journey in an armored Mercedes 770 Offener Tourenwagen - a car that Hitler had given Mannerheim as a gift the previous year. Car driver Kauko Ranta has said that Hitler had been talking non-stop during the whole few kilometers of the car journey.
Marshal Mannerheim and Hitler met near Vuoksenniska in the yard of the Kaukopää factory, where two trains had transported both Mannerheim and President Ryti. The trains were next to each other, but two pairs of tracks had been removed between them to make it easier for the guests to move. Hitler got out of the car and walked together with President Ryti and the rest of the party towards the train carriages. After congratulations and greetings, Hitler moved to the restaurant car together with President Ryti.
In the restaurant car, Hitler talked for a long time with the members of the Finnish government who were there. Hitler moved to the marshal's saloon car, from which Marshal Mannerheim and Hitler walked out towards a nearby forest road. There, Finnish and German officers were waiting for them in a line, ready to be introduced. Jukka Partasen says in his work about Hitler's visit that the last Finn in line was Sergeant Aarne Voutilainen . He later recalled the meeting: "For a long time, I doubted who the only one with only an edgeband was. Marski explained it in German. It looked piercingly."
Mannerheim and Hitler returned back to the railway yard. There, Hitler entered the saloon car, where he had a one-on-one conversation with the President of the Republic, Risto Ryt. Hitler told Ryti how it bothered him that Germany could not help Finland in the winter war. Instead, Hitler promised Ryti that Finns would no longer have to suffer from hunger. The few funds of the Germans can be reduced to the extent that they are enough for the Finns as well.
After their conversation, Hitler and Ryti got off the train and walked to Marshal Mannerheim's train. There, a celebratory lunch was waiting for them in honor of the marshal's birthday. It started more than half an hour behind the original schedule just before 2 p.m. The guests were in two different restaurant cars. In the second carriage, it was possible to listen to party speeches through loud speakers.
Adolf Hitler did not drink alcohol and was also a vegetarian. That's why he was offered egg, rice and cabbage pies and asparagus soup as an appetizer. The main dish was vegetable pudding. Hitler did not touch the fruit salad for dessert, because alcohol had been used to prepare it. Hitler had tea and mineral water as food. The rest of the party got salmon soup and stuffed goose for lunch, as well as wine and champagne as food drinks.
At lunch, the President of the Republic, Risto Ryti, gave a speech. In his speech, he told, among other things, about the life of Marshal Mannerheim. Hitler, on the other hand, discussed the dangers of communism and the warm relations between Finland and Germany in his speech. Birthday hero Mannerheim, who spoke last, thanked Hitler and the party crowd as they grace the occasion with their presence. The speech can be listened to in its entirety in Yle's Living Archive .
After lunch, Hitler, Mannerheim, Ryti and the German marshal Wilhelm Keitel moved four of them to the next saloon car. There is a secretly recorded recording of the conversation that took place there, on which 11 minutes of the conversation were recorded. In total, the conversation lasted an hour. The preserved recording is probably the only recording of Hitler's private speech preserved for posterity. You can listen to the recording in Yle Eläväs archive .
After the meeting, Hitler moved with the German guests to the last carriage of the marshal's train. Very little is known about the conversation that took place there. At least Hitler has brought up Mannerheim's concern there that Finland has not received the promised troops. According to Jukka Partanen's work, Hitler had ordered his subordinates to follow the agreement made with Mannerheim.
On his way home to the airport, Hitler left in the same car as President Ryti. Marshal Mannerheim, on the other hand, traveled together with Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in another car. At the airport, Hitler shook hands with the entire party. His plane took off from Immola airport at 18:30. The departure took place an hour and a half later than originally planned.
You can see more pictures of Adolf Hitler's visit to Finland on the Finnish Defense Forces SA-kuva website. Enter Hitler's AND visit in the site's search field, and you will see all nearly 300 pictures related to the visit.
For more information see http://sa-kuva.fi/ and search for 'hitlerin 06'
Transcript:
00:08
For several years, I had a persisting thought to come to Finland --
00:13
and moreover, when possible, completely in cognito, and not only for getting to know the country, --
00:20
but above all to take part in the Olympic Games, which I thought would be organized in Helsinski (sic) [in 1940].
00:33
I had for several years before been admiring the Finnish warriors in Berlin, --
00:38
and was moreover aware of their freedom fight at time of the Great War, the result of it, and the name of their Marshall.
00:53
I myself could not even have dreamed that Fate would guide me to Finland under these present conditions.
01:00
The war, in which we now go together, was not foreseen by Germany -- and I can calmly say -- neither was Germany prepared for it.
01:13
Had we thought that this war were possible, then the preparations would have been more profound, better, more practical, and more appropriate.
01:28
We perhaps believed in a possibility of negotiations in Europe --
01:35
if in some states the perpetuity of the Treaty of Versailles should have been waived.
01:43
But I had a strong hope that there would be a success, simply by the power of reason and by realizing --
01:51
that with the impossible conditions, it may also become impossible to apply any friendly revisions.
02:02
I had instated a very considerable social programme.
02:07
I have .. myself within my own people... ascended from being a common German with an austere background, --
02:14
and I had not other goal in life but to carry through a very considerable social programme, --
02:20
and also a large supplementary cultural programme.
02:23
These are the tasks I have dedicated myself to.
02:26
The ones for which I must say Providence has now dictated differently, --
02:33
and after it became necessary for my own people to take up arms, --
02:41
for their freedom, I was glad that Providence had made me .. to take this step.
02:50
The development of the political situation has only made it possible since June 1940 --
02:58
to see the lingering threat through the German eyes,
03:04
and in line with this to make decisions, and in reality, binding decisions.
03:11
Each step followed from this decision.
03:18
To have taken the steps, not only have I no regret for, but having taken the steps, I am today glad for.
03:24
Because only the struggle that is now behind us, and which also lies before us, has revealed us the size of the danger
03:33
that was hovering not only before us, but before the whole of Europe.
03:38
Maybe, if I had had an intimation beforehand of the extent of the preparations of Bolshevism against Europe, --
03:46
the decision would have been a harder one for me to make.
03:50
It's quite sure that I would have made it, because I am one of those men that are unwilling to avoid the risk, --
03:56
or the present inevitables, or the future inevitables,
04:02
and are also themselves from the outset accepting each danger and each concern, --
04:09
and especially, would not to pass on to the next generations something that once MUST be done.
04:15
Today, knowing how unengingly great this danger was, I am therefore still glad --
04:20
that Providence let me gain the strength and the insight to make this decision.
04:27
This decision has now for the second time in our history, brought together the German and the Finnish nations -- in a battle against the common opponent
04:39
Already in our first joint battle for the first time our celebrant of today employed his great personality for the Finnish people.
04:56
Already this first battle had created a bond that has persisted.
05:05
The second battle – on this I am confident -- will strengthen these ties permanently.
05:11
For we have an insight which will not sway - there will always be a victory,
05:19
and there can be given no peace without victory, --
05:23
there will be a victory no matter what it will look like.
05:28
The danger in the East naturally still remains, lurking somewhere and I therefore believe --
05:35
that regarding the farthest future of a fair number of European nations, they have a common interest --
05:44
in that the danger must always be observed with an watchful eye, --
05:50
and when necessary, they must also confront it with a keen sense.
05:57
Now I am by fate, by the circumstances and by Providence designated as the leader, not only for the German people, --
06:05
but I have also been .. appointed the supreme commander of the German Wehrmacht.
06:11
I am now happy to be able in this capacity, upon the Marshal of Finland, convey my congratulations today
06:19
On behalf of not only myself, but on behalf of all German soldiers, --
06:30
who regard with a real admiration their Finnish comrades.
06:35
It is so easy for us to talk of a friendship towards the Finnish Armed Forces,
06:42
when you have such brave allies, knowing such a brave people on one's side.
06:50
Additionally, I will speak in the name of the entire German people, --
06:53
because today we have a national army and the German Reich is a people’s state.
06:59
The Army, the Wehrmacht and the People are together as one.
07:04
The whole German people at this moment in their thoughts share what I speak.
07:10
The people admired the Finnish soldiers .. it admired the Finnish people .. and it ... also admired the military leadership.
07:23
For your 75th birthday I can therefore wholeheartedly convey not only the best wishes of the whole German people, but also those of the Wermacht, and those of my own.
07:36
I also thank for the hospitality that myself and my companions have been enjoying here.
07:43
And lastly, Mr Marshall, I shall express my own wish --
07:47
that your native country .. its people .. and ... for us .. our common cause
07:55
shall remain for many many years more, Sir Marshal!
08:02
(People leaving the tables and the carriage)
08:06
(A smaller group moves to Mannerheim's car, and the rest of the recording is from there. This has the "secret" part.)
08:11
I so greatly regret that -- we could not help the Finnish people in their first freedom fight two years ago [Winter War 1939-40]
08:19
but it was not possible, we were bound to the west --
08:23
and a two-front war was not attainable.
08:28
Therefore I am very happy that we now for the second time, --
08:32
and I hope for this time permanently, --
08:36
fighting against an opponent when, --
08:39
should it win,
08:41
there would ... not be a victory of any earlier kind, --
08:49
but an annihilation of our two nations and I believe that of Europe as well.
08:54
I know what Finland had to do in this whole fight
09:00
and how hard the sacrifices were which it brought on the Finnish people.
09:04
and .. I can assure you no matter what may happen, --
09:09
the German people will absolutely, reliably and unfailingly stand behind the Finnish people --
09:17
and the peace objectives the Finnish people -
09:24
-- and they are to me the only conceivable ones --
09:27
they will also be fought for.
09:29
I also know () situations in life () () ()
09:39
because it cannot be that in 15 or 20 years, a new war begins for a Nation.
09:44
And the adjectives of existing and non-existing would come into use.
09:49
That you, Mr Marshal, at your high age are the leader of the Finnish people, and that
09:57
they are lucky to possess such brave leader We admire that, and that ().
10:12
(Probably the sound of cinema film being reeled)
10:21
The Lord Chancellor and the supreme commander of the German Armed Forces!
10:26
For the most amiable congratulations, --
10:30
I would like to be allowed to express my most respectful thanks.
10:37
These wishes are for me and the Finnish Armed Forces one of the greatest honours, --
10:44
which my heart and my .. thoughts .. fully appreciate.
10:55
I thank you in any case heartfelt for the beautiful congratulatory presents which are intended for me personally.
11:12
These gifts ... will be my lasting memory of today's fierce battle --
11:22
for the highest values of spiritual and material culture.
11:28
A battle, which we are allowed to carry out alongside the glorious and powerful German Wehrmacht.
11:39
The importance and the value of the honour bestowed upon me today by your presence, --
11:49
Mr Lord Chancellor, will be here among us highly regarded.
11:58
That it was the supreme commander of the German Wehrmacht himself who conveyed these congratulations and gifts --
12:08
would not only be the greatest joy to me and everyone here, --
12:15
but it is also an honour that is deeply felt by us.
12:24
Particularly highly I think of the fact that you, Mr. Chancellor, found the opportunity --
12:31
to take this journey, especially in the days --
12:36
when the massive and brilliant beats of the hearts of German leadership and of the German men, and German weapons, --
12:46
are bringing us closer in the hope of a far-reaching decision.
12:52
So I will conclude with the expression of my respectful gratitude with the hope that --
13:02
the good weapons be granted in the course of this year, for the just cause --
13:10
to render the pest herds of Bolshevik barbarism harmless.
13:17
May the fighters united in the brotherhood-of-arms bring their respective peoples peace, and rescue --
13:25
the whole Europe from danger, which has threatened us --
13:30
over two decades like a nightmare on our eastern borders.
13:39
(Probably noise from a cinema film being reeled)
13:48
Yes, take a good look.
13:51
A major threat, perhaps the worst one --
13:54
which we naturally only now can fully evaluate at all.
13:59
We ourselves had no precise idea --
14:03
how monstrously this state had been equipped with.
14:09
Mannerheim: That we could not have guessed in the Winter war [1939-40].
14:12
We could not have guessed it in the Winter war [1939-40].
14:15
Naturally we were under the impression they were well equipped, -- but what there was in reality.
14:22
And now, there is no longer any doubt on what they were up to. --
14:27
That‘s apparent. So it went.
14:30
They have the most extensive armament that could ever be conceived by Man,
14:36
so .. had someone told me .. that a state .. mit
14:47
had someone told me that a state can send 35,000 tanks to the battle,
14:56
then I would have said: "you are out of your mind“.
14:58
(Ryti) 35,000?
14:59
(H.:) 35,000 Tanks -- (Ryti): Tanks.
15:02
At the moment we have annihilated 34,000 tanks.
15:06
If one of my Generals had told me that here a state could possess 35,000 tanks, then I would have said
15:15
"You, my dear sir, you are seeing everything double, or ten-fold. It is madness, you are seeing apparitions."
15:19
We had not thought it possible.
15:23
I have already told you that we have discovered factories, the one in Klamarovskaya for instance (actually Kramatorskaja) , --
15:29
was just two years ago only a farming village – we had no idea.
15:33
Today, the site has a tank factory, which was to employ 30,000 workers in its first phase and when fully completed, 60,000 workers.
15:41
One single tank factory! We have taken it over. One gigantic factory!
15:47
The masses of workers, however, would be living like animals .. so.. (..) (Ryti): In the Donetsk area? (H.): In the Donetsk area.
15:54
Mannerheim: When you think that they have had been given the freedom for 20 years, over 20 years, nearly 25 years to prepare themselves --
16:05
[Hitler speaking on top of Mannerheim..]
16:07
and everything for the arms. Only the arms!
16:13
aah, that you said. I previously told that to your President [Ryti] --
16:19
I had no previous idea.
16:20
It would have been even worse for my heart, had I foreseen it.
16:24
But the decision I surely would have taken, because there was really no other possibility.
16:32
And .. for myself .. it was clear already in the winter 1939-40 that a confrontation must arise.
16:42
Myself had a nightmare about the west, --
16:46
a war on two fronts, that would have been impossible.
16:49
Because we were exhausted.
16:51
Today we see it better than we perhaps were to acknowledge.
16:54
We were exhausted then.
16:57
Our whole .. I essentially wanted already in the autumn of ´39 … I wanted to undertake a western campaign.
17:04
Only this darned miserable weather, that we had, that had kept us from commencing that.
17:09
Our whole armament was .. yes .. it is an armament for the good weather
17:15
It is very capable, it is fine, yet it is unfortunately an armament for the good weather, emphatically.
17:20
We do have witnessed it right here in the war. Our whole armament had naturally been tailored for the west. --
17:25
and previously, we all had the belief, uhmm.. --
17:29
that was just our opinion since the times immemorial, that in wintertime one cannot wage war.
17:34
And we have also the German tanks, the German tanks, --
17:39
and they were not evaluated for a preparation for winter warfare.
17:41
But trials had been done in order to become convinced that you will NOT be able to wage any wars in winter!
17:47
That is another point of departure.
17:50
We were facing constantly the same question in Autumn 1939.
17:55
I wanted to attack under any circumstances, and I was convinced that I would be making the French capitulate in six weeks.
18:01
But it was a question of our mobility. And that darned rainy weather, I myself know --
18:06
that French area quite well ---
18:12
And I could not block the view of many of my Generals, that we probably would not be gaining that momentum, --
18:20
that we would be unable .. to employ our tank force. There was also the fact that we would not be able to employ the Luftwaffe --
18:26
at the provisional airfields, owing to the rain. (I know Northern France myself, having been a soldier stationed there during the Great War for 4 years.)
18:33
And so these delays came. Had I been done with France in the year 1939, then the history of the world would have taken another course.
18:43
So I had to wait until the year 1940 and that unfortunately was not happening until May.
18:49
The 10th of May was the first fair day, and on the 10th I immediately attacked.
18:54
On the 8th of May I gave the orders for the attack on the 10th of May.
18:59
And then we had to undertake these () enormous reorganisations of our divisions from the western to the eastern front, --
19:09
not until the occupation. We had this mission in Norway, and suddenly, at the same time ..
19:15
– I can calmly say it today – we were met by a great disaster.
19:19
namely the weakening .. that was emerging in Italy .. firstly through the situation in North Africa,
19:25
and secondly though the situation in Albania and Greece .. a very great misfortune.
19:29
We had to help at once.
19:32
That for us at a single blow first of all again resulted in a tearing apart of our Luftwaffe, a tearing apart of our tank units --
19:39
just as we were making the tanks ready for the eastern front.
19:45
We now had to submit at one blow two divisions, two complete divisions, and additionally replace a third one, it having endured continuous heavy losses.
19:59
There were such bloody battles during the desert fighting.
20:03
That all we have naturally then later felt in the east.
20:07
There was no other thinkable way, as the decision was inevitable.
20:15
I then had a discussion ..with Molotov.
20:19
And it was quite clear .. that Molotov would go on with the decision to begin a war --
20:26
and when possible I would prevent him, and make him free of his war () () ()
20:33
Because the demands that man placed were quite evidently meant for ultimately dominating Europe! () --
20:42
(((())) politische (()) ganze (()) dass gewesen ()
20:47
Already in the autumn of 1940 we were facing an unrelenting question: should we allow a breakup to happen?
20:57
I had then given the Finnish government advice to always negotiate --
21:05
and to win time, and to drag their feet in any discussions.
21:14
And I always had one fear: that Russia would suddenly overtake Romania in the late autumn --
21:21
and gain the possession of the oil wells.
21:24
And we were not fully prepared in late autumn of 1940.
21:28
If Russia had occupied the Romanian oil wells, then Germany would have lost the war.
21:35
And it could be done with with with 60 Russian divisions.
21:39
Furthermore, we then had no troops in Romania.
21:44
The Romanian government was late to turn to us, and the force we had then would have been laughable.
21:50
You only need to conquer the oil fields.
21:52
In September or October, with our weapons, I was in no position to start a war, it was impossible.
22:00
Naturally, we also had not in any way prepared our deployment in the east.
22:06
The units would first have to be consolidated in the west, and get their armament in order.
22:11
Ultimately, we too have also made sacrifices in our western campaign.
22:16
It would have been impossible to get involved before the spring of 1940.
22:22
And had the Russians in autumn 1940 taken over Romania, and gained the possession of its oil wells, --
22:30
then we would have been helpless in the year 1941 .. without the petroleum.
22:35
We do have a large German production, but what the Luftwaffe alone consumes, what our tank units consume, that is one monstrous figure.
22:46
That is .. a usage beyond any imaginable amount.
22:51
And without a supplement of at least 4 to 5 million metric tonnes of Romanian oil the war could not be conducted any longer. (rastlos?) (())
22:59
And therefore I had one big worry.
23:03
Therefore it was my desire at that time to manage the situation by negotiations until such time when we would be strong enough --
23:08
to counter this blackmailing.
23:11
When the negotiations were simply pure extortion. That was extortion, the Russians knew that --
23:14
we were unable to help ourselves while we were tied to the west, they could blackmail us all the way.
23:20
And first on the visit by Molotov, I told him curtly that we would not accept these claims. ()
23:32
So the negotiations came to an end totally and abruptly. () was ((())))
23:40
There were four points. One point concerning Finland, was their right to protect their freedom from the threat represented by Finland. I said: "I’m not convinced that Finland would be threat to you“.
23:54
They said that Finland () would be against the friends of the Soviet Union, their coalition, that coalition would be persecuted.
24:07
"And a major power would not allow its existence to be threatened by any small state."
24:14
I said: "Your existence is surely not being compromised by Finland". (Mannerheim: "hmph!") (Mannerheim: "tosh") You really can’t say to me that your existence is being threatened by Finland."
24:25
"Yes, there would also be a moral threat to the existence of a major state and what Finland was doing was threatening the moral existence.“
24:32
I told him then: "In another war in the Baltic area we would no longer be remaining as a passive bystander.“
24:40
Then he asked me what our position regarding Romania was. We had given the guarantees.
24:46
Would the guarantees be directed against Russia?
24:50
I said: "I don’t think they are against you, because surely you are not intending to occupy Romania".
24:57
You see... "we have never heard anything of your intention to overtake Romania."
25:02
You have always said thet Bessarabia belongs to you, but you have not declared that you would like to occupy Romania.
25:08
Yes, he said: "I’d like to know precisely, if these guaran—" (END OF RECORDING)
Audio of the video released 7th April 2020 on Mark Devlin's YouTube channel. A good introduction aimed specifically at 'normies', fresh to the agendas at play as part of the New World Order.
Text and section following is from the original video upload:
A comprehensive breakdown of why the mainstream media narrative on the COVID-19 so-called 'pandemic' just doesn't add up, and evidence for ulterior motives behind the unprecedented worldwide lockdown. Vitally important information that needs to be circulated far and wide while there's still time with totalitarian tyranny just around the corner.
David Icke - THE CORONAVIRUS CONSPIRACY: HOW COVID-19 WILL SEIZE YOUR RIGHTS & DESTROY OUR ECONOMY
Please put aside any preconceptions you may have about David Icke’s other material, and just focus on the information he provides here. Also consider why Google-owned YouTube has banned this video, and why it has been deleted from other platforms, if the official story is true and stands up to any scrutiny:
A great resource for mainstream and alternative news stories from around the world related to this subject:
https://www.davidicke.com/
FORMER VODAFONE BOSS BLOWS WHISTLE ON 5G CORONAVIRUS, INTERNET OF THINGS, VACCINES, DIGITAL WORLD CURRENCY:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/r5LfM0ayxb1A/
Citizen researchers in the US do what the mainstream media won’t - proof that hospitals that are claimed to be at the frontline of the Coronavirus “outbreak” are actually empty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pIMD1enwd4
Mockery: ‘Stretched-to-breaking-point NHS staff’ perform dance routine. Do these people look exhausted and stressed to you? And why aren’t they ‘social distancing’ like we’re all being told to?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilcMCwTfiQA
Mike Pompeo lets slip that Coronavirus is a live exercise:
https://thefreedomarticles.com/live-exercise-pompeo-lets-slip-covid-19-pandemic/
US Establishment physician and immunologist Anthony S. fauci “predicts” a “surprise outbreak” pandemic during the next administration, (in 2017) (and gets it absolutely right.)
https://youtu.be/C95ECjxgcJE
Coronavirus in context by a professional microbiologist. (German video with English subtitles):
https://youtu.be/LsExPrHCHbw
COVID-19 NOT a ‘high consequence disease’ admits UK government: so how can the lockdowns be justified?
https://newspunch.com/covid-19-not-a-high-consequence-disease-admits-uk-government/
Can you really ‘catch’ a virus?
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-lL2efn2Md/
Coronavirus is not really COVID-19:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvLx17NNlu0
South Park coronavirus mockery:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixtieePLkV4
2013 rap record. Mentions 2020 CV at around 65 secs. How did they know?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P77bUdE4p4
Mark Devlin is a UK-based club and radio DJ, music journalist and author.
In 2010, he underwent what he refers to as a conscious awakening, bringing a new awareness of what's really going on in this world. His special area of interest was how this ties into the mainstream music industry, and the way in which A-list artists have been used to manipulate and mind-control the masses in line with a much larger agenda.
He now presents public talks on these subjects, as well as appearing on radio, and producing two regular podcast series.
In early 2016 he published his comprehensive book, 'Musical Truth.’ Its follow-up, Volume 2, will be published in early 2018.
]]>Six-hour audio of a video published in 2010 on YouTube where David Icke interviews Credo Mutwa, a South African shaman who discusses African history and folklore.
This four-part series on Israeli spying in the United States is pretty shocking. It originally aired on Fox News in December 2001. The videos remained on the Fox News web site for just a couple of days after the fourth installment before being taken down without comment -- in other words, being censored. Fox News must have received a great deal of pressure from Israel and the US government to completely throw away the efforts of this investigation.
"Old news" at this point, perhaps, but history is written by those who control the flow of information.
Of note in this video (all four segments contained in one video):
A highly placed US investigator states, "evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information." This statement suggests that such evidence must exist, since there would be no need for classification if nothing had been found.
American terrorism investigators fear certain suspects in the September 11 attacks may have managed to stay ahead of them, by knowing who and when investigators are calling on the telephone; information provided by an Israeli-owned (and IDF funded) telephone company at which several of the arrested Israeli 9/11 suspects worked.
It is revealed that the wiretapping capability that is permanently built into your telephone is built, installed, and maintained by yet another Israeli owned company and that this equipment is suspected of having a "back door" which allows the Mossad to use the same equipment to wiretap any telephone in America by remote control.
The availability of information on police phone calls resulted in the collapse of an investigation of a drug and fraud crime ring with Israeli connections. Investigators traced the information, which included calls to police investigators' beepers, to Amdocs.
This is the audio of talks about Israel-Palestine relations given at various Institute for Historical Review confererences (1981,1982 and 2002) which have been edited for improved audio clarity.
A scholarly but fervent look at the origins of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Zionist grip on US policy, and Israel's genocidal policies toward the non-Jewish population of the Holy Land, by an outstanding Palestinian diplomat and historian (author of the two-volume Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question).
Senior Advisor UN Palestinian Delegation, The Arab Higher Committee for Palestine (December 14, 1915 — March 29, 2003)
ISSA NAKHLEH was a Palestinian Christian, born in the Shepherd's Field in Palestine. He was a graduate of the London University (LL.B. ) and a Barrister at Law of the on our able Society of Lincoln's Inn, London. He was a member of the Palestine Bar and a member of many Bar associations in the Arab World.
He represented the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine in New York City 1947-1948. He was a Representative of The League of Arab States in Latiin America, with an office in Buenos Aires, Argentina 1956-1957, with the rank of Minister Plenipotentiary.
For the last 40 years Issa Nakhleh was representing the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine in New York City. He attended more than forty sessions of the United Nations General Assembly and made more than fifty speeches in the Special Political Committee of the United Nations on the Problem of Palestine.
Issa Nakhleh is the author of the Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem in two volumes which is the subject of this website. It has 41 Chapters and 1091 pages, with voluminous footnotes and 60 pages of photos. It deals with the ancient and modern history of Palestine, the political and religious questions and all United Nations Resolutions and the Principles of International Law and Justice relating to the Palestine Question.
He was a member of ASIL (American Society of International Law) and the International Law Association of London. He was a Panelist about Self -Determination in the Case of Palestine i n
the 82nd Annual Meeting of ASIL, April 30-23, 1988. He took part in a panel about the Israeli - Palestinian Dispute in the Annual Conference of the American Bar Association held i n Chicago
in August, 1990.
Issa Nakhleh was a Legal Advisor to a number of Arab Delegations to the United Nations.
An outstanding Christian Palestinian scholar provides an eloquent, informed look into the background and origins of the seemingly endless strife in the Holy Land. Hadawi, author of Bitter Harvest, and co-author of the two-volume Palestine Diary, examines the grim record of Jewish-Zionist encroachment and dispossession.
Sami Hadawi (1904–2004) was a Palestinian scholar and author. Hadawi was born in Jerusalem to Palestinian Christian parents. His father was a soldier in the army of the Ottoman Empire and died in combat during World War I. He is known for documenting the effects of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War on the Arab population in Palestine and publishing statistics for individual villages prior to Israel's establishment. Hadawi worked as a land specialist until he was exiled from Jerusalem after a fierce battle in his neighborhood between Israeli and Jordanian forces. He continued to specialize in documenting Palestine's lands and published several books about the 1948 Palestine war and the Palestinian refugees.
A writer and commentator who has often appeared on American television gives a moving and insightful Palestinian perspective on the seemingly intractable Israel-Palestine conflict. Taking aim at the hypocrisy on US policy in the Middle East, Said Arikat charges that US support for Israel's brutal oppression of Palestinians is a betrayal of the ideals that Americans claim to uphold.
Said Arikat is the Washington bureau chief for the Palestinian newspaper al-Quds, a daily for which he is a writer, columnist, and analyst. Previously he served as adjunct professor at American University and as spokesman and director of public information for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq.
In 2009 between Monday the 2nd and Friday the 6th of February, the broadcaster and author Michael Collins Piper (wikipedia) (website) (1960-2015) recollected his personal account of the fall of the highly influential Institute for Historical Review (wikipedia) (website) (began in 1979) and The Liberty Lobby (wikipedia) (started in the mid-1950s) on The Republic Broadcasting Network. These events led to the creation of The Barnes Review publication which was founded by Willis Carto (wikipedia) (1926-2015) who plays a key-role in the funding, founding, operation and history of all of the aforementioned publishers.
This is an amazing history which covers various topics such as corrupt police and judges, missing millions from the inheritance bequeathed by an heiress benefactor, a battle for what remained, people involved with Mossad and possibly the CIA, ADL and other organisations of Western power, the Russia-Afghanistan war, Jewish power and influence... and much more. It is above-all a tale of greed, corruption and self-interest overcoming moral duty and purpose by various individuals and groups to destroy some of the brightest lights in the initial chapter of the post World-War Two historical revisionist movement for truth and exactitude in world history.
According to Piper before the series was broadcast Carto told him “Hit ‘em and hit ‘em hard, tell all the details.”
Piper announced during this broadcast: “The people who want the facts are getting the facts because YOU CAN HANDLE THE TRUTH.”
Note the audio has been edited in the following ways:
A book of the above story.
Jonathan Bowden’s speech at the 12th meeting of the New Right in London on November 3, 2007.
Now this talk which I’m going to give on Revisionism, Left and Right, hard and soft, could be construed in the future as a dangerous talk, because the Chancellor of contemporary Federal Germany would like to extend, as a particular remit of the constitution/treaty which is being negotiated at the present time, the idea that revisionist laws—or more accurately, anti-revisionist laws—that exist in certain Continental societies which have allegedly “known Fascism” at a particular period, be extended to this society and to all other EU access states, including a great wave of Eastern European countries who of course have acceded to the Union in recent years.
Now, one of the ways round this of course is to speak methodologically and in such a way as you talk about an area, and you interpret what people have said, and you put forward what very mainstream and counter-propositional and non-revisionist historians and others have said. And if you keep it within that box and within that framework, to be frank, you will be “alright.” Don’t forget, my father’s generation was told they’d fought in the Second World War for freedom of speech. And now we have to attenuate what we say before we even get down to saying it, so that we will not fall liable to particular laws that haven’t even been introduced yet.
Now the concept of Revisionism: there are several different meanings.
One comes from Marxist-Leninist theory. Whenever you have within communism, say Georgi Plekhanov teaching Lenin quite a bit of the Marxism that he actually knew and some of its materialist theory. When you then had later on a reinterpretation of theory, either for reasons of brutal state power or statecraft or genuine ideological split, it was called a revision. You were revising the prior theory, and it is true that certain Right-wing writers, academics, fringe academics, people who will have been expelled from the academies, and so on have used the term “revisionism” as a counter-propositional term, as an “enemy” term. They’ve shot an arrow back at former political and ideological opponents by using this term.
There’s also, as the President of Iran(1) said quite recently in a German magazine, a genuine element within historiography—which is the writing of history, history as texts over time ramifying with each other—whereby different interpretations are revised over time and statements which were considered normative and absolute and beyond comparison later get changed and attenuated and repositioned and looked at in a different light.
Before I get on to the most controversial areas of Revisionism let’s just have a few, more minor and less emotionally charged examples.
Sir Winston Churchill: In the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, biographies which were not hagiographies, in other words biographies which weren’t enormous tributes to the man’s internal and external excellence, would not have been permitted. He was in some ways a secular sort of sacral figure. When these revisionist biographers—Ben Pimlott a little bit on the Left, John Charmley on the Center-Right to Right as a dissentient Cambridge don, and David Irving’s two volumes known as Churchill’s War—when these books occurred, they occurred in an era when Churchill was already dipping down. Charmley’s biography has Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Churchill on the front, which of course the Churchill family destroyed because they didn’t like that particular image of him.
So to revise something is to change the cultural shift, is to change the way in which something has been perceived that otherwise was uncritically received.
There are many examples. One key one in recent Anglo-Irish historiography is Cromwell and the massacres in Wexford and Drogheda. He was believed to have massacred, with the English New Model Army, two whole Irish towns, and Irish people have been taught this for centuries. Indeed in popular Irish culture the word “Cromwell” is worse than the “c” word in traditional usage because he killed everybody in those towns and all the women and all the children and all the animals!
Now there was a book published by Tom Reilly, a Trinity College Dublin university professor (similar to an Oxbridge level professor over here), called Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy and building on the partially revisionist essay by Thomas Carlyle about Cromwell in the 19th century which forced, particularly within Protestant discourse, a re-evaluation of our only military dictator in English/British history. The idea began to creep forward. There’s a little echo of it even in Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, where there’s a little bit of congratulations to Cromwell for being at least a man of will, of honor, of courage, and of decision, even though he was in turn a hateful regicide. So Cromwell has been revisited and has been turned around and has been revived.
It now appears that in Wexford and Drogheda, the Catholic parishional and diocesan records state that nearly everybody in that area who lived before his army passed through lived after his army passed through. That the number of people killed may have been a thousand combatants who were slaughtered at the high point of a battle when they themselves had surrendered and probably put up the white flag to draw people in before they used arms, which in most forms of war does result in such an event.
That event occurred in the context of Protestants being massacred in 1641. It’s taken four centuries. And this is just historical events between different peoples in these islands, for a slightly more judicious, a slightly more rounded, a less emotive, and more temperate view of massacres and events which are believed to have occurred, to be rewritten and entered into mainstream historical record.
Now when you’re dealing with events like the First World War and the Second World War, which are climaxes, which were the sort of the industrialization of the principle of death in relation to the First World War; many who went through that experience saw a sort of factory-type killing established in battlefields in Europe, whereby the surface of the Earth became lunar and looked like the surface of the moon. Millions of men slaughtered each other in mud and filth and barbed wire. These were extraordinarily savage events, almost sort of revolutions in consciousness for the generation that went through them. Therefore, even to have revised views about the circumstances that led to that war has been very controversial.
One of the earliest American revisionists was Harry Elmer Barnes, and he really concentrated on the First World War and the currents that led to it, both at a micro level, looking at the Lusitania sinking, and at a macro level, looking at the power politics that came out of that war and that many believe led to the Second World War, because many do see the second war as a postscript to the first. Many see it actually almost beginning in a stage one before war is actually announced in ’39 to ’40, because it was partly unfinished business and we were partly into a cycle. Much of the hedonism of the ’20s in Europe, and much of the despair of the Depression in the ’30s in Europe, was that generation sensing an enormous revisitation of the bloodbath was coming.
Most of the writers and intellectuals during that period realized they were living between two explosions and between two wars. We in 2007 are living in the after effects of the Second European Civil War, which is really what the Second World War in Europe amounted to. And the First World War was the First European Civil War.
There is a dissentient notion within political history that the American Civil War, which of course is different and distinct, has echoes of some of the conflicts that will follow. The use of mass artillery and early machine guns of a sort against massed forms of cavalry and infantry, leading to massacre on one side and a very defensive warfare on the other. And the fact that you have two regimes: a white racialist, aristocratic, slave-owning regime against an industrial, liberal, bourgeois regime which preaches radical democracy, which tries to lead us on the other side to a degree, which puts a client government into the defeated South after it’s all over. There are echoes. But this is inevitable because in cycles of war and history you will have echoes before, and you will have echoes afterwards.
Even the Boer War and its origins in 1899 through 1902 between ourselves (the British) and the Afrikaners has been revised and looked at again, even by liberals. But that is a war about which the controversial heat and the gas flare of intensity is much lower down.
When you’re dealing with much more incisive and explosive matters these things are much nearer the edge. And it’s not “talk”! You’ll lose your career; you’ll lose your reputation; you’ll lose your respect; you’ll be put in prison for having certain counter-propositional views about historical events.
In several major European societies at least 10,000 people, in one category or another, have been arraigned for these “crimes” of thought, including many major historians. Many historians, if you read them today, know that this is a minefield they will not go near.
If you take a very contemporaneous book like Richard Overy’s history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes(2) (as he calls them), the Soviet death total and the Soviet camps he’s infinitely cautious with. He’s prepared to draw an enormous amount of criminological and empirical evidence to prove that the Stalinist genocide maybe claimed a quarter of the lives that somebody like Robert Conquest writing in the ’50s and ’60s with The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow said. And he’s extremely careful and very judicious; very, very mainstream; very, very obliging to fact or presumed fact. Don’t forget many of the KGB archives have been opened up since 1990.
But when he comes to the Germans in the Second World War, there is a gap, and there is a statement whereby he said, “Some of what I’m going to say in this section may be refuted by future research.” And then he goes on to give a new version of the official version of the issue that most generations of schoolchildren have been indoctrinated with now for 40 to 50 to 60 years.
In the town that I live in, a selection of sixth formers from all schools were recently taken on an Auschwitz tour paid for by the local authority and its taxpayers to prove the evil of racism, to prove that voting for certain tendencies is regarded as a priori illegitimate and immoral, and also to look at a crime against humanity leading to the need for universal constructions of law and of morality.
And leading to trials whereby political leaders in conflicts that have little to do with what happened in Europe and beyond between ’39 and ’45 of the last century, can themselves be arraigned! The trial and death of Saddam Hussein involving procedures very close to the Nuremberg ones, very close to a similar ideology that was applied to post-war Yugoslavia, very close to an ideology that was applied to some of the fallen militarist leaders from Imperial Japan, very close to trials that people have wanted to enact but have held back.
Now, what’s happened in modernity is that the ability to kill large numbers of people has become an ideological weapon on all sides. During the Cold War, one part of the human race learnt a view of history. Few people know that there was a massacre of communists in Indonesia in the middle 1960s. I’ve met an Australian who saw a pyramid of bodies on one side of an airport in that society. Whereas other crimes would be on the media almost every other night. And the reason for this is that one of the legitimizations of human rights and civil rights rhetoric is the belief that certain tendencies are evil and unregenerate and that other tendencies “make mistakes” and “have excesses” and “commit blunders” or are “not opportune.”
Even in relation to the Iraq War 2 there is a mass debate within our contemporary establishment. The Lancet, which is the journal of our doctors, has said (methodologically) that 670,000 Iraqis, and more, have perished since the invasion, and Blair and Bush say, “It’s a lie! We refute their figures, we refute the methodology upon which those figures are based. The actual figure is 150 to 170,000.”
Why would they bother about that?
They bother about it because in the war of position and the crucible of political struggle the numbers matter and are of crucial importance, because they enable you to demonize one side and extol another. They enable you to excuse one thing as deviation or error (subject to revisionism of one sort or another). Or you actually say that one tendency, by virtue of these actions, is beyond even what it is to be political, is a species of Satanism, is that which you have nothing to do with.
One of the reasons we have a Left-wing society, a liberal society, is partly because conservatism, that which is supposed to “conserve,” is brain-dead in the West, and is terrified, and is afraid. But one of the reasons it’s afraid is because of this area of secular demonology. Because when you have to think in an illiberal way you will “go over there.” You will have to go “over there.” You will have to touch certain thinkers who actually are in that proximity, and that is demonic, and you have to remain in the Center. And if you remain in the Center, you can’t oppose the liberal Left. You can’t oppose the world as it now is inside Western societies. We’re now in the position that we’re invading other societies to impose what exists here (or variants of same) on them!
Of course there are a lot of people inside the West who do not agree with the dispensation that exists here.
Now, Germany was divided at the end of the Second World War into two occupation regimes. In contemporary history and journalistic writing the Eastern regime of Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker was in some ways described as it was, a country that built a wall to keep its citizenry in and shot them if they got over the barbed wire in an attempt to get over that wall
The Western Zone though, was never said to be “occupied.” It had been “freed.” It had been “liberated” by Western power and liberal jurisprudence, French, British, and American. We had set up a zone there that later became the Federal Republic of Western Germany. Since then, the German political elite and beyond it—Central European political elites—have been terrified of any reversal in the demonic fortunes of the parties that fought the wars that brought them to power. Any change, any shift, any relativism even, any minor factual amendment (which always will happen in history) becomes decisive.
In the First World War, Lloyd George and others invented a large strand of German atrocity story which was revealed in 1928 in the House of Lords. This is the idea that the Germans committed bestial atrocities in Belgium; the Germans ran around with babies on spikes; they committed atrocities against prisoners that were outside of the European consciousness and form of civility. It was later realized that it was complete propaganda, although in a society with a mass media that was far less refined and pervasive than it is now. You go out there and look at that screen out there, it’s enormous! (3) It covers the whole room ideologically and sort of in terms of its system of signs.
Now media understanding was much less cynical in 1914–1918. There’s a degree to which a large number of white people were stimulated by propagandistic elites to loathe and detest each other and to kill not just hundreds of thousands but millions of each other right across Europe. In accordance with actually predated forms of alliance politics which in an era of mechanized and mass politics meant less and less.
Now the First World War’s dipped down, there’s hardly anyone left. But the Second World War is still alive and still real in human consciousness today.
Mussolini and Franco have largely been historicized. Their dictatorial regimes, their traditionalist, European, socially authoritarian governments have largely entered into a process that acclimatizes them to the memory of Caesar, never mind Cromwell and Napoleon. They are seen as regrettable but normal European dictatorships.
The National Socialist one is not and remains in a sort of shadow, outside. And while we have the present dispensation that we have in Europe, that will have to be so. So you have to understand that what appears to be historical research is historical and is research. It isn’t about historical research as power perceives it.
If somebody says that Zionist terrorists blew up a hotel in Jerusalem in 1948, and Menachem Begin said, “There was a warning, but no-one else heard it.” That’s one view of history. Zionist militants say to this day that MI6 had its headquarters in that hotel, and therefore it was a “legitimate act of struggle.” Struggle! And those are two perspectives. But that is for historians and for minor debate and for articles in The Times and The Jewish Chronicle.
What happened in the middle of Europe in the 20th century is cardinal to certainly a definition of white or Caucasian identity today.
One of the many reasons why our people find it so difficult to assert themselves—even to think about the prospect that they might!—is because of these events and how they’ve been interpreted. Because, as soon as they say “This is the English flag behind; this is the British flag, the Swedish flag; this is the German flag”: “No! No! He’s got the English flag! He’s gone over there!”
You are entering into proximity to moral danger, to what some philosophers call “moral hazard.” You’re tiptoeing towards what the first thing a liberal journalist will ask you. I was once representative of an organization called “Western Goals” (it was a Cold War organization). The second question the journalist asked me on mainstream media was, “What’s your view of the Holocaust?”
That’s the second issue, because they actually had—and he had it on his paper there—two lines. One is, “Treat them like a negative barrister. They’re hostile to your case, and you rag them and you try and take them down.” That’s the first mental proposition for the interviewer.
The second is: “National Socialism—Shoah.” Get them squirming on that, and what they’ve got to say about what Enoch Powell said, or what they’ve got to say about the European Union, or what they’ve got to say about contemporary crime is of no significance at all, because you have them there! In the pit, squirming! And that pit is pre-programmed. It’s pre-programmed! And quite deliberately so. It’s irony piled upon irony, because, of course, many of the people who use these weapons partly don’t care about the truth itself, indeed deeply, often cynically have no interest in it at all! It is a weapon that’s used, a grenade; it’s a spear that is used.
Now a series of historians, often privately funded, often researching themselves, often people beyond even fringe academic life, have published a series of books since Maurice Bardèche in the late 1940s, questioning the veracity of some of these events, including people who’ve used other names which are not their own. Whether or not Alain de Benoist ever published a particular revisionist article using another name, he has never admitted to it. He has never said he didn’t do it. No-one knows, because you have to understand that this was extreme and deep thought criminality.
An intellectual rather similar to Bardèche was executed by the French Resistance and its occupation/liberation authorities in France just after the war: Robert Brasillach. So there is a degree to which certain people have paid with their lives for having certain ideas or living through them.
The French film director Truffaut knew Lucien Rebatet very well, because certain fascist theorists in France were obsessed with cinema; because that is mass ideology and mass visualization; if you have an authoritarian view of society you will want to communicate not with just the small elite but with the masses; you communicate with the elite before you communicate with the mass. And Truffaut once said, vis-à-vis his friendship with this old French National Socialist—which is what Rebatet was, he was beyond the Vichyite!—nevertheless he said, “You can respect men who are put to death for daring to adumbrate an idea.”(4)
This is in the land of Voltaire, don’t forget, where ideas are supposed to be free and set us free in pursuit of the truth.
Now, a range of writers, normally they’re in the United States. Why in the United States? Because they at least have (strangely) the covering of First Amendment rights and can publish freely, which is why an enormous amount of this material of course has come back; it’s come back into Europe; it’s come back even beyond Europe into the Arab and Muslim world in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s come back from often German Americans or expatriate Germans in America doing this sort of thing.
Tony Hancock said to me years ago, “What should happen to this material?”—by which he meant revisionist material—and I said, “Well, the internet will solve all that for you, but one way to do it, just one of many, is to give it to the Muslim world. Because it will then come back into the West in a way which does not seem congruent with the radical Right within the West. That’s one of the ways in order to do this.”
Now many of these revisionist historians of course are historians, who do not agree with each other and have different lines. Paul Rassinier is a social democrat of a sort who was actually imprisoned in a camp himself. Others may well be dissentient Jews like Friedrich Berg and Alexander Baron and others. Others are radical neo-fascists and ultra-conservatives. Others are Germans who believe that the use of the Shoah is a form of racism against them, that it is used to demonize German people and people of German ancestry all over the world.
The interesting thing about these “crimes” and the memory and the historical narrative through which they are institutionalized, is that they began affecting a particular nation-state and its warrior elite at a particular time. Then it extended to some of the allied nationalities. Then it extended out to (reflexively) the nationalities of people who destroyed that country! Now if somebody who’s English asserts themselves in an ethnic manner, with a little bit too much militancy, they will be accused of spiritually being aligned to those forces, when they are descended from men who flew planes that obliterated the cities of that government.
What has happened is that it has become a generic form of thought criminality which extends out to almost all Caucasians, and then beyond, including in the victor and successor states! So it’s become a generalized negative propaganda against all of us stretching from Iceland to Australia. No-one is immune from the taint of this retrospective “criminality.”
So it’s been used as an extraordinarily effective thought weapon and ideological buttress. And in societies where you can’t read Arthur Butz or Robert Faurisson or Michael Hoffman or Paul Rassinier or Wilhelm Stäglich or [unintelligible] or Walter Sanning or Jügen Graf or Germar Rudolf or Carlo Mattogno or any of these people. The irony is that people actually know what they say. The Daily Telegraph had a poll about four years ago in which they said—to the average Briton, this is the average Radio Four Briton:
“Do you believe the Shoah occurred?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe that the numbers that are used in contemporary historical record are right?”
“No!”
That is interesting. That is Joe Public, who’ve had nothing but one view, are prepared to accept that the figures are exaggerated, which of course if you put it in a certain way will get you imprisoned in certain contemporary Western societies. The irony is that because we have a conflict between state law and power and the desire to crush dissent and historical research, all sorts of little people, nerdy academics—people who don’t look both ways before they cross—get smashed down in the middle, because it’s a doctrine and an ideology of power against power in terms of memory.
If you’re a German citizen and you say what the Israeli state says occurred, you can be imprisoned!
This is a fact, because Yad Vashem says that the number of victims for the Shoah is a half of the number that you’re supposed to use. Therefore we have a situation that European countries will imprison their nationals for saying what the Israeli President can say openly!
But that’s because it’s about power. It’s not about truth! The view is that the significant proportion of the European population believe that the post-war settlement was unjust, that it was victor’s justice, that the government in 1948—although Adenauer may have genuine sides to him and was broadly speaking conservative in difficult circumstances—nevertheless his regime was a partly illegitimate one. That there is unfinished business there, that America’s domination of half of the Continent was a different version of Soviet domination of the other half of the Continent. That the endless laws of memory, and trace of memory, are an endless vilification of German people and people of Germanic ancestry.
During the 1970s and ’80s there was an enormous split in Germany between the generations, and there was an enormous amount of intergenerational hatred, and far-Left terrorism grew out of that: a rebellion against everything German, a rebellion against everything that had gone before, a destruction and a hostility towards everything that was prior. You had very great oddities, though because some of these revolutionary Left groups ended up fighting against Israel with the Palestinians: fanatically anti-Zionist but would kill anyone for a scintilla of what they deemed anti-Semitism. So you get these strange combinations as you always do within a crucible of history.
But nevertheless, the extraordinary damage psychologically and sort of intestinally, that was done to modern Germany by the self-hatred and loathing that has been institutionalized there as a result of the discourse of the Shoah, is incalculable.
The Jewish-American novelist Norman Mailer said that the real victims of the Second World War were the Germans. A revolutionary statement, and in many ways a truthful one. What he means by that is that the people have been partly spiritually destroyed, morally destroyed.
Because before you take a structure down, you take it down spiritually and morally and in terms of its ethical sense of itself. You take down that which is above the top consciousness of the rational mind. You take down that which leads to a morally efficacious sense of self. If you grew up believing that you’re descended from murderers and your nationality is worthless, and the most extreme form that your nationality took has no value—and even the communist states have an element of that—you will end up with a self-loathing population as Benoist has described it, which characterizes a large number of Western individuals at the present time.
It’s a sort of moral and psychological form of cancer, and almost everybody who doesn’t like the changes in Western societies has had this moment. Almost everybody who’s thought “I might in the 1970s vote National Front . . .”
“No you don’t!”
“What do you mean?”
“No you don’t!”
Because you’re going to be linked to a trajectory that links you to this, and a lot of Caucasian people feel, “Oh my God, you know, to sort of assert myself in a minor and nationalist way, I will be re-routing my sensibility through what is presented as ‘the dungeon’; the sort of Fred and Rosemary West writ large.”
Your average Western person says, “No! No I’m not going there. I’m not going there. A bit of conservatism’s alright. But I’m not going there!” And this means that we are, or have been left partly mentally defenseless in relation to many of the changes which have occurred. It’s a sort of secular version of a fall, in a way, and there is within contemporary liberalism the belief that there’s a denied God that needs a Devil, an extraordinary parallelism in the use of this idea.
People who hold these sorts of ideas, these sorts of historians including Serge Thion, who’s a Leftist, including Noam Chomsky who wrote an introduction to Faurisson’s book saying he should be given at least freedom of speech, for which he was vilified by neo-conservative lobbies in the United States. Everybody who’s gone into this area faces demonization. Not just white people either. Anyone who touches this area faces it, and it’s created a sort of paralysis and a double reflex in our entire population.
It means that the most Right-wing view that’s allowed in our society is virtually President Bush and those around him. That’s where you can go and remain within the spectrum of the non-demonic within secular modernity. You go outside that, you are morally other.
And it is not nonsense that I’m speaking. Almost every self-conscious generation that’s come up since the war has this moment, irrespective of education, of class, and of everything else. There’s this moment when people will say, “You’re one of them, and it leads to that, and I don’t want to know!”
And the problem is that we as a European civility will gradually disappear, because the generations that fought in that particular war and came after will disappear, but the memory and the ideological reinterpretation of these events will not.
Blair was asked in 1999 why the Second World War was fought, and he said it was to protect the Jewish race from extermination. Which is an extraordinary remark and an extraordinarily illiterate remark! This is what you get. Because many Western politicians never inform their population about normative historical truth, an enormous number of people are totally miseducated now.
The fact that the Second World War resulted from a confluence of parallel institutions of power, and the idea that great powers in Europe balanced stable alliances with each other, so that Germany could have one area but not another, and Britain would give guarantee to another state in order to invade, which in the minds of some of the people who made these decisions was the cause of war.
It’s all out of the window with Blair. Blair views the whole of that war—and the present intellectual clerisy and academic and intellectual life; turn on the media that isn’t sport over there and they all agree with this view—this war was fought from the retrospective outcome of ovens at its end. It had nothing to do with rivalry between states, nothing to do with ideological conflict! It had to do with some of the victims of that particular conflict and its aftermath.
So why has this event become so crucial?
It’s become so crucial because it justifies the post-war age.
It justifies Western multiculturalism. It justifies Western multi-racialism. It justifies mass immigration by virtue of reverse. It justifies forms of liberal and attenuated European integration, because separate nationalism is a bad thing. Therefore you integrate to overcome the memory and legacy of events which have occurred. This isn’t theory. No-one’s interested in the European Union, let alone most Europeans, but there is a degree to which whenever they get a chance to vote on these things, a certain mania of consciousness intrudes.
We had a referendum recently in two Continental countries that were before then thought to be very pro-EU. One politician from one of those countries went to stand in the demarcated fields of Auschwitz and said on mass European and world television if people vote “No” in this very minor, methodological referendum/poll they are “voting for the Shoah; they are voting for this!” He later revised—a bit of revisionism on the spot—he later “revised” that sort of remark. Jack Straw said that the rejection of those treaties “would be a moral disaster for Europe.” He later said that he’d said no such thing or meant something completely different. Because a vote before it happens is crucial, and then afterwards you think, “Well, who cares about that?”
So there’s a degree to which the post-war world is based upon this. And one of the most crucial reasons for this is the domination of the whole of the Western self-conception by the United States, and the domination of Mid-East politics by Israel and Israel’s conception of itself in relation to the United States, and America’s conception of its own self-interest as almost being aligned with Israel to the degree that maybe there is a little bit of separation, maybe there is a distinct chink of light between the contemporary American nationalist/neo-imperialists and Zionism. But it is so fine a difference and you have radical Protestantism as the cultural discourse in the background that forces—even if there was any difference—a virtual merger between the two.
And this means that European countries, whether they like it or not, in the First and the Second Gulf Wars, were dragged along to fight essentially an Israeli war pursued by American power, whether they wanted to or not. And all the muteness and the partial semi-surrender, and the very weak and rather corrupt French president daring to stand up to the United States and its colossal power, with Germany hiding, literally hiding—contemporary Germany—behind the French, was an attempt at a minor neutralism and which is an attempt not to go along with that.
Britain? We’re in with America, and we go where they go. And any war or adventure they want, we go in as well. We’ve spent six-and-a-half billion of our cash in Iraq. We’ve lost 200 men. We’ve achieved absolutely nothing! Absolutely nothing. And we have done so because in 1956 we attempted a very minor independent move with the Israelis and with the French and earned American disapproval. And that was a very cold burst. And the British establishment doesn’t like cold bursts. And American power faced internally within the West is awesome, even though they have very little idea what to do with it.
And yet, in a strange way, they do know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is imposing the logic of an attenuated French Revolution, of the American Revolution, on the whole planet. Equality, indeterminacy, aspiritualism, materialism, the right to shop, the right to vote (parts of it are the same), human rights, civil rights, Israel always safe. This is the agenda that’s being pushed all over the world in Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East, in Central and Latin America, which they virtually regard as a dominion and an extension of their own state power, from the Monroe Doctrine onwards.
Now, this means that when you tack against certain historical verities, even in relation to numbers, you are pushing against the nature of the modern world as it’s become, as it’s been constructed. So in a way you are chipping away at the foundations of an enormous edifice.
An element of the emotion around these issues is semi-religious! There are many people who regard blasphemy in relation to this orthodoxy in the way that atheism would have been treated in this country before 1800. It is: you are outside if you posit this. And this is a crucial thing that Right-wing and Europeanist discourse has to confront and has to, in a sense, overcome. The past won’t do it. To just say, “Time will pass, a century will pass. In 40 years from now it’s a century from me to them! People will forget.”
No! Because these things will be put before them always and present and forever and a day. They’ll even be used against assertion by the new Russia, a country which can only be fitted into the schema in a sort of strange way, but a power that fought might and main against fascism and has achieved an element of national sense of itself under communism in that war. It has to go along with the feelings of guilt and moral reparation as well, certainly if it’s ever to join the rest of the West in a wholehearted way. And if you are perceived as a country that links at all with the ideas of the regimes that fell in flames and have been demonized by trial, even if you fought against them in the past, you are part of that trajectory of guilt and that solidarity of lost innocence.
Now, the figures that were adumbrated immediately after the war of seven-and-a-half million have come down to six, have come down to four-and-a-half according to Norman Stone. Raul Hilberg, for instance, would push that much further down. So we have a sort of collapse in some of the paraphernalia of this particular historical narrative. But what’s really happened is that the political use of this has partly separated off from revisionism and counter-revisionism, because it’s become an ideological arrow, bludgeon, weapon, independent of the facts.
So there is a degree to which, even if there is a sort of conceptual shift—like your computer goes down, “clunk” and then you reboot it, and it comes up again—and Western ideology in the next 50 years, from the top down, recomposes itself to say, “Well there was an error about these figures, and there was Communist post-war exaggeration particularly from Poland, and we’re now revising it all for you, maybe for a lesser figure.”
But the impact of the moral statement will in a sense be the same or different. Indeed, to say that because the figure may well be less, that less of a moral crime is imputed, will be made to be worse than the prior discourse, because it’s not really about those who suffered and those who died and those who didn’t in a particular way. It’s about who rules the West, and who rules Britain, and who rules the United States, and what the future of the world will be.
At the moment we have an enormous “clash of civilizations” as it’s called, and much of the Western world is now convulsed by the idea that we are pitched headlong into an antithetical struggle with the Islamic world. You only have to turn on the news broadcast to see that. And many ordinary Westerners internalize this and cannot at all understand, in many ways, what is going on. Has communism been replaced by a new bloc in secular Western terms that we need to oppose?
But in actual fact, of course, although cultures and civilizations will clash and will often clash violently with each other, the reason for these wars and the reason for this contestation began in 1945, began in 1939, began in 1914 and is a continuation of these processes that may even predate that. We are always in a situation whereby if we were to chart an independent course we would have to overthrow American foreign policy in the last 50 years.
I was once asked on a platform for a party(5) that I used to be a member of—that changed its opinions about some of these matters several years ago—what my view of Israel was, and I said—and everyone else on the platform had refuted what I’d said before I’d said it, which is an interesting conceit—and I said, “Israel is a terrorist state, and is not a morally legitimate one.”
Horror! But he’s posh, and he’s got a bow tie on, so we’ll let him say it. But there was moral horror. And this is a group that is regarded as fascistic, don’t forget. This is a group that is regarded as a far-Right group by the media. The Guardian would say they’ve just changed their lines to accommodate themselves to new realities. It’s just cynicism.
In actual fact it’s not quite that actually. It’s cynicism and other things as well, all combined. But, there’s a degree to which we will be dragged into war after war in relation to the Third World, in relation to American power politics over the Gulf and their need for oil, but also we will be systemically dragged in to the radical and increasingly radical consequences of the post-war dispensation. The fact that in a way the governments and opportunities of white people in Europe that were occupied twice over after 1945 by communism and American capitalism and by a particular world view which is not a European one, and that the occupation of the West was subtler and deeper and more invasive and more destructive than the occupation of the East.
Communism killed and chopped off the arms and behaved like you’re on a Procrustean bed. “You want more sympathy? We’ll cut another finger off!”
But American domination was subtler, more deconstructive. It’s broken down people in the West far more than people, though physically savage, were broken in the East, because it’s destroyed elements of their self-respect. Peter Hain was asked recently, “What has Western civilization achieved?” He said, “Nothing! . . . Nothing at all!”
He said “Nothing at all”!
“These are the people,” he said with his finger in the air, “these are the people,” he was then negotiating the peace deal in Northern Ireland, “these are the people who gave us Stalin,” interesting as he’s a Leftist, “Stalin and Hitler, these are the people who gave us that!”
It’s interesting isn’t it? This is his own civilization as he allegedly perceives it, and all we’ve done is that!
We’ve created no millennial civilization. There have been no libraries. There’s been no classical or neo-classical sculpture. There’s been no Beethoven. There’s just death and pillage and authoritarianism. This is allegedly what we are responsible for. And this is a man in our government! As though we’re beasts without mind and without wit and without intelligence.
There’s an irony here. When somebody’s uncultured, when somebody’s boorish or doesn’t know anything about art and those kind of things, they’re called a philistine. There are certain archaeologists who have actually dug down and looked at the Philistine culture. And the Philistine culture, such as it was, was not quite as barren, not quite as stupid, not quite as archaic as one might suppose, or their enemies supposed. And there’s an important lesson there, and that is that civilization and barbarism—often in a Western, Faustian context—are interwoven with each other.
We believe in the ferocious remaking of reality, moment by moment and layer by layer. Our previous speaker partly touched on some of the dynamics in our very complicated, fluid, but also hard civilization. When you ask a contemporary liberal what do they believe, they don’t really know, and they fear that if they authenticate themselves they will be revisiting the after-effects of the Shoah. That’s the truth. That is the mental construction that people face. It’s almost tendentious, if somebody says a bit too militantly, “I like the music of Richard Wagner!” That implication is only just under the surface. And it’s only just under the surface of being under the surface if you say Beethoven and Mozart instead of Wagner. It’s there! Any white self-assertion is regarded as an act of semi-criminality now, and it is because we cannot face certain facts, certain misreading of facts.
Let’s have a few facts. Hundreds of thousands of Germans who were pushed out of Slavic countries they’d been in for centuries, decimation of German cities by British terror bombing (let’s face it), total destruction of those cities. A friend of mine called Bill Hopkins once told me that if you went to Hamburg—and I believe he was in the RAF there in ’48—the stench in summer of all the bodies under the buildings was unbearable, unbearable in the height of summer.
Let’s have a few other facts: massacres of large numbers of white Russian prisoners who fought on the Axis side because they had become “enemies of the people.” When we decamped them back to Yugoslavia, and they went before people’s courts to receive the summary justice of the masses.
The large number of death squads who roamed French towns and villages after the Liberation with white sort of things on their sleeves and they said, “We’re with the Free Forces of the French Interior.” And you had a book by Charles Maurras on your shelf, and they drag you out, and shoot you in the back of the head, and put your body in a ditch. “Purification” it was called, the purging of those who had collaborated in a corps, against the interests of the French masses and humanity, and so on and so on.
You see there are facts and facts. And there are those that are used one way and those that are used another. When America bombed Serbian positions in the 1990s, they said they were doing it to “stop ethnic cleansing.” But Israel is based on ethnic cleansing. So one standard for one and one standard for another.
But that’s life, and that’s power, and that’s the reality and the vortex of power. What we have to do is to understand that things have been used against us for ideological reasons, irrespective of the facts, and only when we have the courage to do that will we revive.
So it’s really only when a leader of revivalist opinion is asked, “Well what’s your view of the Shoah then?”
And they say, “We’ve stepped over that.”
“What do you mean you’ve ‘stepped over’ that? Are you minimizing its importance to humanity?”
You say, “We are minimizing its importance to our form of humanity!”
At the present the United States Congress is trying to push through a sort of moral “statement,” if you like, and they’re always very keen on this, saying the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians at the end of the Great War. This is causing great contravention, because they need Turkish support given the situation in northern Iraq. As we speak, the Turks have massed a large part of their army on the north Kurdish border to invade, to attack a Marxist group that’s attacking Turkish territory.
The Turkish state has put out what would be regarded as revisionist ideology for most of the 20th century actually. You can get it from quite a lot of Turkish embassies and so on. And yet they also would contextualize much of the violence: as many Turks died as Armenians, different groups were involved in the slaughter, marches by one were met by hostility and massacres by another.
When Saddam Hussein was arraigned and tried, he was tried for gassing a Kurdish village. But don’t forget they were fighting a war which was called by some a First World War-type war often with gas, which was used by both sides in the Great War in the West of course. The Kurds fought on both sides simultaneously. The Iranians and the Iraqis both used gas. In the vortex of a war and the context of such struggle, to abstract one line of events and one series of interpretations and to arraign those who are responsible as criminals before humanity—a bit like Mafia leaders who are to be strung up on butcher’s hooks—this is part of the discourse of power, not of history. But history is about power, and that’s the situation that we find ourselves in!
So I do advise people, before these books are banned and before various people fish around under their beds looking for this book: “Sanning? What on Earth’s that? And why has it got such a cheap cover?” “What’s inside it?” And this sort of thing. Well this book called The Hoax of the Twentieth Century or another book called Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence. Or some of the ones that Germar Rudolf’s presently incarcerated for are up-to-date versions of some of these things.
One of the interesting counter-methodologies is that as the death totals in the most notorious camp of all have gone down and down and down, the burden of guilt/proof has been shifted to other camps (many of which don’t even exist now). Because you have to keep the primary figure, because propagandistically the great fear and the great threat is that it will be destroyed.
I’ll end with one quote.
There is a minor political historian who was at the University of Bath in the West Country of England. And he wrote a book about Fascism in the last ten years.(6) And he was asked about Revisionism, and he was asked particularly about Holocaust Day and the Shoah and its use in schools, and its use in primary schools, as a weapon of . . . as a “means of moral instruction.”
And he said: “I’m worried about it.”
And the researcher said, “You’re worried? Why are you worried?”
And he said, “There’re two problems with it. One, there’s too many Muslims in British schools, and some of them will stand up and say ‘I don’t believe in it,’ and then the propagandistic effect dips with white children.” And the second thing, he said, is, “There are too many lies that have been told about it after the war, too many lies, and it’s becoming dangerous propagandistically!”
And this chap said, “Well if that’s the case, what do we do?”
He said, “Ah, ah, ah! I’ve got an answer. What we do is we conflate that in with all other crimes, so we have a ‘Genocide Day’ to deny the self-affirmation of all groups!”
Because ultimately, you see, the logic that applies to us will apply to everyone. Because identity, if it leads to the consequence through history of massacre, will affect all groups. So all groups partially de-scale or de-escalate all of their rival and competing identities. So we have One World for us all. That is in some ways what is proposed.
That is why, although radical Right people are thought by others to be full of hate against other groups and so on, it’s actually a philosophical position of extreme conservatism: about structures from the past and how they relate to where we are now, and also how we can live on this planet together without losing identity which gives life meaning. Because without it, there is no context for art or beauty or philosophy or science or knowledge or progress of any sort. Because if somebody says to you “Who are you and what are you?” and you have no answer, all civilization will have come to an end.
Right-wing views are about difference, they’re about inequality, they’re about distinction, and they’re about meaning. So I advise you to have a look at a few of these texts on the internet before Mrs. Merkel drags you away!
Thank you very much.
Notes:
Jonathan Bowden’s speech at the 23rd meeting of the New Right in London on September 26, 2009.
Editor’s Note:
The following text is a transcript of Jonathan Bowden’s lecture, “Nineteen Eighty-Four and Totalitarian Leftism,” which was delivered to the 23rd New Right meeting in London on September 26, 2009. In editing this transcription, I introduced punctuation and paragraph breaks. I also deleted a couple of false starts. You can listen to the lecture at YouTube here. Several bits were unintelligible and are marked as such. If you can understand these words, please post a comment below.
I’d like to talk about George Orwell who was one of the major writers of the 20th century. Many people believe that the political novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is in many respects the novel of the 20th century. It is probable that by the middle of this century, at the beginning of the new millennium, this novel will be seen as axiomatic of much of what went on in the era just before.
Orwell was dying when he wrote this work, and he wrote in on the island of Jura; he wrote it in a tent; he wrote it in an island that had been rented to him by the proprietor of a magazine called The Adelphi. He was dying when it was written, but it doesn’t really bear upon it the impress of a dying man.
Nineteen Eighty-Four has entered into the language of contemporary modernity. Even the word “totalitarianism” was made fashionable by it. The term “Big Brother.” The belief in an all-powerful and all-seeing yet strangely unknown party. The invention of Newspeak. The notion of Ingsoc or English socialism.
The extraordinarily famous broadcast in the middle of the 1950s which caused a scandal at the time the BBC broadcast it with the late Peter Cushing playing Winston Smith in the title role. It is said that one Tory MP got up in the House of Commons and condemned the BBC for having this broadcast because one of his constituents had dropped dead during the middle of it. The ultimate critical accolade: dropping dead in the middle of a TV performance. It is quite possible that she dropped dead at the moment when the rats were introduced into the mask to torture Winston at the end, by the Party.
If you remember, O’Brien, who is the sort of sadistic Party priest and has an Irish Catholic name of course because there is an anti-Catholic element to the novel and Blair, or Orwell, was a Scottish Protestant in many respects: that strand is there.
And she dropped dead at the moment when the rats were introduced. Do you remember the moment in the cellars of the Ministry of Love? When O’Brien says to Winston about the thing, the one thing that every individual fears above all, and he knows that in Winston’s case it’s rats, and rats are introduced into this mask. Richard Burton, of course, played O’Brien in the famous Virgin film actually, done by Branson’s organization, of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984. Burton was dying of cancer at the time, and it was not just his last great performance, but his last performance.
Now, this novel begins with a very famous phrase. I don’t usually actually quote in my talks, but I think this is one occasion when I’ll differ from that. This is a triadic novel in accordance with the Dante-esque schema which prevails in a lot of Western literature. You have a tripartite division: the affair between him and Julia, the Party dissident, is in some ways a slightly squalid version of heaven; the purgatorial existence under the rule of the all-seeing Party in the third part of the volume is purgatory; and the last sequence in the always lit, electronically lit cellars of the Ministry of Love, is hell. Under the dispensation of O’Brien and the totalitarian Party that he serves.
The novel begins in this way. Nineteen Eighty-Four part 1:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed down from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Now, of course, that’s a portrait, in a cartoon-like way, of Joseph Stalin. Who, if you remember, had the handlebar moustache and the eyes that seemed to follow you around the room in a sort of quasi-Elizabethan painting where the eyes are hollowed out and a spy watches you in between one room and another, and so on. On a personal touch, my mother’s step-father had a portrait of Joseph Stalin on his wall, in the pantry, because he was Communist shop steward in the AVRO’s works that built the Lancaster bomber in Manchester. And so Stalin gazed down upon the Butties and upon the Eccles cake, and upon the things in that Manchester pantry, Stalin: his hero.
Although he once said if it wasn’t Stalin it would be Hitler, because he was one of these individuals who could never be in the middle, you see, and because he was naturally of an illiberal mind. But there we are. Don’t forget these individual leaders had enormous cults earlier in the 20th century. The postmodern people wandering around with their shopping bags this afternoon in central London are living in a totally different time and in a totally different temperature and moral climate.
Now, the novel begins with a lot of sense-data which shows that Orwell was a novelist and not a political ideologue. One of the reasons that this novel has lasted is because it is not political philosophy translated into novelistic effect. It’s a novel infused with political ideas. What most apolitical people remember is the cabbage smell that’s everywhere, the dirty mats that are everywhere, whenever you put your hand on something there’s dust, and there’s dirt. Everything’s decrepit and broken down, and yet the Tannoy in the background’s pumping out ideology about the glory of socialism and the coming struggle of the masses.
The one thing that’s forgotten about this novel is that this novel’s a comedy. It’s actually an extraordinarily funny book, and Orwell used it in deeply dark satirical terms. The fact that the world has not read it as a comedy, but has actually read it literally as a fact, is a testament partly to the extraordinary cynical and dark and treacly nature of Orwells’ outlook. Maybe it was also affected by the fact that he was dying at the time that he wrote it.
This novel is a satire on many of the Leftist Hampstead intellectuals that Orwell knew in the ’30s and the ’40s. Robert Conquest, who wrote The Great Hunger and The Great Terror about Stalinist atrocities in the Soviet Union, was able to do so by the mealy-mouthed and appeasive apologetics which he came across in the salons of Hampstead and elsewhere, and Orwell was very similar.
Orwell was a paradoxical man: a socialist of upper-middle- class origins, he was in revolt against the Empire of his day, and he wrote a book called Burmese Days which was a testament to that revolt. Yet also, a man who, in some respects, was a “Tory,” in inverted commas, was archaic in Leftist terms, was a bit of a nationalist, and a man who always adored rubbing the fur of his own side backwards. Orwell was one of these people who is an extraordinarily difficult bedfellow, as his fellow Leftists were to discover.
He made his name, amongst other things, for editing Eniran Bevan’s review Tribune, on the left of the Labour Party, in the 1930s. But his hostility to Stalinism and to Left totalitarianism, his hostility to the British Communist Party, and his hostility to the tactics Communists used to impose their discipline on others became apparent throughout the 1930s and ’40s.
They were basically crystallized by his experience in the Spanish Civil War, where–typical of Orwell–he didn’t go for any of the left militias that were most favored, and ended up with the POUM which was in the command of somebody called Nin, I think, who was a minor demi-Trotskyist figure, despised by the anarchists, and by the official Left, and yet to one side of the main socialist bloc fighting in the Republican cause. This is rather typical of Orwell because you know full well that he’s aligned himself with the faction that, if crushed in internal Left disputes, would mean that he’s actually persecuted by his own side, and this is, of course, what happened.
So, in the July days in Madrid, when the anarchists and the Communists fought with each other inside the Republican zone, when there needed to be a scapegoat for that fighting, they turned on this tiny little party that everyone hated called the POUM, and they became, “fascist apologists,” “clerical dog-collarists,” “running dogs of the international bourgeois conspiracy,” and so on. And these individuals were hunted down with extreme ruthlessness, and all those that were found were shot and killed without any sort of a tribunal or trial at all. The leader of this particular sect was tortured to death by the Communist secret police inside the Republican zone.
These incidents traumatized Orwell and made him a sort of critical figure of parts of the Left on the Left. We look back today through rose-tinted spectacles to a degree. When he wrote this sort of material the world was still very much in the balance, and the forces against which he was inveighing in art, novelistically, could well have come to power.
It’s also interesting to note that most of Orwell’s books are not forgotten today, but would have been partly forgotten had he not written the fable Animal Farm about the Bolshevik coup, and had he not written Nineteen Eighty-Four about the texture, and nature, and, what novelists call sense data, of living under a totalitarian Left dictatorship.
One of the interesting things to note is that Eastern European intellectuals, particularly in societies like Hungary, and Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere all regarded this book as essentially a factual commentary on their lives, so close was it an imaginary, and yet projected, identification with what it was like to live under Ceausescu’s Romania, for example. There are also extraordinary parallels between reality and this novel which, don’t forget, was written in 1948 which is why when he needed a title he inverted it and it became Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Now, in Ceausescu’s Romania almost every telephone conversation was listened to, and if you rang into the country from the outside, the Securitate, the all-pervasive secret police, would break a line–very crude, pre-digital connections–and they would put in a new block of tape to listen to the message again. And you’d have to ring again, and then you would have to ring again, and then they would block the line, and you’d have to ring again, and so on. Because everything was being listened to even when it wasn’t. Every cafe table had a microphone underneath it; but 80% of them didn’t work; but people couldn’t take a chance that it wasn’t one of the 20% that happened to be working.
There are two extraordinary parallelisms between the Ceausescu regime and this novel. One is the endless production of works by the great leader. Ceausescu’s collected volumes ran to 15, 20, 30 volumes. Of course, he never wrote a word of it. They were all written for him by communist scribes and apparatchiks. Hoxha in Albania had a similarly unread, cavernous library that was produced, to a boy, by tame scholars who would have been shot, or tortured to death, or their families killed, and their family homes bulldozed so that they never existed, hadn’t they actually produced this sort of material.
The other parallelism is the pyramids. In this novel, the Party build four enormous ministries: Ministry of Peace, which is for war; Ministry of Love, which is for torture, oppression of the citizen, and to the purity of Ingsoc, the ideology of the dictatorship, which is called Ministry of Love because it’s the inversion of that. Then there’s other ministries: the Ministry of Plenty, which deals with economic affairs, usually involving endless braying statistical announcements of pig-iron production which Orwell thought was a hilarious joke from Eastern bloc dictatorships, but actually came quite close to the truth.
Now, in Romania Ceausescu ordered large pyramids to be built in the capital, and these were built and were observable when the regime fell in a coup organized by ex-communists and other factors to form what was called the National Salvation Front at that time. Do you remember the scenes on television? When Ceausescu’s on the podium surrounded by the Securitate. Many of whom were orphans, many of whom were taken from orphanages directly by the Ceausescu family and impregnated with the idea that they were related to him; that Ceausescu and his ubiquitous wife, who was always with him on all occasions, were their mother and father. That’s one of the reasons, psychologically, why the Securitate gunmen fought to the end, unlike many of the other Eastern bloc dictatorship servants who gave up when the going got rather rough.
But that incredible moment, which is history as it’s observed, when Ceausescu was orating about the dangers of fascism, the dangers of revanchism the dangers of counter-terrorism, the dangers of a new bourgeois elite arriving in Romania, and he suddenly stops. And the Securitate around him start to get worried because the crowd is getting restive. And the crowd is working out that if just a few of them move, nothing will happen, but if they all move together, the security police don’t know what to do.
And there’s a moment when Ceausescu is looking: “Do I step back from the microphone? Do I continue my anti-Western rant? Do I go into the helicopter with the Securitate?” And he suddenly decides to go with the Securitate, and they disappear.
And usually, whenever a regime like that’s in trouble, there’s an immediate cut in the television, and a ballet starts. Do you know? Or something like that. That always used to happen in the Soviet Union: whenever someone was being purged or something of moment was going on, a famous feature film would appear, you know, just to fill a gap, just like trooping the color but in Soviet terms, just put up, you know?
But the Romanian television just allowed it to run, and you can see the Ceausescus running across the top of the roof, surrounded by Securitate who had their weapons out by then, and then got into the helicopter and went off, by which time the crowd, or mob if you like, had broken in to the bottom of the building, and was coming up the building, and by then the whole structure was swaying. Later that day, of course, the Securitate got on top of many of the buildings and started firing down on the people, and many of them were determined to bring back the regime.
Now, this novel is interesting because it radicalizes certain elements of communist rule. One of the ideas that’s almost got forgotten about in many treatments of the novel; and filming, and theatrical treatments like the Peter Cushing one and like the John Hurt one, and that sort of thing, can’t really deal with this: and this is the language the Party creates called Newspeak. This is this all-purpose, jabbering, ideological, Marxist-Leninist language, sometimes referred to as Duckspeak. Duckspeak is the idea that you quack away, quack away, and your conscious brain is not really involved because your response to everything is a preformatted form of ideology.
If you remember, one of the dictionary makers who befriends him, he’s called Syme, in the grubby canteen where they all have their dinners, in the Ministry of Truth, which of course is to propagate lies on behalf of the regime, and to rewrite the Times so that everybody’s been purged, at the right place, and if someone is purged they are now an un-person, a un-person in Ingsoc Newspeak. And you have to go through the records and make sure that it’s all filed, so there’s no relationship with them, so you can never be accused of thought criminality by virtue of the fact they exist. Every spare bit of paper that relates to an un-person, someone they’ve done away with, you put in the memory hole, which goes down into the furnace, which is everywhere, ubiqitous, behind these pipes, this little grill; it’s just like a sort of waste disposal really, but the idea is it’s waste disposal of all the lives who are being rewritten continuously, so that the current reality fits in with the Party view at any particular time.
The Party has two sections: the inner Party, which wears black and has special privileges; the inner Party can turn the telescreen off; like that screen back there, every apartment, every room has a screen but you can’t turn it off, and it watches you as you watch it, so it’s two way. And O’Brien of course in a famous scene in the second section of the book, can turn it off because he’s in the inner Party.
For most people, the TV rather than at the end of the room. is in the center of the room on a wall, so it can look down on them, and so it can instruct you–“Citizen!,” you know–in appropriate behavior. Everyone, like in Maoist China, at the beginning of the day in Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell has to do physical jerks. You have to do physical exercises at the beginning of the day to coordinate yourself for the coming struggle and for the commitment to socialism which will occur throughout all of the hours before you go back to bed again.
Another interesting insight is the relationship that people have with their children. Orwell prefigures the world of bourgeois chaos where parents are frightened to discipline their own children, and which we increasingly see in liberal humanist societies. The parents are preyed upon by the young. One of the first, and great, scenes is with the Parsons family who live just up the corridor in the block, cause the Parsons boy is a terror. He accuses everyone of being, “You’re a thought criminal!” he says, “You’re a nasty little vanguard against the Proletariat elite!” He screams that at everyone he meets. And he’s got a pop-gun, he says “You’re gonna burn, you’re gonna burn, you’re going to the camps! You’re going down [unintelligible]”
And his mother’s terrified of him because to discipline him is to engage in the possibility of a counter-revolutionary act. So he knows that he’s got his parents where he wants them by this endless sort of Young Pioneers brigading sort of behavior. And it’s a way of corralling the older generation into conformity. Orwell’s instinct for particularly Left totalitarian forms of power is very acute here considering that, except for a small period in Spain, he’d never really been subjected to them.
The other thing which is very interesting, and which Orwell knew extraordinarily well partly because of his time at the BBC, was the penchant intellectuals have for propaganda. Intellectuals adore the idea that they are independent spirits who are highly individualistic and always love gainsaying what anyone else has said to them. In actual fact, Orwell believed that most intellectuals are craven, and deeply conformist, and extraordinarily group oriented.
[Orwell] wrote BBC propaganda for India during the Second World War. He wrote it in Senate House, which is in Malet Street which is where the Central London university buildings are, the sort of whitewashed, slightly authoritarian sort of ’20s, ’30s type of heavy modern building. And there’s a Room 101 in that, because all of the BBC offices had numbers, and the torture scene with O’Brien was the same room from which he broadcast anti-Axis propaganda to India, where, of course, Gandhian pacifism, and the Indian National Army that supported the Axis, and so on, were active, and the BBC needed people to bring propaganda over to that part of the world during the Second World War.
Now, there’s an individual in this book called Syme who’s an etymologist. He’s writing the 11th dictionary of Newspeak, and Syme meets Winston Smith in the grubby canteen. You remember the food they have? Your lunch would be a Brillo Pad, which is sort of pork or something, surrounded by bloody stew, surrounded by bits of decaying vegetable, all in a broth, and you sort of eat it down with Victory Tea in a chipped mug, and it’s really hot because there’s no milk in it, you know, and it’s just sort of filth really, but you’ve just got to sling it down because it keeps you going. And all the time Symes talking about the 11th dictionary of Newspeak.
He says, “We’re going to totally eradicate intellectual freedom of thought.” This is an intellectual. He says, “We’re going to so restrict, methodologically, the linguistic compass of the human, so that people won’t even be able to think independently of Party rule,” because to be able to think, you have to have not just a concept but the language with which to express it. We will so restrict language to the possibility that the signifier can never go beyond that which is signified, there can only be concrete concepts even for ideology, so that the mind works in a totally binary way, and you’ve filtered out the prospect of chaos and thought criminality before you’ve even uttered a word. And, of course, this is an intellectual who’s devoted to the mind but finds in his own imprisonment and self-torture a strange pleasure.
Orwell has realized that there’s a penchant in many intellectuals to weave the bamboo of their own cage in ever more fascinating shapes. And it’s this extraordinary percipience in the way in which his own group behaves that gives the novel a particular power. Whether Syme is based on an academic called Syme who wrote a famous book about Roman history in the 1930s, which was about the concept of Caesarism, I don’t know, or whether it’s accidental. There are others, what are they, Tillotson, and various other Party weavers, and so on.
There’s a great moment of illumination as they’re biting into one of these meat sort of burgers, you know, and yet look around you. Just over there, the masses in a society like this will be eating meat that isn’t meat. Don’t you know that when you go to Kentucky Fried Chicken that many of the trays contain food that isn’t food? A lot of junk food is gas. It’s chemicals, has no food at all. There was an American television program a couple of years ago . . . well, you know what Americans are like. A fifth of them are so obese they could hardly fit through that door. I saw a man in America who was so fat that I thought to myself, if you fired a bullet through his body–I have these thoughts–you wouldn’t hit a bone because he was so fat. And that’s because he’s spent his entire life eating that sort of muck.
But it’s the same muck that the Party apparatchiks eat, and say that they like it, in the canteen in the Ministry of Truth. And Syme, he’s sort of spitting out this sort of gristly non-meat as he’s talking, you know; these are probably imagined dinners in the BBC sort of re-filtered through a novelist’s imagination. And he’s going, “This is marvelous, Winston,” he says, “marvelous. In Ingsoc no freedom at all, the individual will be completely restructured and inert. Imagine a baby with its limbs cut off just quacking away ideologically, it’s marvelous! Have another bit of chicken,” you know? Because Symes is sold totally on the idea that his liberation is more and more enslavement, sort of anti-hermeneutically, to the minutiae of the Party’s lexicographical control of man.
Now, to the non-intellectuals, to the mass of the population who are known as the proles, for whom the socialist revolution was created of course, none of this matters at all, and Orwell’s extraordinarily aware of the ultimate class split, which isn’t really about poverty but is about the mind. This split between people who live for and use the mind, and those who are purely physical.
One of the slogans of people who want change in Nineteen Eighty-Four is “The future is the proles.” They look at the proles, and all of them are looked at in a degraded way. One of the things that socialist and left critics, such as Professor Raymond Williams, have always said about Nineteen Eighty-Four and related books is that they are degrading to working class people, that they are an attitude of bourgeois snobs in their ivory towers, liberals really, cracking on about theory, condemning those who are struggling for a better world. Williams, who was a sort of communist fellow traveler or crypto-communist, from his berth at Oxford, of course, for many years deep down had this view of Orwell and expresses it in the Fontana Modern Masters about Orwell. Interestingly, Fontana gave the Lenin volume to Robert Conquest, which is an absolute hatchet job, and they gave the Orwell volume to Williams, which is a mild hatchet job because Orwell couldn’t be criticized too much.
Now, the desire for intellectuals to torment themselves and the division between them and those who are purely physical in this life is one of the cardinal themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The moment when Winston, and Orwell partly identifies with Winston although he’s not that fit, obviously, but he invents a certain emotional power that clearly comes from himself within the narrative into the Winston figure. There’s a moment when he looks out, I think it’s during a scene when he’s about to have sex, you can’t really say “love,” with Julia, his lover in the novel, and he looks out and sees a proletarian washer-woman with some pegs putting some laundry on a line. And she sings a love song, “It was only an ’opeless fancy,” and all this, you know, it’s a musical, it’s a vaudeville turn. And Winston looks out at her and says, “If there’s any hope, it lies with the proles.”
Now, one of the most interesting features ideologically in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that the Party creates its own dissent; the Party creates its own past; it creates its own present; it creates its own future. Because it controls the mind, the mental regime that people use to think about the past, the present, and the future. And it also creates its own dissent.
All the dissenters use a book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Immanuel Goldstein, who of course is Trotsky. And the two minute hate is oriented towards Trotsky.
The two minute hate is very funny. In the Ministry, all the chairs are lined up for the hate, and you get like a sort of performance, or giving a speech in the company office, you know? There’s a certain buildup of tension in the bureaucracy prior to the hate, and they all sit in these rows.
And all of the blocs are at war with each other, because there’s Oceana, there’s Eurasia, there’s East Asia, three great totalitarian socialist regimes dominate the world. Sort of North America/Latino bloc, European bloc, Asiatic bloc, and they just divide it, Africa and the rest of it. They’re not even mentioned. Poor old Africans don’t get a mention.
And initially the hate begins with millions of Eurasian troops, you know, sort of the depiction of North Koreans or the Vietcong during those particular wars of American power, you know, faceless, merciless Asiatic masses marching towards you tommy gun out, all depersonalised and impersonal. And then, Trotsky’s features will appear on the screen, and they all start hissing immediately; women, uncontrollable, have sort of negative orgasms, and roam about throwing things at the screen, “Beast! Beast!” they scream. And the hate’s beginning you see, and the Party officials are pointing out the Goldstein figure, because Goldstein wrote the book that defines the Party’s negation.
But the inner truth is the Party wrote that book, because they control the mind even of their enemies. And there’s an amazing scene with O’Brien in his Ministry, where he’s turned the screen off so he can’t be listened to, and he’s dressed in black. And Julia and Winston, who he knows are lovers, dressed in denim, dressed in blue serge, are with him in the office. And they talk about Goldstein’s book, and O’Brien says later on, “I wrote that book of course.”
But no book’s written by an individual. Books are written by committees, because the individual mind can never be trusted, so everything’s done by committee. So his outlook is true: the Party degrades itself, denigrates itself, tells you pretty explicitly what’s going on and why, but never why they’re doing it. So if you provide your opposition with the mental feed that they need in order to oppose you, you partly control them. This is a very old idea, but in the 20th century, when mass propaganda became available for the manipulation of the masses, this was an extraordinary way of behaving. You actually create your own inversions so you can control them.
Now, Trotsky/Goldstein is a figure of the early Party who provides the figure of the renegade, the running dog, the one who turns against the purity of the Party position, and also the scapegoat, the goat that’s actually tied with the rope to the tree. All rage, all the failures, all the espionage that goes wrong, every battle that’s lost: it’s the fault of Goldstein and the deviationists. They are the ones; they are the traitors. In every word, behind every lie, behind every false sausage, behind every false statistic, the traitors lurk. Sin, secularized sin really, lurks everywhere, always to be purged, purged in the hate, purged through self-criticism.
Under communist regimes, individual Party members had to undergo self-criticism on a regular basis. You’d be forced. “Self-criticism is expected comrade.” You’d be forced to stand up in front of the others and to engage in dialectical critique: “I had moments of class evasiveness. I suffered from moments of false consciousness. I had certain religious moments where I denied the material nature of reality and the glory of the Party’s ascendency.” And everyone would be going, “Mmm, yes.” It’s all very serious, you know. And under certain regimes this could be life or death.
I went to a Catholic school; you did religion four periods a week. But in loads of ex-Catholic schools in Poland you did Marxist-Leninism four periods a week. And you had to get those lessons right. It was very important. If you made a mistake about the 1844 Paris manuscripts in relation to Grundrisse, you were in error, and that was a serious matter.
Most of the liberals smile cynically about all this because they’ve never really had to live under the pressure of those sorts of institutions, and don’t understand what it’s like to have to play all those dialectical games and engulf yourself in all those sorts of lies.
The irony is that, broadly speaking, working class children weren’t exempt, but as long as they just prated a few simplistic slogans it was alright, because they weren’t the ones for whom it was done. The Party wanted to control the minds of those who could think, not those who, in a sense, follow, and who are physical and who need an architecture within which to be. So the very modern totalitarianism understands that you have to control the mind first. Control the mind, you control the body; control the present, control the past, you dictate the future. The future is the Party.
The Party has three slogans: War is Peace; Ignorance is Strength; Freedom is Slavery. And those are on everything. They’re on every beermat. They’re on every watch. They’re on every tablecloth. They’re on every flag. War is Peace; Ignorance is Strength; Freedom is Slavery. And then there’s the ubiquitous “Big Brother is watching you.” And Stalin’s heavy Georgian features, although some people say he’s Ossetian, his heavy features looking down on you. That sort of power, that sort of insistence, that sort of mask, because he was wearing a mask.
There is an extraordinary picture of Stalin after Kirov’s death. Kirov was the Leningrad Party leader, who was assassinated in mysterious circumstances, and it’s probable there were lots of Western Marxists and liberals who didn’t understand what was going on. And, of course, Kirov was killed on Stalin’s orders to set off the purge which sort of begins, in effect, the Ukrainian famine from the panoply of a politically-oriented purge.
Kirov was killed to provide an excuse for mass terror, less in the society than over the elite: terror over the bureaucracy; terror over the army; terror over the KGB, or one of its incarnations itself. Because Kirov was so high up in the regime that if he had been got to it must be because of conspiratorial forces of an anti-revolutionary tendency at the heart of the republic. This means that no one was safe, and that you look for the treason and the traitors right at the top, not at the bottom or in the middle.
The mass shootings and killings and tortures beforehand that got rid of between a third of a million and a million Party members, higher to middling apparatchiks and members of the armed forces, and that decimated the Soviet higher command before Barbarossa, and were one of the many reasons–partly because the army was in the wrong position in relation to the invasion because they were planning to attack Germany themselves and were caught unawares, and so on–but one of the many reasons for their collapse in the early days was because vast numbers of their officers had been purged, undergone self-criticism, failed self-criticism, down the plug.
But, of course, executioners and torturers and invigilators and those who interviewed those who were going to the camps or going to be shot, they themselves could be found guilty of deviation, because if they made a mistake, or if they had an elision of consciousness, or if they showed too much zeal in certain circumstances, if Party ideology shifted slightly in a subsequent moment, they themselves could be before the committees. It’s just like the French Revolution but using sort of mass death technology in a way, and it’s all quite deliberate.
And there is this amazing moment when Stalin looks down on Kirov, in this orthodox way when the body is laid out in the casket, and he looks down on Kirov, and it’s a Mafia boss looking at a subaltern that he’s had killed in order to start a war between clans, and you can see it, I mean it’s just a subjective way of looking at reality, but you can see that Stalin knows in his face what he has done.
And Stalin is this odd character. Western propaganda about Stalin has been based on Trotskyism for most of the 20th century. Stalin was an interesting and slightly creative man who was also a brigand and an extreme criminal addicted, psychopathologically very like Mao, to extremes of sadism and slaughter which he positively enjoyed, positively enjoyed, and gained pleasure from.
Mao certainly had pronounced sadistic features and used to enjoy the physical torment of former Party members who had fallen out with him. Their bodies, mutilated, would often be exhibited in the streets in order to terrorize the masses into obedience with socialist logic. It’s probable that psychologically many Chinese have not recovered from this. The full extent of the terror that was represented in Asia by the Cultural Revolution is still not really explored, even by quite radical and mainstream Western historiography.
Certainly, many people in Hong Kong saw enormous numbers of bodies floating out to them, when Hong Kong was under British rule, of course. Many of these bodies were partly eaten as well, and many of them were Red Guards who started fighting with each other about moments of dialectical purity, because these bureaucracies have a tendency to start sort of ravening like dogs. They get so wild they start attacking themselves if there’s no object to attack at a particular time.
This phenomenon also fed through into many other things, the collapse of discipline that was also ordered, a sort of planned chaos, particularly in relation to the mass rape of German women at the end of the Second World War by Soviet troops, which even today Premier Putin says never occurred: “Never occurred, Western lies fed by the enemies of Russia.” Russia is a nationalist country now, and Putin in many ways is a man to be admired in certain respects, but the old ways die hard in many ways. Those mass rapes certainly occurred to the degree that the German communists pleaded with the Soviets to stop them because they were preventing the creation of Ulbricht’s state in occupied East Germany. The reason they occurred was because commissars ordered them, and at the same time there was such a breakdown in order that that order was itself part of the chaos with which it ramified.
All of Stalin’s atrocities are ordered and are written down. The Katyn forest massacre of the Polish officer corps. There’s an interesting quasi-revisionist Polish national film called Katyn which is available now in certain art cinemas, not getting a general release, but who in the multiplexes would see it, let’s face it? But it is available through art cinemas. It’s very gruesome at the end, very truthful at the end. Now, the whole Politbureau ordered that. All of their signatures are on the death order, including Krushchev’s, and the later thawists and reformers. Stalin’s name: bigger than all the others, graphologically, is at the bottom: Stalin.
Because they thought they were going to win and that history was on their side and that all the records of the elite of the masses should be there for people to see for history to judge: “We have to wade through feces and blood and filth to create socialism and glory.” Heaven can come down onto the Earth but you’ve got to wade through the blood to get it. Heaven is coming down but first: the abattoir. Onwards!
And Orwell in a sense understood the logic of many of these processes of purges and trials within regimes. Within months the men like Vyshinsky in the ’30s at the show trials, screaming at the victims, certain of their subordinates could be on the other side being screamed at and could be executed very quickly.
Now, the interesting thing about this novel is that actually, the man, apart from in Spain for a few brief months before he got out, never really experienced the rigors of communism. There will be many on the Left who say it’s a fantasy. It’s an artist’s metaphorization of what occurred in certain Eastern European societies, particularly certain societies that were less controlled by Soviet power: Hoxha’s Albania, parts of Yugoslavia, and Ceausescu’s Romania, where there were indigenous communist, terrorist, army-based, and paramilitary movements came to power without necessarily the intervention of the Red Army. Sometimes you see purer forms of communism built to excess of a sort that occupied Eastern Europe didn’t always equate to, because there were certain balancing elements in occupied Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union of course, Soviet power and pure communism had been completely uncontrolled from the very beginning.
The term Bolshevik revolution is itself a misnomer. There was no revolution. It was a coup by the armed wing of the Bolshevik Party, and was thought so at the time by the people who did it. There was a moment when Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin slept together in a room about as big as this after they had seized Kerensky’s Palace, and with newspaper on the ground. It was the first day, after being up for over 20 hours, and after they had had a couple of hours sleep, Lenin got up and said, “Comrades, we have achieved a great thing. We have been in power for one day.” Because power is what it’s all about in relation to this ideology, which ramifies with what O’Brien says to Winston at the end.
The point is that Winston has intellectually denied the sovereignty of the Party’s rule over the mind. Therefore he’s far more important than some prole who just rebels physically against the Party. But then you break their arms or their legs or send them to a camp, that’s of no importance. What matters is the mind that controls the body. So before they kill Winston they will torture him into submission: he must love Big Brother before they execute him; he must be reworked.
There’s a famous moment, isn’t there, when all his teeth are rotten, and O’Brien pulls all the teeth out–snap!–in one go, and pulls them out of the mouth, and he says, “Look what you’ve done to yourself, look how you’ve destroyed yourself.” And Winston (John Hurt’s always playing the victim, isn’t he?) says, “You’ve done it to me, you’ve done it to me,” and O’Brien says, “No! No, no, no, no, no, you’ve done it to yourself by denying the love of the Party!” Do you remember that line, “You’re just a cell, Winston,” he says, “a cell”? The individual has long ceased to exist in history as we define it. “You’re just an individual cell within the body of the Party. Your death, your life is of no significance; you’re just a cell. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?”
I say this in this theatrical manner because I’ve played O’Brien. When I was 18 we had a school play, and it was quite interesting. There was a very bad actor called–someone I won’t name–whose surname was Smith, who played Winston Smith. And I played O’Brien dressed all in black, and we didn’t have any girls in the school so we had one homosexual in the sixth form dressed up as a girl who played Julia. And there’s this strange moment, because this is an all boys’ school, and all the Catholic brothers are down there, and it’s all very odd. I’m one of the few Protestants there, there’s a transvestite on the stage and a bloke who can’t act and we’re playing Nineteen Eighty-Four; it’s typical. And when Julia comes on there’s this great wolf-whistle that then dies in its own throes, do you know what I mean, when they all realize, “Good Lord, it’s so-and-so dressed up!” And there’s a moment of horror and terror, in which you see all these grammar school boys, about 17, you know, funny actually.
O’Brien is one hell of a part, I mean he really is, let’s face it, because he’s attracted to O’Brien from the earliest stages because O’Brien is a priest who believes in nothing but the ideology of the Party, and who is genuine. He’s not a fool: he wrote The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. He believes in torturing Winston as a cog in the machine because it doesn’t matter. You see, it’s the futility of the absence of negation. They could just shoot Winston and have done with it. Why go through all these games?
But the games are important because they prove the meaning of meaninglessness, if you like. That’s the point, because all of these ideologies are totally atheistic, totally anti-transcendental, totally mechanistic, and totally material. It’s a sort of revenge of matter upon itself, if you like. It’s the churning of matter, and he’s the sort of scientific non-priest of the churning of matter, human matter.
There is a slogan of the Czechoslovak secret police where they used to say, “We are the engineers of human souls.” And there’s a famous Czech dissident novel called that, or uses it in the title, and that’s how they really saw themselves. They saw themselves as a vanguard in history. The working class were being oppressed. They’d been degraded. They’re being decanted from the agricultural state–this is in classical Marxist theory–into the industrial one. The industrial civilization creates its negation through social renewal and the creation of a vanguard which is drawn from all classes, particularly from bohemian, outsider intellectuals; half of them are Jews, although they don’t say that in the ideology, half of them are Gentiles who want to destroy their own society because they hate it for various reasons, and want to tear it down, and want to see themselves–largely marginal figures hitherto–promoted to serious posts.
This is why ideology is so important for these sorts of regimes, because it’s committees and groups of quasi-intellectuals fighting with each other about meaning and purpose, and plotting against each other, and doing each other down, and sort of releasing statements to the secret police so they can all be purged, so I can get his job, so I can edit this magazine, so I can overstep him, and so on. It’s the universalization, with a ruthless and very violent terrorism added on, of the struggles that go on in the average university department today. But that sort of engine of destruction isn’t added on. Orwell’s extraordinary insight is his ability to see these processes at work.
Don’t forget communism is one of the most extraordinary stories of modern man; here is a movement that emerges with almost no social support at all, and a few fringe ideologues around it, in the middle of the 19th century. By the first third of the following century, just passed, it controls vast stretches of the world; it kills tens of millions of human beings; it launches enormous wars; it creates enormous social structures; and then it fails, virtually, and deconstructs, morally and structurally of itself, almost as if never believed in its own lies any more.
It’s quite clear that Gorbachev was in many ways a liberal, or a Social Democrat in an old/new way, who allowed it to go. Because no reform of that system is possible unless you want to use violence and ferocious force, which Honecker wanted to do when the crowds began to come out in Germany prior to the deconstruction of the wall. Honecker’s first instinct is the Stasi on the streets, fire, fire again, fire again, step on the bodies of those that are covered in blood and fire on them and step on their bodies: Socialism! Imposed on the masses! Because we are the masters of fate and history.
And it’s only because Gorbechev said the Red Army will not back the Stasi up on the streets that Honecker remembered he was feeling a bit ill and had a bit of cancer on the way, and so they allowed him to clear off to Chile. And slightly more reformist, Euro-Communist types took over. And eventually sections of the wall were opened. Remember those incredibly dramatic moments when the bulldozers and so on brought down sections of the wall and the Stasis in [unintelligible] came out and stood with their Kalashnikovs, and the Germans came through the gaps that had been created? And the Westerners were on the other side cheering and this sort of thing.
When the Soviet Union collapsed there was a British trade unionist leader called Ken Gill who was the leader of TASS, a certain section of the electrical engineering union. And he said that when the Soviet Union collapsed–a bloke with a broad Wiltshire accent, a genuinely working class communist–Gill said, “A light went out for humanity when the Soviet Union went down.” A light went out, and he died soon after. Because, you see, for people like him it was a pseudo-religion, and it was a belief in a radiant future as they used to call it in the ideology: a radiant future for the masses! And there was a belief in it.
It’s why all of these people spied and so on. Of course many of them did it because they were owed money; they were perverts; they were rebels against their own system. But never forget that many of them converted to it like a quasi-religious conversion. Maclean, who was part of the Philby ring at Cambridge, read an incredibly boring book called Materialism and Empirio-Criticism by Lenin which is based upon the materialism of a scientist at the beginning of the 20th century called Mach, and the light came into his eyes: “Now, history is clear to me, there is a plan! There is progress from agriculture to the industrial state, through the dialectical reversal via the vanguard that creates socialism that is above the masses.” And eventually all the apparatus that is needed to install this–the terror; the lies; the propaganda; the secret police; the endless purging; the mass graves–will all fade away, all fade away, and be replaced by love. And by the encomium of forgiveness, as all members in all classes embraced each other, and there’s no division. There’s no division of race, of kind, of class, of gender, of ideology; all are one. All are one in the radiant future. And that’s socialism, you see.
And there’s a stage even beyond socialism: communism. Because if you listen to communist parties when they’re in power, they will say that socialism is just an approximation of that which exists just beyond them. Another quasi-religious idea, really a quasi-idealistic conception, whereby the perfection of the future is still to be announced, and in that moment the state itself will wither away. There’ll be no secret policemen. They’ll start kissing their rubber truncheons, and this sort of thing, and throwing them away. It’s all going to die before the dispensation of love, and that sort of thing. But down in the abattoir, you know, comrades have got some dirty work to do in the name of progress.
It is, if you look at it, an enormous sort of materialist Greek tragedy acted out over about a century and a half, because it affected and changed the whole nature of the world, this ideology. China, of course, has done the reverse trick. They’ve kept an authoritarian, technocratic regime that’s frozen the ideology like a theology it no longer even listens to, and it’s introduced the most aggressive form of capitalism on Earth, using the very structures of authoritarian rule that were supposed to bring in its opposite. So there’s a strange hybrid. Then you have these sort of dinosaur states like North Korea which strongly resembles in the cult of the Emperor/the Kim Il Sung figure who’s worshipped like a god. Didn’t you know he discovered the light bulb? Didn’t you know he wrote all the books in the British Library? Didn’t you know that he painted, personally, the roof of the Sistine Chapel? Didn’t you know that virtually every scientific development has been done by Kim Il Sung and his semi-dead son? Because most North Koreans are taught this all the time.
There are also very interesting elements in the fugitiveness of communist ideology where you do wonder whether it’s a materialist belief system at all. In camps in North Korea, if a dissident has a child, a woman, often the child will be killed by a commissar. The child will be born. The child will be presented as the child of a deviant and of a thought criminal. This is the doctrine of hereditarianism isn’t it? This is the doctrine that the child inherits the social and secular sins of the parent. This isn’t a Left-wing idea at all, essentially, so it’s very odd, mentally. And the child, the commissar will step on its neck and crack it, break it in front of the camp. “Death of a deviant! Aliens of socialism and the praxis of the masses! I do not this as a crime. I kill not a human. I kill an enemy of the human.”
When Yugoslav trials killed a large number of people in 1945/46–“trials” in inverted commas!–they were described not as trials of people, but as enemies of the people. The communist jurists would get up in the dock and say, “You are an enemy of the people,” you know what that meant: not long to go; let’s hope it’s over quick. That’s what people really thought when they were subjected to this.
What this novel does is it draws out the psychological, linguistic, and mental processes of what’s going on in those quicker, enemy-of-the-people type trials which, of course, Ceausescu and his type got at the end. There is an occult principle isn’t there, “What goes around comes around,” as the hippies in the ’60s used to say. And I remember when Ceausescu and his wife were tried the trial lasted for three hours. There wasn’t much of a defense, just a bloke jabbering a bit, pushed to the side by the military policeman. They were dragged out of the court and shot. And shot as terrorists by the National Salvation Front, two thirds of whom were ex-communists. And remember there was that moment when the camera goes towards them as they’re lying on the ground and the camera flicks onto the faces? The BBC, ITV, and CNN (if CNN existed then) cut that, because it was too distressing for Western audiences. Too distressing for Western audiences; but you could see the blood on the ground, you know, and they were dead. So they got the trial that they gave many others. And the Securitate, their bastard children, ideologically as well as structurally, fought to the end and died in burning buildings to keep it going.
Hoxha’s Albania was an even more extreme example even of that. You could be arrested in Hoxha’s Albania for owning an orange. Because it obviously hadn’t been grown there, and you’d imported something from the regimes of the class enemy. So you were even a criminal for owning a bit of fruit. And that’s why, if you view it in a cross-conscious European way, a very scandalous way, many European politicians from the comfortable West, like Kohl and so on — do you remember he went to East Berlin waving bananas? Waving great bunches of fruit saying, “You haven’t seen this have you, you poor little people? You haven’t seen this stuff for 50 years,” extraordinarily condescending. But, the liberal materialism was at a much higher level. That’s one of the reasons why they collapsed further east.
But the interesting thing is that communism is really the product of intellectuals. It’s almost a sort of revenge of the intellectuals as a class upon life. The interesting thing is that some of the softest elements of Western societies, some of the most long-in-the-tooth elements, also some of the most economically comfortable elements are the people who pushed the Western/Eastern version of these ideas when they came to power.
There’s a famous story of Jean Cocteau which may well be apocryphal, the French artist and poet and writer and film director, and all the rest of it. It’s about 1910, and Lenin was certainly around then in Parisian salons as were many other people; don’t forget Stalin was in Vienna. There are rumors that Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin once sat in a street in Vienna in different cafes, and they didn’t know the other from the other, all developing their thinking. And you never know, because many of these bohemian undercurrents mix with each other in that decade of proto-revolution between 1900 and 1910, revolving around the Soviet proto-revolution of 1906, the early Soviet attempt at revolutionism.
I personally think, in a totally differentiated way, we’re in a similar era now. We’re on the threshold of enormous changes, of Herculean changes, the nature of which we don’t really understand yet. And I think, very like the first decade of the last century, we’re looking out on what’s coming. Because quite clearly an attack upon Iran is prefigured by much of the rhetoric that’s going on now, and much of which is being prepared now. They say they can’t weaponize it by 2014 but who knows?
So, the interesting thing is the support of the wealthy and intellectual outsider for a belief system that materially offered them very little but intellectually offered them power. Power! Winston says at the end, “What’s it all about?” to O’Brien. “What’s all the hunger and the torture and the endless war and the propaganda and torturing me to death for a cause I don’t really believe in to say I love Big Brother and then I do and then you shoot me. What’s it all for?” And O’Brien says, “It’s for power. Power,” he says, “Power and more power. Power as a dialectical principle.” You remember that great line? “If you want the future of the human race, Winston, imagine a boot, a boot, stamping on a human face forever!” And it’s a sort of satire of a sort egomaniacal intellectual power using ideology purely as a vehicle.
And there’s a very interesting insight into communism there. At the end Mao lived like a potentate. He lived like an ancient Persian or Egyptian Emperor. He was surrounded by women. He was surrounded by bastard children that he created. The politbureau used to meet him around his bed. Mao was quite a beast towards the end, and he used to say to Western correspondents he cleaned himself in his women. This is the great champion of humanity, the great anti-sexist, you see. This is what they’re like when they’re in power. Have you ever seen pictures of his bedroom with an enormous bed like that of an emperor, with all these women and children around, and the secret police in their caps with the red star further back? And then these volumes of Marxist prose behind the Red Books, his own work allegedly, to the front. And then he’d be lying on this bed dictating to the others like a sort of overgrown child, like an ideological version of a mad Roman Emperor, essentially, because that’s how it ended up. And probably the ideology had ceased to matter by then hadn’t it? It had become a sort of mental chess that you played with yourself and with others for reasons of pure power.
Because these economies weren’t making anything except more weapons, and the idea of Marxist critique of capitalism, that the proletariat is degraded because of the distinction between price and value, and that the surplus product is ripped out of the proletariat and invested by capitalists abroad in Empire. When Lenin wrote Imperialism in 1916 this is why he explained that revolution hasn’t happened yet. It hasn’t happened yet because they displaced the capital they have stolen from the people, stolen from the proletariat. And the irony was that extreme communism was an extreme version of what Marxism had criticized Western societies for: total degradation of the peasantry and proletariat; total ripping out of surplus value. Used to create more and more weapons in order to build more and more forms of power: pure power as an end in itself, but always at a material level because the ideology could only justify itself in material terms.
I think, to close, the interesting thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four is the one thing that’s in my mind is the sense data. When Winston’s in the Ministry of Truth and he needs to use the intercom he has to clean the holes in the device because they’re full of dirt, you know? It’s that grubby dirt-under-the-fingernails element that you get in state socialism, even in Western societies. Anyone who’s ever queued in a DHSS queue–the glass in the office is cracked, there are no plants, there’s no carpet. Everything’s unnaturally cold and grubby. You know, your sub-standard, sub-standard NHS ward, you know what I mean? Everything’s slightly out of focus. No one listens to you. Half of them are foreign anyway. No one really listens to you when you say something to them. They exist for you, don’t they, not the other way ’round?
There’s this logic, the state socialist logic, the logic of the producer writ large. You couldn’t buy anything in shops in the Soviet Union at the end, but the Party could. You had a card, and you went to a special shop where you could get razor blades; you could get boots; you could get the niceties, soap, things you need to live, basically, in any sort of industrial society. And the masses would queue.
Anthony Burgess who wrote A Clockwork Orange once went to a restaurant in Moscow, and you sat there for five hours! “Can I get some service now?” “Screw you, we’re the staff! You’ll wait there for five hours.” And then, after five and a quarter hours, you get this sort of cabbage soup, which is just a bit of cabbage in a bit of hot water with a sprig of parsley in it, sort of chucked at you, you know. It’s like in Western restaurants now isn’t it?
But it’s that sort of idea of the grubbiness of its texture, when you’ve got this ideology of idealism and universal brotherhood, and yet you return to the cabbage soup and the smell in the dysfunctional lift and the hair floating in your soup, and you know that state socialism of that sort, imposed by a party, a bureaucracy, an army has gone, and in all probability won’t come back.
And yet the real point of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the reason why this novel lives, and still probably frightens people in a way, is the ubiquity of its concern with mental processes, and the belief that when humans, in many ways, reject the philosophies of the past they will try and subordinate the present to them. Communism has died.
It maybe killed 100 million in the 20th century, or more. It had to be fought. The tendency of which we are in some ways a part is accused by many out there of beastliness, of non-humanism, and all the rest of it. But I would say that there was a time when the forces of the Right had to be as ferocious, had to be almost as nasty as what they were attacking, and was attacking them, otherwise they would have been completely destroyed by it. This was an ideology that preached utopia but believed that the ends justified the means in a manner that’s beyond that of a mafia don.
Do you remember the scene in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather? With the Jewish Hollywood producer who’s a pedophile, and the Irish-German councilor of the Mafia clan? And they talk about him, and he’s racially abusive to people of Italian and Germanic and Irish ancestry and all the rest of it. And the don waves that away. He’s not bothered with all that. And Brando, big figure then, bit of a better actor then, said, “What does this man love?” And he loves a horse. So the mob cuts off the head of the horse and puts it in his bed. Why? Because the don is saying, “I am a man beyond all law, beyond all morality, beyond anything you could even think of. I can strike at you in a way you don’t even understand. Because I have no limits. No limits.”
And there was a time when communism, before it froze into a bureaucracy, had no limits at all. I’ll close with Lenin’s remark. Don’t forget that the Cheka, the secret police was created momentarily. It was said it would be dissolved in a few years like the Terror under Robespierre. “It’s just to impose discipline upon the class enemies so that paradise can begin.” Towards his death in 1924 Lenin’s brain was liquified. Many medical historians believe that at least half of it was liquid. And at the height of the terror and the war between the Red and the White, which of course the Whites lost, Lenin said to one of his aides, “Now is the time. There’s maximum chaos, total starvation, the complete collapse of the Russian economy and civil war. Now is the time.”
And the aide said, “Time for what?” And he said, “Time to seize all the assets of the Orthodox Church. Time to seize all their churches. Time to turn them into granaries and barns and shops, and places where we put tap paths and tractors.” And the aide said, “Why?” And Lenin said, “Why not? Why not? We are history, we do what we wish.” Lenin believed that in a moment of chaos you extirpate the meaning of the prior order that the chaos was destroying, because they always worked on the mind before they worked on the body.
Thank you very much!
Dissident German lawyer Sylvia Stolz was incarcerated in Germany on 23 May 2019 to serve 18-month prison sentence for speech "Speech Forbidden, Evidence Forbidden, Legal Defence Forbidden: The Reality of Freedom of Expression" she gave in Switzerland in 2012. FOR THE SECOND TIME!