Turning Orwell into Propaganda

“Who controls the past controls the future.”

“Some animals are more equal than others.”

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

George Orwell’s lines are the stuff of much political commentary—and have been for decades. As Justice, Law, and Criminality scholar Samantha Senn writes, this is the product of a concerted effort by intelligence agencies back in the 1950s.

Senn notes that Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1944 as a “fairy tale” that was a transparent allegory for the path from the Russian Revolution to Stalinist authoritarianism. The ruling cadre of pigs gradually betrays the farm animals’ revolution. By the end, the other animals discover that it’s impossible to tell the difference between the pigs (the rulers of the Soviet Union) and the humans from the neighboring farms (the capitalist ruling class of the other countries).

While the political systems of the US and UK clearly don’t come off particularly well in the story, Senn writes, many readers in those countries interpreted it simply as an anti-socialist message. And both British and American intelligence services encouraged this reading, translating the book into numerous languages and distributing it across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

In 1950, after Orwell’s death, the CIA arranged for an animated film to be made based on the book. However, it pushed several changes. It transformed Orwell’s generally positive depiction of Snowball (Leon Trotsky), emphasized that the animals on some neighboring farms were perfectly content with their treatment by the human farmers, and changed the ending to show the other animals rising up to overthrow the pigs. The adaptation was unpopular in theaters, but it was widely shown in US and UK classrooms and was translated and distributed in other countries.

Senn writes that British and American intelligence agencies similarly supported the spread of Orwell’s 1984 through translations and the production of another box-office disaster widely shown in schools. Compared with Animal Farm, 1984 is a far broader warning about authoritarian governments. Set in England, the novel envisions a future in which the whole world is divided among three totalitarian nations.

This made it far more useful for a variety of propaganda purposes. The Soviet Union, which had identified Orwell as an “Enemy of Mankind,” turned 1984 to their own ends, depicting it as a prediction of the future of the United States, with either J. Edgar Hoover or Ronald Reagan compared to Big Brother.

The adaptability of 1984 has also made it useful fodder for all kinds of memes and satire. Invented words like “newspeak” and “thoughtcrime,” as well as images of surveillance by ever-present screens and looming pictures of a despotic leader are now ubiquitous in all sorts of political contexts.

“By ensuring that Orwellian concepts such as ‘Big Brother,’ and ‘some are more equal than others’ entered into the public lexicon,” Senn writes, the intelligence agencies “unwittingly provided the world with a vocabulary that is potentially well-suited to criticizing the United States in the twenty-first century.”

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