Big Brother Is Working For You!

Orwell, Trigger Warnings, and the Meaning of Censorship (Part 1)

You cannot think what you cannot say.

The new edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) has an Introduction by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, which contains a disguised trigger warning about the novel’s supposedly misogynist language. The delicious irony of that has not gone unnoticed: Walter Kirn on the podcast America This Week, declared: "Thank you for your trigger warning for 1984. It is the most 1984ish thing I've ever f***ing read."

But why are trigger warnings Orwellian? Aren’t they just a kind thing, promoted by the Ministry of Love to spare the reader’s feelings? Oops, I meant, of course, the progressive left.

In this essay, I want to take a deep dive into the meaning of censorship through the lens of Orwell’s great novel. I will argue that there are two distinct kinds of censorship: negative and positive. And while the instances of censorship we often hear about, such as book banning or blasphemy laws, belong to the negative side, trigger warnings and manipulation of language constitute positive censorship, which is more insidious, more dangerous, and far more common.

In negative censorship, specific forms of language are criminalized and eventually erased, along with the people who speak them. There are plenty of examples: the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books); the Nazi book burning; 19th-century feminist Anne Besant jailed for publishing a guide to contraception. In our century, we have Muslim countries, such as Pakistan, instituting laws against blasphemy. We have the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo.

But there is another form of censorship, which I will call positive censorship (though, of course, there is nothing positive about it). This is a creation of false narratives and of euphemistic language to disguise and divert attention from whatever the censor wants outlawed. A sort of substitution ensues, in which the original text is buried under layers of circumlocution, which eventually take on a life of their own. Truthful language is not simply erased. Rather, a false language is created that generates its own reality. And in this reality, dissenting opinions are not simply forbidden to be spoken or written. They become literally unspeakable.

I have two distinct memories related to Nineteen Eighty- Four . The first one is from my childhood. I must be nine or ten. My mother, the great essayist and dissident Maya Kaganskaya, is reading a book, which is how I always remember her. But she is wearing gloves - indoors.

“Mama,” I ask her, “what are you doing?”

She shows me the book. It is Samizdat - a handmade copy typewritten on cheap onion paper. I have seen such books before. But the title of this one is strange - just a number.

“I want to read it,” I say.

“You have to wear gloves,” she says. “KGB can lift fingerprints off the paper. And we only have it for one night. We need to pass it on.”

The explanation is perfectly clear. I know what the KGB is and what it can do. Every child does. And as the daughter of a dissident, I also know that she is part of a nebulous circle of friends and acquaintances who participate in forbidden or semi-forbidden activities, such as book clubs or writing letters to authorities. So I put on my winter mittens and sit down to read a pirated translation of George Orwell’s novel, finishing it by the break of dawn.

The second memory is from a much later period. I am a second-year student of English literature at Tel-Aviv University. I am sneaking out of the building because I want to play hokey and go back home where I have a teething baby who has kept me awake last night. Suddenly I see my professor approaching and my heart sinks.

“I just read your essay about Orwell,” she says. “It is brilliant. But do you really believe that the USSR will fall? And Mrs. Parsons will bring it down?”¹

The USSR falls next year. And millions of Soviet equivalents of Mrs. Parsons finally have their sinks unclogged.

I will come back to these stories later. But now, let us look at the novel itself, disregarding the mealy-mouthed framing of it in the Introduction, which Kirn mocks as “a little guidebook” that tells you: “Here's how you're supposed to feel when you read this”, much like the guidebooks produced by Winston Smith’s workplace, the Ministry of Truth.

Nineteen-eighty Four is one of those books that everybody knows about but few actually read. And when they do, they often get a shock. If you look at the way the book is framed in public discourse, especially by the left, it is read as a warning against fascism, or the surveillance state, or capitalism. But the text is plain that the novel is a scathing critique of socialism, and specifically of the major socialist state in existence at the time when the dying Eric Blair wrote his masterpiece, the USSR.

The ideology that rules Oceania is called Ingsoc, which translates as “English socialism”. Orwell’s own excruciating experience with Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War and the spectacle of the staged Moscow Trials contributed to his disillusionment with the USSR. The often-heard rejoinder “But Orwell was a socialist!” is meaningless. Yes, he was, and so was everybody else who cared for the conditions of the working class in England. It was a cliche at the time that planned economy was more efficient than the market (boy, were they wrong!). But even here, Orwell was prescient, showing in the squalor and discomfort of the everyday life in Oceania that a command economy is “detrimental to efficiency and growth” (Malia 508).

But Nineteen Eighty-Four focuses on a different aspect of socialist command: language. And here, rather than in the long-resolved debates about the state’s ownership of the means of production that the real power of the book lies.

Let us consider the part of the novel that is often overlooked, despite being, in my view, its core: the Appendix, describing the principles of Newspeak, which is the official language of Oceania.

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible…Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods” (Orwell 312).

Ingsoc is modelled on the Soviet language, which aspired to create a whole new vocabulary to control not just what the population could say but what they could think:

“…the vocabulary of what was now called Marxism-Leninism was standardized and ritualized into what has variously been called ‘wooden language’ or ‘newspeak’. All groups and individuals had their fixed labels…Nothing on this scale, and nothing this total, had ever been seen before in the world of ‘culture’…The…partocracy was also necessary logocratic [language-centered]” (Malia 172).

Fluency in the “wooden language” was necessary for survival in the USSR. Satirized in such underground classics as Alexander Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights (1976) and Viktor Pelevin’s Omon-Ra (1992) , Soviet Newspeak was the exact parallel of Orwell’s, up to and including, the use of endless abbreviations, euphemisms, labelling, and circumlocution. The reduction of the vocabulary was done in order to make certain concepts unthinkable:

“In Newspeak, it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it WAS heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent” (Orwell 300).

Orwell died before the rise of the “linguistic turn” in the humanities, which argued that thought and behavior are shaped by language. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; Michel Foucault’s notion of the episteme; and Derrida’s discourse analysis, all claimed that we are forever locked in the prison-house of language, with the reality outside being either inaccessible or nonexistent. The commissars of Newspeak knew this before the French school of postmodern thinkers made the idea mainstream. O’Brien explains to Smith:

“We control the matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull” (Orwell 295)

And the way to control the mind is through manipulation of language and narrative: doublethink, Newspeak, erasure of the past, are all means to create a collective reality that will conform to the Party’s ideology.

You cannot think what you cannot say.

The USSR is dead but we are still living with its stinking corpse. The inglorious collapse of the socialist utopia was one of those episteme-changing events whose consequences will reverberate through centuries. Ideologies seldom die; they mutate into new forms. The heir to socialism is the protean ideology that some call woke and some “identity synthesis” (Mounk). The most important feature it shares with Soviet totalitarianism is the belief in the omnipotence of language. Trigger warnings, cancel culture, fights against "verbal “microaggressions”, attempts to censor online debates or to criminalize “hate speech”, are all attempts to control the mind through the manipulation of discourse.

Whatever the name, the contemporary left ideology is not orthodox Marxism-Leninism but it shares some prominent features with Ingsoc. The most important of those is positive censorship. Based on the idea that language creates, rather than reflects, reality, positive censorship attempts to control society the same way as the Ministry of Truth controlled Oceania - though, of course, it does not have the tools of physical violence and legal repression. But it turns out that these tools may not be necessary. In the next essay, I will argue that the features of Nineteen Eighty-Four that everybody knows - surveillance, torture, and intimidation - are the least important ones. Totalitarianism can, and does, exist without any of those. All it needs is a trigger warning. Consider that self-censorship on campuses today is worse than during McCarthyism.

The main difference, of course, is that the USSR had recourse to both negative and positive censorship, while the left today can only employ positive censorship, and imperfectly at that. The USA has the First Amendment, though as we saw during the pandemic, it was not totally successful in preventing the manipulation of discourse and “filtering” of information. Other Western countries do not but even so, the idea of freedom of speech is firmly embedded in most democracies.

But is negative censorship even necessary? Nineteen Eighty-Four is not without its weaknesses, and as I will argue in the follow-up essay, the melodramatic figure of O’Brien and the torture in Room 101 are the main ones. For negative censorship in the USSR failed miserably to prevent the collapse of the regime and to create a purely linguistic version of reality. Power over the mind through terror, violence, prohibition and erasure has its limits. Will the creation of a new Newspeak through trigger warnings be more successful?

Let us go back to the two stories I told at the beginning. Reading with the gloves on is an example of negative censorship. And the fact that my mother was not arrested, and I continued going to school where I mouthed Newspeak platitudes with the facility that earned me good grades in Marxism-Leninism, shows that the regime was on its last legs at the time. We left the USSR before it finally collapsed, but it was clear to everybody (except, it seems, Sovietology gurus in the West) that it would be gone before long.

And here we come to the unsung heroine of freedom: Mrs. Parsons. She does not care for Newspeak or Oldspeak; unlike Smith, she is not interested in ideas, truth, or reality. She just wants her sink unclogged. And I stand by that essay I wrote so many years ago. Ordinary people (or “proles” in Orwell’s terms) who want material prosperity above all else are the last defense against totalitarianism. Of course, they can be intimidated by the apparatus of power. But they cannot be easily manipulated by positive censorship because, contra Foucault, they value things above words. People who shop in Walmart are the true defenders of democracy, not the academics who peddle the Newspeak of LQBTQ+ or Latinx or BIPOC. And I am saying this as an academic who is as fluent in that language as I was in Marxism-Leninism. But I saw a superpower fall when the proles realized they wanted jeans and fast cars rather than a socialist utopia. When Democrats in the US are wringing their hands over the “inexplicable” defection of the working class to the populist right, it is only because they have willfully forgotten how socialism fell and why.

So, is positive censorship completely toothless? Of course not. The elites in publishing, education, and the academy still wield the power to shape discourse. And in the age of AI, the pollution of language and the falsification of narrative are easier done than before. In the next essay, I want to talk about where Orwell went wrong and why utopian totalitarianism is an ever-present danger in democracy.

Works Cited

Malia, Martin. The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia (The Free Press, 1996).

Mounk, Yascha. The Identity Trap (Penguin Press, 2023).

Orwell, George. Nineteen-Eighty Four (Amazon Edition, 2023).

1. For those who don’t remember details of the novel: Mrs. Parsons is a minor character in Nineteen-Eighty Four, a timid housewife whose sink is permanently clogged because consumer satisfaction is low on the list of socialism’s priorities. In my essay, I wrote that not Winston Smith but Mrs. Parson is the real danger to the regime.