In this age of Piffle vs. Horror, Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, remains a beacon for sanity. Ian Slater's revised Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One (McGill-Queen's $29.95) bristles with penetrating illuminations about Orwell and politics. "I have tried to show not only why Orwell matters now,"; says Slater, "but why he will always matter."; In his diary Orwell wrote about working at the BBC for six months, imbibing the culture of lying. "Its atmosphere is something halfway between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum... Nevertheless one rapidly becomes propaganda-minded and develops a cunning one did not previously have. "For example, I am regularly alleging in all my newsletters [broadcasts to India] that the Japanese are plotting to attack Russia. I don't believe this to be so, but the calculation is: If the Japanese are plotting to attack Russia, we can say, 'I told you so.' "If the Russians attack first, we can, having built up the picture of a Japanese plot beforehand, pretend that it was the Japanese who started it. If no war breaks out after all, we can claim that it is because the Japanese are too frightened of Russia."; In tracing Orwell's increasing political consciousness, Slater, a prolific novelist and past editor of Pacific Affairs at UBC, suggests Orwell clearly surrendered to what he later called the 'dangerous proposition... that intellectual honesty is a form of antisocial selfishness.' Slater continues: "The most dangerous implication of the proposition is that although most people may readily agree to short-term tactical lying in time of war, if the war (or war preparation) becomes permanent...then the short-term becomes the long-term. "Lying becomes the norm, and one cannot, even by an act of will, confine it just to military matters. Lying becomes a habit in all areas of life, especially in a totalitarian state in which control of the past by deception is deemed essential to protecting the myth of infallibility."; Read in the context of Iraqnophobia, Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One allows for some very disturbing comparisons to be made between the Big Brother society of the Soviet Union and the Big Brother society of America today. After the United Nations' inspectors never found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Colin Powell assured the United Nations, and the world, the U.S. had its own evidence that such weapons existed. We have since learned that no such evidence existed and the White House administration of George Bush II laid their plans to attack Iraq prior to 9/11. But the pretence of infallibility remains. 0-7735-2622-6

[BCBW Summer 2004]