A few years ago, I got what, for a writer of political fiction, is a dream job. I was invited by the estate of George Orwell to write a retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the point of view of Julia, the lover of the protagonist, Winston Smith. The concept had been in the air for years, until its writing seemed inevitable; by asking a trusted person to do it, they hoped to nudge it in a direction that did justice to the original. They wouldn’t pay me, but after I’d finished and published the novel, they would give it their support and help it find its way in the world.
It was a huge compliment but also a daunting responsibility, and I was immediately engrossed in work: rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four, sketching plans and ideas, researching the political history that drove Orwell to write his book, drafting my first pages. My opening chapter – like Orwell’s – was the well-known scene of the Two Minutes Hate.
The Two Minutes Hate is a ritual in which Party members gather to watch a film of the rebel leader Emmanuel Goldstein and express compulsory rage. Regardless of their beliefs, the audience finds this an easy task. “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate,” Orwell writes, “was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within 30 seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”
At the time I was reimagining this scene, I spent much of my day on Twitter. It was early 2021, and everyone there was chronically angry. People communicated by jeering, trading insults, hectoring, flinging accusations. The mildest disagreement could trigger a storm of ugly attacks. Any tweet might make thousands of people love bomb you, then turn on you, then fight viciously among themselves about whether you should be exalted or killed. It was like being in an abusive relationship with everyone in the world.
Until recently, I’d seen this bruising chaos as knockabout fun. We were playing together, bonding by making fun of people, vying to craft the most annihilating tweet about the “main character” of the day. The jokes were often ingenious, and the targets of attack mostly seemed culpable. Though I had my doubts, I could mostly believe that Twitter was more good than bad.
But now I was writing all day about the Two Minutes Hate, which is eerily like the worst of Twitter. My bedtime reading consisted of histories of the rise of Hitler and Stalin, memoirs of the Cultural Revolution and the Holodomor. All these periods were characterised by the violent rhetoric, demonisation of vulnerable groups, singling out of individuals as targets, and fear of going against the mob that were increasingly normalised by online behaviour – and by the ever proliferating YouTube and cable TV channels devoted to political propaganda.
All that had changed was the rationale most commonly offered for this: that it was just a joke. Harassment was a form of joking, death threats were satire, slurs were meant ironically. With this excuse, even when a target was hurt in real life, the crime could be disowned by the people who had instigated it. They’d only been kidding around. How could their goofing, taken seriously by no one, be linked to such a tragedy?
Of course, those using these tactics are aware that kidding around is a highly effective way to incite violence. Perhaps the most infamous instance is Rwanda’s Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). This radio station, launched in 1993, used an informal, jokey, call-in format, in which the chat was interspersed with music. It was, in the words of one journalist, “like a conversation among Rwandans who knew each other well and were relaxing over some banana beer or a bottle of Primus in a bar ... It was all fun. Some people left the bar, others came in, the conversation went on and stopped if it got too late, and the next day it took up again after work.” True, all the discussion and jokes, even some songs, revolved around fear and hatred of the Tutsi minority, but the light tone made it easy to dismiss. As the Canadian ambassador to Rwanda, Lucie Edwards, later commented: “There were so many genuinely silly things being said on the station, so many obvious lies, that it was hard to take seriously.” But within nine months of its opening, RTLM was directly mobilising and organising the Hutus of Rwanda to murder an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 of their Tutsi neighbours, hacking them to death with machetes. Women were often gang raped and genitally mutilated before being killed. At the peak of the genocide, an RTLM host jocularly scolded listeners: “You have missed some of the enemies. You must go back there and finish them off. The graves are not yet full!”
Perhaps it seems like a stretch to equate this with Fox News or TalkTV. But is it only a matter of time before the underlying threat presented by these channels becomes explicit? Hauntingly, three months before the Rwandan genocide, a group of political dignitaries, including Senator Edward Kennedy, advised that the international community should act to shut down RTLM. Had his advice been followed, the voices directing the genocide would have been taken off air, and hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. Even the most passionate free-speech absolutist would find it hard to oppose such a decision – especially with hindsight. But how can we know if a media outlet will ever become this dangerous? When it comes to free speech, where do we draw the line?
It’s probably clear that mockery, however savage, isn’t the red flag we’re looking for. People make nasty jokes all the time. You might laugh while saying you’d like to see your boss thrown into a tank of piranhas, when in reality you would find it harrowing if it really occurred. One distinction that has been widely embraced on the left is that between punching up and punching down. Punching up is when you make fun of someone with more power than you; punching down is when you mock people with less. This intuitively sounds right. Anyone can ridicule Boris Johnson without worrying about the repercussions for his everyday wellbeing, but if a public figure mocks an unemployed Black man, or unemployed Black men in general, it can have real consequences. Too many people are looking for excuses for callousness and violence toward such men; indeed, they are being harassed and killed by the authorities there to protect them. Any joke at their expense is uncomfortably close to “The graves are not yet full!”
However, jokes that punch down are everywhere in classic satire. What else can we call the countless scenes in Don Quixote where we’re invited to laugh at a mentally troubled old man being beaten viciously for his mistakes? Or the sequence in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man about a Black sharecropper who has impregnated his daughter, in which the act of incest becomes a surreal extended joke? Even the silly running gag “I saw something nasty in the woodshed”, from Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, is essentially a joke at the expense of trauma victims.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the insults rain down on the just and the unjust alike. Orwell’s proles are ignorant and brutish; his middle classes utterly incapable of thought; while women are “always the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies”. Orwell even mocks the Party’s victims. In one scene, a man waiting to be tortured nervously praises the patriotism of the daughter who turned him in, while “casting a longing glance at the lavatory pan”. His surrender to the diarrhoea occasioned by his suppressed terror is then played as comedy.
Yet Nineteen Eighty-Four has been passionately embraced by survivors of Stalin and the Cultural Revolution, by refugees from North Korea. Their reaction is not “Why was this privileged outsider so disdainful of us?” but “How did he understand so well?” In Orwell’s harshest passages, they have seen the unfiltered, fearless expression of their own long-hidden shame and anger.
So can we say that satire can punch down safely, as long as it expresses an important truth? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The worst political actors – neo-Nazis, shills for dictators, terrorist recruiters – always sell themselves as brave truth-tellers. But while there are no simple rules about when satire is dangerous, there are ways to tell when satire is good for you. A satire that makes you feel good about already having all the “right” views may be comforting, but it’s not as much use as one that tangles with you, surprises, wrong-foots and makes you question what you really think.
From the time Animal Farm was written, the right wing has been keen to claim Orwell. Originally, this was because of his outspoken criticism of the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the CIA even funded film adaptations of both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, with the aim of building support for the cold war. Nowadays, the language of Nineteen Eighty-Four is used by rightwingers to indict “wokeism”. Any new coinage from the left is called “Newspeak”; any attempt to acknowledge moral ambiguity is dismissed as “doublethink”. With the single word “Orwellian”, a college’s overreaching speech policy, for example, is framed as an existential threat to the free world.
But Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t a warning against a university’s inclusivity statement. It was a warning about men like Trump and Putin and the violent mass movements they inspire. Men like Erdoğan, Modi, Orbán, and Maduro: events such as Duterte’s mass killings in the Philippines, Bukele’s mass arrests in El Salvador, Xi’s ubiquitous surveillance and social credit system and concentration camps and institutionalised torture in China. Orwell’s great political works speak to our current moment, when seemingly every country is infested with would-be autocrats, using the old playbooks with their lines about “enemies of the people” and “lying media” and “globalists”.
When my Nineteen Eighty-Four book was announced, described as a “feminist retelling”, I was treated to a personal experience of how far things had gone. The news attracted a storm of misogynist and antisemitic abuse in rightwing tweets, blogs, YouTube videos, even newspaper articles. This was long before the novel was available to be read – before I’d barely written a few chapters. Still, all the attackers were sure what would be in it: a full-throated endorsement of Big Brother. They also declared there was a plot to replace Nineteen Eighty-Four in school curricula with my book – despite the fact that it was being published in the US by Orwell’s publisher and had been endorsed by the Orwell estate, two organisations that would be out of pocket were Nineteen Eighty-Four to be dropped. It’s still unclear to me whether the attackers believed what they were saying. Were they lying or deluded? Or was this a real feat of doublethink – the ability to believe two contrary ideas at once – where no such distinction can be drawn?
In his essay Looking Back on the Spanish War, Orwell observes how we underestimate the risk that fascism, or “a combination of several fascisms”, will prevail throughout the whole world because, “nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run”. This is a fatal delusion. “We have become too civilised to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.” We no longer have the luxury to indulge in quibbles about civility, nor do we have the time for an emotionally satisfying but futile Two Minutes Hate. We must speak, write, make jokes, argue, fight, with an eye only to what is most effective. We must organise against fascism as if our lives depended on it. They do. The threat is here; the time Orwell warned about is now.
• Julia by Sandra Newman is published by Granta (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
