What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics Edited by András Szántó, with an introduction by Orville Schell (Public Affairs, New York) $14.95, 256 pp.

George Soros, billionaire founder of the Quantum Fund and reportedly the 80th most wealthy person in the world, is a major sponsor of liberal causes through the Open Society Institute (OSI) which he founded and chairs.

Learning the lessons from the failure to defeat Bush in the 2004 election — a campaign that he supported with large donations—he focuses this time on exposing how totalitarian propaganda methods are gaining a foothold in our ostensibly open society.

Soros' Open Society Institute sponsored the book What Orwell Didn’t Know — a collection of 20 articles by experts in the fields of journalism, cognitive psychology and popular culture. The authors have diverse backgrounds and impressive credentials, typified by Farnaz Fassihi, senior Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

The launch of the book occurred in tandem with a symposium (also sponsored by the Open Society Institute) held at the New York Public Library on Nov. 4 and attended by 900 people.

Both the book and the conference were sponsored in collaboration with five schools of journalism. The second session at the library was chaired by Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism; the third by Ernest J. Wilson III, dean of the Annenburg School for Communication of the University of Southern California. The graduate schools of journalism at UC Berkeley and Northwestern University and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard also collaborated in the publishing venture.

The appendix of the book is a reprint of Politics and the English Language, written by Orwell in 1946, three years before his apocalyptic novel 1984. Politics was inspired by the totalitarian regimes in Russia and Nazi Germany. Orwel, disillusioned by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War—in which he fought on the anti-fascist side, remained a committed progressive and critic of British imperialism. This commitment is clear; in Politics, Orwell wrote:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. [217]

In 1984 Orwell emphasized the use of propaganda to brainwash a population into submission. Some of Big Brother’s methods foreshadow the use of double-think today, but Orwell died in 1950 so he missed the application of modern psychological techniques to marketing and the emergence television and the internet. Thus, he envisaged neither the effectiveness of modern propaganda, in a supposedly open society, nor its use to deliberately evoke fear as a way to short circuit the brain’s capacity to reason. Szántó makes this point in his preface to What Orwell Didn't Know, writing:

Contemporary methods of persuasion are subtle, insidious, sugarcoated, focus-grouped, and market-tested—and comparable in their effectiveness to anything served up by despots and demagogues of the past.[xii,xiii].

Soros reiterates Szántó's point in his own epilogue to the book:

What I find most troubling is that the American people seem so susceptible to manipulation. The outstanding example is the War on Terror, which has imposed a false and misleading interpretation of the threat presented by the terrorist attack of 9/11. The general public has bought into that interpretation so completely that even though it criticizes the war in Iraq, it is loath to challenge the War on Terror as a false metaphor. This is not the only case where public opinion has been successfully manipulated. Political discourse is rife with examples: the Clear Skies Act actually relaxes the rules on air pollution; the Healthy Forest Restoration Act actually permits clear-cutting; and the No Child Left Behind Act imposes testing standards without providing the necessary funds. Needless to say, both sides of American politics engage in deliberate deception at election time. How could propaganda methods reminiscent of Orwell’s worst fears prove so successful in contemporary America? How could the public be so badly misled?[187,188]

What Orwell Didn't Know is an attempt to answer Soros' question. The book is divided into an introduction, the "Follies of Orthodoxy " by Schell and three sections — "Part One: Language and Politics" with six articles which discuss the competing conservative and progressive paradigms as illustrated by the use of words such as “freedom, liberty and rights,” [56] in a thoughtful analysis by Aryeh Neirer, president of the OSI. "Part Two: Symbols and Battlegrounds" has six articles, including one on framing by cognitive scientist, George Lakeoff, [67] which discusses the use of emotional language to imprint a message on the brain. The third section of the book, "Media and Message," with five articles, is arguably the most informative for progressives who are familiar with Lakeoff’s and similar discussions of framing.

Martin Kaplan from the USC Annenburg School of Journalism, describes television news as an Infotainment Freak Show. His description of a typical newscast is a hilarious riff, but his main point—that today news is treated as an entertainment profit center—is deadly serious.

Geoffrey Cowan, also from Annenburg, gives a detailed account of how major newspapers like the New York Times censor themselves. He writes about media hesitation to call events in Iraq a civil war:

President Bush made the administration’s views clear. … Meanwhile, various news organizations were struggling with terminology. Sectarian violence seemed too soft. Civil war seemed too definitive—and too politically sensitive. As Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, later explained to Brooke Gladstone on National Public Radio’s On the Media: “One of the reasons for not using it was, you know, honestly, a concern that because the White House had contended that this is not a civil war, that using the phrase amounted to a kind of political statement.” So the Times used qualifiers, Keller explained, quoting other sources or modifying the harshness of the term “civil war’ by describing Iraq as “on the brink of civil war.”[160]

In the same section, Victor Navasky, now director of the George Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia and a editor and publisher of the Nation and an editor at the New York Times, issues a call to action in his article "Neither Snow, Nor Rain, Nor Heat, Nor Gloom of Night Will Stay the Couriers from the Swift Completion of their Appointed Rounds—but What About Big Media?" in which he writes about a move to drive smaller publications out of business.

The postal rate increase of 2007, when for the first time the postal service, which had until that time imposed rate increases on big and small periodicals more or less equally, adopted a plan and rate structure that Time Warner’s lawyer-lobbyists had been pushing for more than a decade, all in the name of efficiency.[153]

and

An informed and empowered citizenry is necessary for a diversity of viewpoints to become part of the political debate. One way to ensure the diversity of our media would be to demand (ask) that our candidates for public office put forward an information policy the same way they put forward a foreign or a domestic policy.[155]

In his concluding epilogue to What Orwell Didn't Know, Soros expresses his hope that this book will “inoculate the public against false arguments by arousing resentment against being manipulated " [203].

The November 4th 2007 three-session conference There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America (available on the web) takes its name from a tactic that Soros suggests as a way to defeat the Republican propaganda machine. In Ronald Reagan’s second debate against Jimmy Carter in 1980, Reagan scored big by challenging a misstatement by Carter with the words, “There you go again.” Soros suggests: [203]

Perhaps the same result could be achieved if we said, ‘There you go again’ every time an Orwellian Newspeak technique is used.” Despite the bleak picture of the way that the uses of propaganda have been perfected since the days when George Orwell wrote about Big Brother in his 1949 classic, 1984, he remains optimistic about our ability to take back America.

The three sessions--Propaganda Then and Now: What Orwell Didn’t Know; Deceiving Images: The Science of Manipulation and Solutions and The Future Political Landscape --cover some of the same material that is in the book but also include wide-ranging discussions with questions from the audience. The webcasts are well worth listening to in full.

One of the speakers was Michael J. Copps, presently an FCC commissioner. He called for a grass-roots movement to once again defeat efforts to end regulatory control of the air waves by big media monopolies.

Soros himself spoke on the first panel and elaborated on his epilogue to What Orwell Didn’t Know. Additionally, as a complement to the recorded 3-session conference, a televised interview with Soros aired on C-span 2 on Nov. 13. In it, Soros discusses the concerns that motivated him to oppose Bush in 2004 and his concerns now -- in particular the fear of Democrats to question the validity of Bush’s War on Terror.

What Orwell Didn’t Know places the discussion of framing, initiated by George Lakoff in his 2004 book Don’t Think of an Elephant in a broader historical context. In 2007, this phrase could be translated: “Don’t mention the “War on Terrorism.” In his contribution to the Orwell book project, Lakoff emphasized that modern psychological techniques go far beyond the techniques of new-speak identified by Orwell. It is chilling to realize just how successful the Bush Administration in forcing their will on the American population, and controlling the political process. Unfortunately the comparison of President Bush to Big Brother is anything but ludicrous.

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About the Author: Carol White is Book Reviews Editor for ePluribus Media. She has edited a small science journal and is presently a free-lance writer, who covers the arts and related matters for her local newspaper.

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