Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/396532
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 12 OCTOBER 2014 Opinion 18 B ritish author Will Self recently took his much more famous antecedent George Orwell to task over the 'mediocrity' of his literary output. OK, I admit it might not be the most earth-shattering news item to have surfaced in the last few months; but given a choice between a high-profile literary catfight, and, say, yet another article about the unfinished parliament building in Valletta… I'd go with the literary catfight any day. And this fight promised to be more entertaining than most. In literary circles, calling Orwell 'mediocre' is roughly the equivalent of claiming that Mozart had no ear for music, or that Napoleon was a bumbling idiot when it came to military strategy. It's the sort of thing you just don't say in public… unless you're the author of books that have had at least a fraction of the literary influence Orwell has had over the past 50 years (or unless you're commenting under any article published online, in which case you can write whatever bullshit you like). So of course, I read the article, and... what a surprise. The author who has been dead for 64 years won the contest hands down, without even uttering a single insult. The trouble with Will Self 's criticism – as is so often the case with deliberately provocative iconoclasm – is that it gets lost in minor details. He berates Orwell mostly for his writing style, in particular his quasi-Marxist 'rules' of simplicity and economy of words. He also finds fault with the "obvious didacticism" of Orwell's most famous books, Animal Farm and 1984. Yet what makes Orwell a literary giant is not his prose writing style, but his understanding of human nature. Sticking only to his best- known novels, Animal Farm and 1984 display a profound grasp of the basic forces at work behind political ideological movements (which are ultimately composed of, and driven by, people). And Orwell understood not only how people manipulated the power structures of his own day… but he accurately predicted how they would likewise manipulate structures which didn't even exist when he wrote the book in 1948. We can all see some of his predicted scenarios with our own eyes. 'Newspeak', for instance, revolved around the concept of controlling the public's ability to think by limiting the language they are permitted to use. This has become a manifest reality today: jobs have been lost over thoughtless 'tweets', media corporations argue among themselves about how best to label issues for fear of provoking violent backlashes… in brief, we have created for ourselves the same Orwellian culture of fear when it comes to speaking our minds. Control through surveillance is another Orwellian reality we live through day by day. Winston Smith had to move his writing desk into a corner of his bedroom to avoid being watched all day by the monitor on the wall. Google Earth can now track people in the streets where they live through photographs taken by geo-stationary satellites. The only difference is that most people don't move their desks out of view: they quite happily upload all the details of their private lives onto Facebook, where the information is scanned by user profile software and sold to the highest bidder. I could go on, but like I said George Orwell already won the fight without any help from me. The only reason I started with this digression in the first place is that the whole Self-versus-Orwell story forcefully reminded me of how accurately the latter's portrayal of human nature applies to Malta in the 21st century. There has been a lot of talk recently about 'threats to Maltese democracy', mostly in the form of a plan to postpone the next round of local council elections. I wrote about this last Wednesday, and was immediately struck by the quality of the responses I received. There was an unmistakable tone of personal offence expressed at my comparison between PN leader Simon Busuttil and Jackie Chan. Only it didn't come from Simon Busuttil himself (or, even more surprisingly, from Jackie Chan). It came from people who are merely uninvolved spectators: your regular party supporters, in this case rooting for the PN. The interesting thing is that I detected the exact same tone in responses to an article I wrote the preceding week, this time criticising the Labour government's nominee for the Commission, Karmenu Vella. In both cases I was accused of wearing 'partisan blinkers'. Yet the two objects of my criticism are actually from opposing parties… which makes those blinkers quite unique, in that The real threat to democracy Raphael Vassallo For the brainwashed party supporters the important thing is that 'their' party maintains power at all costs. So if it becomes necessary (hypothetically speaking) to throw sulphuric acid into a child's face to achieve that aim their unhesitant answer will be "yes"