Susan Boyle in 1984

Lies becoming Truth

Page 62 extract from George Orwell's grim satire of 1984, the year in which the world is divided into three great powers, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. They are warring with one another and in each state, four ministries-the Ministry of Peace which deals with war, the Ministry of Love which deals with law and order, the Ministry of Plenty which deals in scarcities and the Ministry of Truth which deals with propaganda. Each agency has absolute powers, under 'The Party'. The Ministry of Love is also the headquarters of the dreaded Thought Police that carries out operations. The authorities keep a check on every action, word, gesture, or thought.

The anti-state hero Winston Smith had just picked up from a drawer a copy of a children's history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and was beginning to copy a passage into the diary. It was the Party's official version of the history of London, painting a life of untold miseries and subjugation of the working class to capitalists...

How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that screamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set-up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering-a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons-a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting-three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with a lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.

He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations-that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand. whereas before the Revolution it had been 300-and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that are accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the jus primae noctis*, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed-after the event: that was what counted-concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it in his fingers for as long as thirty seconds...

* The law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.

Kids Becoming Orwellian?

Are we attempting to make our kids "Orwellian" these days?

Just consider how much control we have over our own Malaysian kids, be it in their school life or compulsory "National Service" under the Ministry of Defence. It's interesting to note that weapon training is provided as well.

Right now, I've nothing against the National Service Programme at the moment personally but if the kids really start becoming Orwellian... I will know it will be time to draw the line.

"Orwellian"?

Yes, that's "Orwellian" as in "George Orwell", the brilliant satirist and author of the famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Well, I'm not answering that question whether we are really attempting to do that starting with the kids, right now. I would like to share an extract from Nineteen Eighty-Four here. Perhaps we would think better out of the box after reading it.

There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children barged into the living room...

"Up with your hands!" yelled a savage voice.

A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and eas menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.

"You're a traitor!" yelled the boy. ""You're a thought-criminal! You're an Eurasian spy!! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!"

Suddenly they were both leaping around him, shouting "Traitor!" and "Thought-criminal!" the little girl imitating her brother in every movement It was slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow into man-eaters. There was a sort of a calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.

Mrs. Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to to the children, and back again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.


"They do get noisy," she said. "They're disappointed because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take them, and Tom won't be back from work in time."

"Why can't we go and see the hanging?" roared the boy in his huge voice.

"Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!" chanted the little girl, still capering around.

Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck with an agonizing painful blow. It was though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.

"Goldstein!" bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what struck Winston was the look of hapless fright on the woman's greyish face.


Back in the flat...

With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worse of all was that by means of Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of the slogans, the worship of Big Brother-it was all a sort of a glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak-'child hero' was the phrase used-had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.

BRUNO IS STILL ALIVE! Or isn't he? How could a happy man living in a comfortable First World peaceful and beautiful country like Switzerland throw it all away to live in a bug-infested disease-ridden tropical jungle with ferocious wild animals such as poisonous cobras and fierce gnashing sharp-tooth bears?

He could only answer that himself. I do believe though that he fell in love with the jungle and its most primitive nomadic tribe, the Penans.

When I first met him in Miri in 1984, he sounded really enthusiastic about his time with the gentle folks in Ulu Baram.

He shared with me candidly his favorite past-time of caving and other speleological activities and his life with his domestic animals up in the Swiss alps, his concern for the heavy deforestation of tropical rainforests everywhere and the disturbing callous disregard for Mother Nature. It was classic Bruno-trusting and honest about everything. There wasn't a single hint of his decision to remain in the thick Sarawak jungle at all.

The rest, as they say, is history. He stayed behind. He was caught for overstaying, deported, came back again and was never seen or heard from again.

Coming soon: The Borneo Post report on his disappearance...and the latest from his family...

(Part 1)

One late sunny afternoon in 1984, as I drove past the Miri District office, I noticed a grinning bearded European, dressed in army fatigues squatting near it.

"Holy smoke! Maybe it's Jesus!" I muttered to myself.

It could very well be him to save us all from the madness. 1984 was indeed a miserable year. Malaysian kids were gradually learning almost everything in Malay and English was being frowned upon by the authorities as a colonial legacy. Even the freedom to worship was affected with the banning of the Alkitab, the Holy Bible that had been translated into Malay for the local Evangelical Church's Malay-educated members to use.

Added to this misery was the action of an idiotic police inspector who trampled on our human rights and used a road block to detain for over 12 hours whatever vehicles the police disliked. My Datsun pulsar had two small fog lamps, fixtures which were part of the vehicle, on it. Over 20 vehicles were detained in a cramped small traffic depot by the seaside.

In that year, 1984, I was a church-going, smartly dressed slim young man with a clean-cut hairdo, working as a book-keeper for the Borneo Evangelical Mission (BEM) which came under the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF). The Evangelical Church of Borneo (SIB) was nurtured by this Mission, which was headed by a wonderful brilliant French-Jewish director, Brian Michell.

Okay, I got you there, angry, anti-semitic turkeys! Actually, he's a Caucasian with French and Jewish ancestry.

Anyway, we'll leave him out of this story because I've never mentioned my acquaintance with Bruno. He would be shocked and astonished to read about this if he ever surfs into this blog, I'm sure.

Part 2 -To be continued.