Orwell and beyond

It was pointed out to me recently that very few authors, poets or playwrights become English adjectives. We do have ‘Shakespearean” and, at least in Scotland, “Burnsian” but the one most bandied about these days is “Orwellian”. Like many schoolchildren of my generation ‘Animal Farm” and ‘1984’ were compulsory reading. Nowadays when the language police are on a mission to change the way we speak and, in the process, the way in which we think, we are encouraged to look back at Orwell’s genius and remind ourselves that we need to voice who we are and what we think, otherwise we are no longer true to ourselves.

Recently I stumbled across a book called “Orwell’s Roses” by Rebecca Solnit. It is extremely well written. More about George Orwell later.

I was listening to Siddharth Kara on the radio the other day. He was being interviewed about his new book, “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo powers our Lives.” I thought that I now have to read this book . I did not want to read this book, I would not be at my ease reading this book and, if I time it wrongly, I will not be able to sleep after reading this book. But, Dear Reader, I did read this book. More about Siddharth Kara later.

Why be on a mission to right wrongs or speak about things about which one can do nothing? Like all of these blogs that I write, the whole process is cathartic for me. It is self-serving. Of course, I am delighted when people read them and even more so when you/they comment on them. So again, Dear Reader, thanks for that. I guess this current rant has been partly spawned by what I have been seeing on the evening news lately. It must be very difficult to decide what is important to include on a news broadcast (not everywhere in the world has a reporter on site), so I do understand that it must be difficult to triage world events effectively. There is so much out there. But, there are some fairly obvious candidates. War in the Ukraine, famine in Africa, earthquakes in Syria and Turkey, women’s and girl’s rights in Afghanistan and Iran, sabre rattling between China and Taiwan, issues of climate, are crucially important. There are more but, in my naïve and anachronistic way, there are some things that really shouldn’t merit some of the time they consume. A book from a disaffected prince, talk about the Academy Awards, a court case over a skiing accident, obscure celebrities who die,  as well as some of the so called light hearted bits at the end of the newscast, these are all a bit spurious and maybe merit a place elsewhere in our programming. Anyhow enough of that, back to Kara and Orwell.

I suppose that I have been sucked in to believing that people are better behaved today than we were in the past. (Actually that’s not true, I have always had an healthy respect for the wisdom of the ancients and, indeed, see their 2000 year old understanding of humanity as adding some clarity to our everyday lives.) And, Friends, reading the work of these two wonderful writers I am learning again that better behaviour today than yesterday is simply not the case. Our ancestors, by which I mean the ancestors of all human beings, were guilty of sending children down mines and up chimneys to work; they worked adults and children to death as slaves. Kara demonstrates that in the Congo, where we mine cobalt to help run our cell phones, computers and electric vehicles, we are still using children to work in deadly conditions. In Africa, we are responsible for employing virtual slave labour to bring us luxuries ($1.10 per day is nothing more than slavery, is it, Dear Friends?). Underlying all of this, one suspects, is a current of racism and old fashioned greed and putative corruption. In the PRC (People’s Republic of Congo), an environmental and human disaster is taking place. It is happening now and it is happening on our watch. It is a catastrophe of immense proportions and, in this day and age, it is an absolute disgrace, but, Dear Reader, it should not be a surprise.

So this to me is where George Orwell comes along. The companies who exploit Congo and its people glibly state their commitment to proper care of the environment, the welfare of their work force, they reiterate with wonderful language how they are virtuous and nurturing. They do not on any account support child labour. Yet nothing is further from the truth. It is ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’ all over again where talk is being talked but the walk is not being walked. In many cases they are doing the exact opposite of what they say they are doing. Like Orwell warned us, language can be highly charged and in the hands of suits in cosy, carpeted offices, can be a force for us to do unspeakable things.

In reading  Siddarth Kara’s “Cobalt Red”, there really was no need to read anything beyond the first chapter. It starts on a note of dire pessimism and goes downhill from there. Children and adults working and dying for a pittance; exploitation at its most brutal; humanity at its most savage; corporate interests at their most greedy and, worst of all, caring for the lives of our fellow human beings, at its most indifferent.  And all for a battery that will ‘save’ nature’s balance. What is the point of destroying an environment to save an environment, I am asking myself? Pollution is rife in the mining sites of the Congo. If people don’t die in an accident then the dust and the river pollutions will produce an early death. It is morally wrong, ethically unconscionable and, sadly, totally consistent with the cruelty of human beings since the dawn of our beginnings. And the sorrow and tragedy of collapsed tunnels killing 40 people at a time, many of them children, and bodies never recovered and the lives of relatives destroyed and a story of tunnels with no light should be news and televised for all to see. It means nothing getting better just a never-ending hopeless descent into worse.

As I have read both these books and am shocked and appalled along the way, it is really my own solipsism which is haunting me. I sympathise with all of these poor people but my strongest emotion is directed towards myself. I seem to be absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of myself, and this pontificating makes me feel a bit better albeit only a smidge. Of course, somebody might scream at me that I am the victim of fake news; that this is not really happening in this day and age. To which I shall reply there are people who deny the holocausts of Armenia, Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the massacres in Rwanda in the 1990s; the so called ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the old Yugoslavia; the rise of the Isis atrocities. To me the overwhelming truth lies in the fact that human beings do behave with great cruelty towards each other. There continues to be ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. It is, tragically, most likely that the brutal situation in the mines of the PRC is true rather than not. However I cannot escape the point that I am part of the problem. At the top of the supply chain, the buyer, I play a part in the situation, an analogous complaining about the volume of traffic in North Vancouver when I am part of the problem if you see the similarity . I, like most of you, would be prepared to pay extra money for our electronics so that children could have a child’s life of school and play. We would do without just a little so that they could do with just a little bit more. We would, I believe, respond financially to the awful statistics and, even more so, to the shattering photographs of lives ended before they have had a chance to really begin.

 Back to George Orwell and the words of Rebecca Solnit in her book. In the year 1910, Helen Todd was a campaigner for human rights in the USA.

“In her magazine report, she reflected on the phrase that was to become a refrain for the suffrage movement, the labour movement and then for radicals in the 1970s and after, declaring that women’s votes would ‘go toward helping forward the time when life’s bread which is home, shelter and security, and the roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice. There will be no prisons, no scaffolds, no children in factories, no girls driven onto the street to earn their bread, in the day when there shall be

“Bread for all and roses too.”

It’s now 113 years later and the children of the cobalt mines in the Congo have little bread and any sign of roses remains an impossible dream.

Thanks for reading.

“Orwell’s Roses” by Rebecca Solnit. Published 2021 by Viking.

“Cobalt Red: How the blood of Congo powers our lives” by Siddarth Kara. Published 2023 by St.Martin’s Press.