Contemplating George Orwell, Human Rights and Atrocities in a Time of COVID-19
In this ECR2P June Fresh Perspectives blog, Dr Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, writes on George Orwell, COVID-19, and our current political times.
Orwellian times?
Maybe it is the turbulent times we are living through, or the fact that “1984” is on the bookcase behind me during Zoom meetings, but I’ve been thinking about George Orwell a lot lately. In 1940 Orwell, the century’s most famous literary opponent of totalitarianism, lifted his portentous pen to review Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” In a few serrated paragraphs, Orwell exposed several inexorable truths regarding the threat that a joyless narcissist like Hitler posed to democracy. One was that Hitler always spoke in a way that if “he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.” Despite his penchant for persecuting others, Hitler also invariably presented himself and his supporters as victims, battling iniquitous enemies and “suffering under intolerable wrongs.”
Orwell was no casual commentator. He had fought in Spain’s civil war, where he was shot by a fascist sniper. In June 1940, just three months after he reviewed Hitler’s turgid autobiography, Paris fell and Orwell started preparing for Nazi Germany’s imminent invasion. In his diary, Orwell wrote that if England was conquered then “one must remain alive if possible, if necessary in a concentration camp.” But if the United States would not declare war against Nazi Germany, then “there is nothing for it but to die fighting.”
Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf was published on 21 March 1940. Almost exactly eighty years later most of the world went into lockdown in response to a global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. In the United States another joyless narcissist, President Donald J. Trump, has been criticized for his Orwellian deployment of “alternative facts.” And while crude comparisons with Hitler are historically problematic, Trump has spent his entire Presidency trying to convince people that he is fighting the dragons of illegal immigration and media malfeasance. Instead he is undermining democracy while presiding over the deadliest public health failure in modern history.
Across the United States - the richest and most powerful country on earth - more than 100,000 people have died of COVID-19. New York City has been the epicenter of the pandemic, with more than 16,000 deaths. For eleven weeks the wail of ambulance sirens has been a constant part of our lives here in Brooklyn. But last weekend the ambulances were replaced by police sirens as riots broke out in response to the police murder of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis. The country is now experiencing the largest protests and civil disorder in decades.
Tweeting furiously from the White House, President Trump chose not to confront the ugly history of systemic racism that led to the protests and the unnecessary loss of so many black lives. He chose instead to focus on the intolerable wrongs he imagines he is suffering, and threatening that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Human rights and COVID-19
One suspects Orwell would have had a lot to say about Trump and other contemporary threats to human rights in the world. In recent years a climate of creeping authoritarianism has been evident in Russia, Turkey, the Philippines and elsewhere. In India, the Hindu nationalist BJP government is trying to strip away the citizenship of millions of Muslims and the country recently experienced its deadliest sectarian riots in decades. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has eulogized the former military dictatorship and been recklessly indifferent to the pandemic. Brazil now has the second highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world.
There has also been much scrutiny of how China’s authoritarian government responded to the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan. But we should not forget that in Xinjiang, in the remote northwest of the country, more than one million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims are currently being detained in so-called “vocational training centers,” or “de-extremification facilities,” that amount to concentration camps. There are grave fears for this population who are cut off from the world, and we have no idea of what measures (if any) have been put in place to protect them from COVID-19.
Other politicians are exploiting COVID-19 in more direct ways. Hungary’s xenophobic Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, seized upon the pandemic as an opportunity to indefinitely rule by decree. As a result, Orbán’s self-declared “illiberal democracy” is no longer formally considered to be a democracy at all by Freedom House, whose latest annual survey described the country as a “hybrid regime” – half-democracy and half-autocracy.
In short, we were already in an international political crisis before COVID-19. But as the virus continues to spread, malignant political forces are trying to weaponize the pandemic.
COVID-19 does not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender or identity, and it does not respect passports and borders. The pandemic has, however, resulted in increased hate speech directed at minority populations – Asians in the United States, Roma in parts of Europe, Africans in China, and so on. In Central African Republic, people have already suffered through a civil war and are still enduring attacks from predatory armed groups. There are only three ventilators for the country’s 4.8 million people and it has been reported that the minority Muslim population are now being disparaged in the streets as “virus-spreading outsiders.”
Responding to these disturbing trends, the UN Secretary General, António Guturres, has argued that the pandemic is “a human crisis that is fast becoming a human rights crisis.” During February he launched a Call to Action to “put human dignity and the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the core of our work.” In keeping with this call, it is essential that all UN member states respond to COVID-19 by defending universal rights, emphasizing human solidarity, and upholding our responsibility to protect vulnerable populations from atrocities. An incalculable number of lives may hang in the balance.
Spring is still spring
In his 1940 review, Orwell observed that there will always be a certain constituency of voters in any democracy who desire not just comfort and security, but also “drums, flags and loyalty parades.” In the midst of the Great Depression, Hitler promised people both economic salvation and paramilitary pageantry, and as a result “a whole nation flings itself at his feet.” From the militarized response to mass protests in America to attacks on human dignity in so many countries, Orwell’s writings are a grim warning from history of the need to defend civil liberties and universal rights.
As we all continue to shelter in place, books and literature provide a respite from the daily barrage of disturbing news. “1984” is currently number one on Amazon’s bestsellers list for classic literary fiction. And Orwell was not only an incisive enemy of totalitarianism, he was a resilient activist who also wrote about life, freedom and… amphibians.
In April 1946 Orwell penned a short essay about seasonal change and the English toad. He wrote that, “so long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison,” then “Spring is still Spring.” My city is under curfew, the world is experiencing a deadly pandemic, and too many people are facing the threat of persecution or the mass grave. But as Orwell wrote, “the earth is still going around the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.” In these troubled times, we should all draw strength from that indisputable truth.
Dr Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.
Image credit: "1984 Book Covers" by colindunn is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
If you are interested in submitting a blog post for the ECR2P's Fresh Perspectives series, then please contact Richard Illingworth by Email (pt17rji@leeds.ac.uk) or Twitter (@RJI95).