1984 Orwell and the reality of Venezuela (part I)
English literature has given the world one of the most important anticipatory novels of our time: 1984. Surely you, dear reader, are thinking of other English works such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells or A Happy World by Aldous Huxley, which are also science fiction novels in which a future is envisioned in which technology dominates man, and I do not take away his reason; these works are also as important as the one written by George Orwell. But what is it about the novel 1984 that makes it fundamental and valid above all other novels at this time?
Indisputably, beyond the devastating pessimism about the future, its pages maintain, unlike the other two novels mentioned, the premonition of the present that many of us are living and the intuition of a world increasingly governed by the irrational use of technology. That is to say, its history is not that of a future that has not yet arrived, but that of the devastating present that we suffer.
This book, published on June 8, 1949, shows us how citizens can be controlled by an omniscient being who, through a television screen, observes everything that surrounds him and in which everyone spies on everyone; in the same way, it shows us how totalitarian regimes work and how they can do the indescribable to remain in power.
But what is the similarity between the 1984 fiction and our contemporary reality? In a series of posts I want to write for 
When we look at the situation in Venezuela we have the impression of entering the dystopian history written by Orwell: we live under a totalitarian government; we have a leader and a single messianic party that personalizes power and controls everything; we suffer the indoctrination that imposes not only thought, but also reality; we observe the artifice of the ministries that try to control everything; we live the conception of an arbitrary language and the serious problem of the absence of freedom, persecution and misery. In this first part we will deal with the manipulation of memory as a form of citizen control.
The country where the history of 1984 is developed is called Landing Track Number One. In this sense, the Party has had to reconstitute everything on the basis of a brainwashing that is done to the population, in order to disconnect the present with the past of the nation. This mechanism, by all means arbitrary, seeks to leave citizens without memory, so that they not only doubt history but also the existence of themselves.
More frightening than the torments and death itself was the fact that the Party had the power to seize the past and affirm that such and such an event had never happened ... For it is their understanding that would not take long to be annulled anyway. And if everyone agrees to accept the falsehoods imposed by the Party as true and all the evidence is used to support them, then the lie becomes history and becomes true. "Whoever owns the past," said the Party's motto, "dominates the future, whoever owns the present dominates the past. 42
As far as we can see, the control of memory is a fundamental and determining factor for the domination of people. When a government erases the past of a people, in one way or another it is leaving it orphaned and adrift. This makes it an easy target for lies and inventions.
The same thing is happening in Venezuela. Since the Bolivarian Government, led first by Hugo Chávez and then by Nicolás Maduro, came to power, there are many passages of history and even patriotic symbols that have been reconstructed or refounded, leaving the youngest citizens with uncertainty and total ignorance of the country's historical past. A clear example of this maneuver is the change in the name of our country, which used to be called the Republic of Venezuela, becoming now the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The same change took place in emblematic streets and squares that were refounded with other names overnight. A similar variation was experienced by the national dates, which until then were commemorated in the country and then fell into disuse, to then begin to promote and celebrate others that violated all previous history. Not to mention the alteration they made to the National Coat of Arms, the Flag, money and even the face of the country's greatest hero: Simón Bolívar.
In the search to eradicate memory, in the novel 1984 all means are used to establish history, to make it credible and truthful before the eyes of all:
In the old days, the paragraph said, before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city we know today, but a miserable, dirty and sordid population where almost no one ate enough and there were hundreds of thousands of poor people without shoes or even a roof under which to shelter. (78)
Even later, he tells us more clearly how the books have been responsible for transmitting part of the country's historical memory:
I would like to know your opinion on this. The history texts affirm that life before the Revolution was totally different from what it is now. There was the most atrocious slavery and injustice and misery beyond all one can imagine. (94)
As we see in this passage of the novel, books, like newspapers, can be carriers of information. Hence they are used to create a favorable line of opinion for any government. Perhaps because of this, any regime with totalitarian tendencies is going to look for ways to control not only the editorials, but also the press and any means of communication. In this case the aim is to show how unfavorable any time before the current government was, the hardships that the citizens of a country could have experienced, all this in order to establish the idea of messianism, so that the citizens feel grateful and indebted to the government.
Venezuela is an oil-producing country, so it could be economically more solvent than other countries, but that's not the case. When Hugo Chávez, former president of Venezuela, comes to power, the discourse he uses is precisely that of a savior, that of someone who comes to improve the conditions of the most underprivileged, to give them a voice, to listen to them. Obviously, many people who until that moment had felt despised by previous governments believed in the proposal. They saw in the words of the former president, the opportunity to have a better economic position and a better quality of life. To reaffirm the image that the Chavista government wanted to establish in the minds of Venezuelans, all the means of communication were used to transmit messages that not only spoke of the positive aspects of the revolution, but also of how bad the previous governments had been.
The ideal sustained by the party was something dazzling, gigantic and overwhelming: a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons; a people of warriors and fanatics advancing towards their destinies with perfect cohesion, animated by identical thoughts and all chanting the same chorus... But the reality was another: sordid and decaying cities, where malnourished people wore shoes with holes in the soles and lived in houses built in the nineteenth century that smelled of boiled cabbages and toilets in poor condition of conservation, (79)
Apparently, one idea is what they want to see and another very different idea is what they really are. Like 1984, in Venezuela there is still the greatest fallacy that the country is on the right path, that we were never as happy as we are now, that there has never been as much prosperity and abundance as there is in this revolution. In fact, it has been seen outside our borders that the Venezuelan is one of the world's citizens with the best quality of life at the moment. Not to mention, that the government, whenever it can, threatens to declare war on other countries, starting from a power that does not exist, because if one thing is clear is that Venezuelans are suffering from terrible malnutrition and lack appropriate clothing that can cover their bones.
Day and night the telepanel broke one's eardrums with statistics to show that today the people ate more, dressed better, had more comfortable housing and better means of entertainment; that men lived longer and worked less; that they were more robust, educated and blissful than the poor people of fifty years ago... Thus, for example, the Party affirmed that today 40% of the plebeians knew how to read and write, while before the Revolution they did not exceed
15%. (80)
With respect to the above quotation from Orwell's story, it has been said that Venezuela's current regime is one of the most mediatic in this country. The number of official transmissions that have been broadcast in these 20 years exceeds by far the number that previous governments could have done. Many of these transmissions, of endless hours, are used to talk about the goodness of the current government and to rant the previous governments, as well as those who oppose it.
In short, the historical impositions and the repeated maneuvers to eliminate Venezuela's past with a single stroke are an example of the maneuver of the government to disorientate and to that extent to keep a people submissive. We know that without memory, without the myth of foundation, there is no full national identity. The construction of our identity is subject to the necessary remembrance of our past, to the solid foundations it gives to the present and the future. A person who has lost his past is a docile and submissive person. Many governments, as well as that of the history of 1984 and of Venezuela, play at having an amnesic population in order to achieve control and the distortion of history. Let us remember the motto of the only Party: "Whoever owns the past, dominates the future; whoever owns the present, dominates the past". He who makes history official owns everything.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
Orwell, George (1981). 1984. Juan Pablos Editor: México.
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-44205892
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