Revisiting Burma through Orwell's '1984'

Hartoyo Pratiknyo, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Secret Histories:
Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop
Emma Larkin
232 pp
John Murray

"Truth is true only within a certain period of time; what was once truth may no longer be truth after many months or years." These words, worthy of the sardonic interrogator O'Brien in George Orwell's spine-chilling political novel 1984, were said by a spokesman of the military junta in Rangoon, now Yangon, just a year after the popular uprising of 1988.

Thus Emma Larkin begins her account of present-day Burma, or Myanmar, in the grip of a military dictatorship.

And well she might. In Myanmar, Larkin tells us, George Orwell is better known as "the prophet", and as she sees it, Orwell's swan song 1984, which he wrote as he lay dying in a London sanatorium sickbed, his lungs choked with lesions, paints a chilling picture of the dystopia that is Myanmar.

But how do Myanmar and Orwell connect?

"As I reread Orwell's novels -- books I had not read since my schooldays -- I became curious about his personal connection with Burma. What was it that made him trade his career in the colonies with that of a writer? And why, after nearly a quarter of century away from Burma, did he look to the country for inspiration while he lay on his deathbed?" she wrote.

She wondered whether Orwell had seen something in Burma, had had some thread of an idea that was later to work its way into all his writings.

A journalist by profession, Larkin left London and set out on not one, but several trips to "Burma" to retrace the novelist's footsteps incognito, as he spent five years in Burma in the service of the British Empire.

Part travelogue, part sociopolitical commentary, Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop makes for easy reading and is obviously meant for readers with a general interest in Burma and life in a country "ruled by one of the oldest and most brutal military dictatorships in the world".

Secret Histories is as much about Burma as it is about George Orwell and his beliefs, the two inseparably intertwined.

It is, of course, true that all of Orwell's novels -- from his first, Burmese Days (1934), right down to his scathingly satirical last works Animal Farm (1946) and 1984 (1949) -- are concerned with the sociopolitical conditions of his time and notably, with the condition of human freedom.

"It is a particularly uncanny twist of fate that these three novels effectively tell the story of Burma's recent history," Larkin notes.

But when Orwell died in London of tuberculosis in January 1950, the Union of Burma had already broken loose from Britain to become an independent democracy with a bicameral legislature, which was controlled by the socialist Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL). It was only in 1962, after a series of rebellions and increasing disorder, that Gen. Ne Win, head of the army, staged a military coup d'etat, discarded the constitution and ruled by decree through a newly formed Revolutionary Council.

Any sign of a possible reemergence of civilian rule has since been ruthlessly squashed by the military.

Actually, Larkin argues, it was the British colonial administration in Burma, of which Orwell was part, that laid the foundation for the ruthless powers that have controlled the country ever since.

The British colonized Burma in stages, gradually spreading their hold over large chunks of the country, and it was not until 1885, with the capture of the royal capital of Mandalay, that the whole of what is now Myanmar became part of the British Empire.

"Here in Mandalay, then, the imprint was laid both for Burma and for Orwell," Larkin writes.

In Mandalay, Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) received his training at the Police Training School after joining the Imperial Police Force in Burma in November 1922.

Ironically, Mandalay is one of the few places in Myanmar whose name has not been changed by the current regime in Yangon, Larkin notes. Elsewhere across the country, streets, towns and cities were renamed in a sweeping campaign that the authorities claimed was long overdue "to cast off those old colonial tags".

"But there was a deeper-rooted motive," Larkin asserts. "The generals were rewriting history." By renaming cities, towns and streets, she said, the regime was seizing control of the very space within which the people lived. And when the regime changed the name of the country, maps and encyclopedias all over the world had to be corrected. The country known as Burma would cease to exist and would be replaced by a new one: Myanmar.

But why go to all this length?

"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past," the sinister O'Brien lectures Winston Smith, the protagonist in 1984, who is being tortured for committing the one cardinal crime punishable by "re-integration" and eventually, death: loving his soul mate Julia.

Parallels can certainly be made between present-day Myanmar and 1984's imaginary superpower Oceania, where only one rule exists: unquestioning obedience in deed and thought to the state's symbolic, all-knowing head, "Big Brother", and where "thoughtcrime" is the fundamental crime that contains all others.

"A vast network of Military Intelligence and their informers ensures that no one can do or say anything that might threaten the regime. The Burmese media ... are controlled by a strict censorship board and government propaganda is churned out not only through newspapers and television, but also in schools and universities. These methods of reality-control are kept firmly in place by the invisible, though ever-present, threat of torture and imprisonment."

Furthermore, Larkin says, the surveillance machine is frighteningly thorough and efficient. In some towns, it operates at a neighborhood level, with local military intelligence minions filing daily reports to central bureaus. The regime, the writer was warned by friends, knows everything.

For many Indonesians, all this has a familiar ring. Life certainly was not that much different in this country in the not- so-distant past. But at least, Indonesians can console themselves in the realization that the dictatorship that lasted in this country through the 1970s and up to the 1990s did produce a certain measure of material comfort, even though much of it turned out to be ersatz.

Democracy and prosperity have so far eluded Myanmar and its 47.7 million population, although conditions have improved slightly since the country's emergence from isolation in the 1980s and its entry in 1997 to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) fold. Yet the junta has continued to persist in clinging to power and to rebuff any and all calls for greater openness and democracy.

In Orwell's book, Big Brother's interest is power. Purely power. But to what end? O'Brien explains to Winston: "We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."

Could it be that such an ideology really does exist?