Sixty years following its first publication and twenty-five since the fateful year, George Orwell’s 1984 remains a mystery to the experts. They convene often in exotic places to agree that Orwell wrote a dystopia on the communist take-over of Britain and America. They concur how he reversed the final two digits of the year he wrote the book — 1948 — to arrive at the title 1984. They write that Orwell was not a prophet and few predictions fill his volume. These consensus beliefs on 1984 by the experts still shape the views of tens of millions of citizens who read Orwell’s work in the public schools and colleges.

Experts can often befuddle. They sold the banking world on using derivatives. Experts in real estate failed to warn about the consequences of zero-down mortgages sold to non-qualified home purchasers. Again and again experts lead us to believe they are more competent than they really are. They want us to stand in awe of their pronouncements and never to challenge them. But following steep declines in the domestic economy and the mortgage industry, few people today doubt that the experts can be fallible, and never more than when collectively they agree about the facts pertaining to the Orwellian masterpiece.

What better time than now, twenty-five years since the fateful year 1984, to correct the errors of the consensus experts? Do not the media provide copious coverage of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the terrorist explosion killing 237 marines in Beirut? Then why not celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Orwell’s fateful date to provide a retrospective, and answer whether or not Orwell wrote about the future conquest of Britain and America by the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin? Or whether Orwell arrived at his title by reversing the final two digits of 1948, the year when ostensibly he wrote 1984? Or whether we can confirm that the book contains no predictions?

As we shall see, 1984 is, in fact, not a vilification of the Soviet dictator Stalin. Nor was the title chosen by reversing the final two digits of the year in which the book was written. Rather, the book is satire of the highest order written against Fabian socialists. They are the breed of English socialists seeking to reform the British economic system, favoring public ownership of the means of production. They also favor state-controlled schools, nationalization of land ownership, and the welfare state. Their foreign policy is internationalist. Orwell wrote his powerful satire to show how Fabian socialism could reform the world until it resembled Stalin’s Soviet Union, even if it took 100 years. Moreover, Orwell’s scenario is chock full of “predictions” — 137 of them — that describe the daily life of citizens in Anglo-America living in a socialist state modeled after the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin.

How legions of 1984 experts fail to decipher these basic truths remains a mystery even now, 60 years since Orwell’s masterpiece burst on the scene in Britain and America.

Orwell on Stalin
When George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, published in 1945, he delivered much vitriol against the Soviet government — Soviet leaders were cast as the pigs. Americans who acquired the rights to 1984 from Orwell’s widow and second wife, Sonia, would have us believe — along with many Orwell scholars — that Stalin is Big Brother in 1984. This is wrong. Published in 1949, Orwell’s 1984 states clearly that Big Brother is merely a televised image. Though Stalin may be a distant benefactor, Big Brother symbolizes the rise of super agencies in Britain and America staffed by intellectuals on the political Left. A letter from George Orwell to the author Sidney Sheldon that has recently come to light confirms this hypothesis. It states that 1984 is an exercise in “trying to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.”

Similarly, Orwell hardly meant for the satire to be a repudiation of all breeds of socialism. He further stated to Sheldon, “What I most particularly did not intend was an attack of the British Labour Party, or on a collectivist economy as such.” Orwell states that the book is not “a sermon on what Socialism in England must lead to.” He is informing readers that by the year 1984, the respected socialist leaders of his day, like Clement Atlee who defeated Winston Churchill to become Prime Minister in 1945, would be retired. Then younger socialists born in 1945, the first year of the Labour Party’s post-World War II tenure in office, would be 39 years old, prepared to replace the earlier generation. Having been raised under state socialism, the bullies among them handed the reins of power could establish a state so totalitarian that it would destroy every vestige of democratic thought. Orwell was sure that the Atlee government meant no harm — although on Atlee’s watch Big Brother super-agencies emerged capable of regulating every aspect of citizen life.

Orwell foresaw how the coming generations of younger Fabians building on the precedent of universal healthcare would employ the emergent welfare state, then, bloated by obedient Left intellectuals intent on increasing governmental power, could become dictatorial. In 1984, instead of bringing the promised peace, truth, love, and plenty, new Fabians would construct enormous ministries devoted to war, deceit, and hatred. In secret, this future generation of Fabians would create shortages, and use fears engendered by the shortages to impose Draconian governmental controls.

Indeed, Orwell while employed by the BBC and the Ministry of Information observed how “totalitarian ideas had taken root” in intellectual socialists. They often represented the tenured elite at universities and government, unable to be ousted whatever leadership took over. Claiming to be above politics, the new apostles of government power, Fabian socialists, believed that their university educations made them high-born. They could trace back their academic bloodlines to famous socialists of the past, much as we Americans look back on Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

Becoming apostles of the adviser to Ren-aissance princes, Niccolo Machiavelli, who taught them cunning and deceit in politics, the Fabian socialists determined to conquer their competitors regardless of time and cost. Through collectivist political teachings, contrived crises, and central planning, they expected that like a ripe fruit, the control of government in Britain and America would fall into their hands. They planned by committee to seize power by citing the good works of famous Fabian socialists like Beatrice and Sidney Webb, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.

1984’s Satirical Targets
The targets for Orwell’s blistering, boisterous satire in page after page of 1984 are members of the London Fabian Society. That organization, whose public face was Beatrice and Sidney Webb, created the organized socialist groups rooted in universities like University College London and the London School of Economics. They constructed curricula based on the premise that technological knowledge is power. George Bernard Shaw inflamed the popular imagination to believe that rule by an educated elite would become the political ideal. Their combined ideas powered the movement leading to the requirement that at least four years of university training filled with socialist indoctrination be required before students could graduate, then enter into learned professions.