'I've Come To Fight' - How We Made It To 1984

"theyll shoot me i don’t care theyll shoot me in the back of
the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot
you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother—"

This started as an entirely different project, "To Hell with Gomburg!" - an attempt to imagine how the world might look if the 'New World Moral Order' of Maurice Gomberg, Library of Congress researcher and political thinker, had been attempted. 'Unholy chaos' would most likely have been the result - Gomberg called not only for vast and completely unhistorical federations to come into existence, such as the United States of Europe, but for them to be completely demilitarised, with only the USA, Latin American states, Britain and the Soviet Union being allowed to retain armies for any reason whatsoever. My initial ideas included Northern Ireland being integrated into Eire but remaining part of the Commonwealth, the annexation of the Rhineland by France and its subsequent descent into rebel control (encouraged by the quarantined Grossdeutschland next door), and Soviet East Thrace. This subsequently evolved into theorising that this might lead to the world portrayed in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and from there to a more realistic look at a socialism-dominated world, entitled '"I've Come To Fight" - How we made it to Nineteen Eighty-Four'.*

The three giant superstates stretched believability - instead, I envisaged three power blocs (just as there were two power blocs during the OTL Cold War) - a world that has undergone socialist revolution but is still trucking with all its old prejudices and regional paranoia. The Oceanic power bloc is led by the USA, whose actual constitutional system is largely unchanged; its political landscape however has been radically influenced by the rise of EngSoc (English Socialism), the philosophy behind the English Republic, the leading successor state to the United Kingdom after the latter's collapse after *WW2.

EngSoc's distinctive features include the perpetuation and even expansion of the ration-book system in peacetime, allowing for equitable division of goods in a way that can be tracked and controlled; the vouchers expire if not used and are issued via a just-in-time system, so cannot readily be exchanged or used as currency. EngSoc also differentiates itself from most previous formulations of socialism by explicitly outlining a meritocratic hierarchy (its opponents, most notoriously Emmanuel Goldstein, charge that it is instead oligarchical) within the revolutionary society; whilst Bolshevism argued for a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as a stepping-stone to true socialism (with the natural corrolary that the Party must not be seen to replicate the bourgeoise lifestyle), EngSoc dismissed such as not inkeeping with human nature, and (with a perspective opponents have seen as uniquely influenced by English society and the aristocracy) openly established a higher status for the Party, and a still higher status for the inner Party officials. At least in theory this status was not to be hereditary, though in practice it proved difficult to dissociate parental privilege from that of their children. The rationale was to place the Party beyond the reach of corruption, and indeed EngSoc officialdom has proved remarkably resistant to bribes and personal advancement, at least compared to the other strains of socialism. EngSoc is also distinctive from its other Oceanic variants insofar as it includes a peculiarly English moral emphasis, as exemplified by the Anti-Sex Leagues, which encourage young people to pledge to abstain from premarital sex.

The English Republic has retained the Cross of St George as its flag, but the English Socialist Party's logo depicts a 'V for Victory' with white and black coloured hands clasped in solidarity, originally intended to symbolise the unity of workers across the British Empire before it became clear that revolutionaries in the colonies were intent on going their own way (today a 'Global Worker's Council' includes most of the ex-Imperial states but is little more than a trade forum). The logo has been adopted in various forms by other revolutionary movements in the British Isles, the Western Hemisphere more generally and the ex-Empire (e.g. AmSoc uses red and blue hands clasped against a white background within a circle, evading the racial imagery altogether and instead recalling the national flag).

To the frustration of many revolutionaries within Britain, the English Republic has continued to play host to American military assets, with some charging that the Party has reduced the Republic to little more than an airstrip for the USAF; the Government insists that a strong US airforce presence is vital to deterrence of aggression from Fourth International nations across the Channel. London was the subject of grandiose designs after the atomic wars of the 1950s, with plans to rebuilt it as a futurist utopia. In practice the project was abandoned shortly after the completion of the massive new Government ministry buildings (each a pyramidic skyscraper 300m high) and the rest of London remains a run-down, faded city, retaining many of the scars of the last century.

The ideological head of the English Republic is Eric Blair,** a revolutionary who first achieved fame as a member of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. He became General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1941 and of the English Socialist Party in 1953, and is known within the party as Big Brother. Although now retired from public life, he was a driving force behind the Revolution and continues to hold immense symbolic significance to the Party - somewhere between Lenin and Kalinin in the OTL Soviet Union's mythos - and his image continues to grace Party propaganda; most memorably in an anti-looting poster inspired by the infamous Lord Kitchener British Army recruitment campaign, the slogan reading "Big Brother is watching you".

AmSoc, EngSoc's trans-Atlantic counterpart, has enjoyed less success; the Democratic Party currently controls the House of Representatives while the Republican Party controls the Senate; both are heavily influenced by English Socialism. AmSoc has one Senator and two Representatives, all of whom caucus with the Democrats. North of the border the Canadian Co-operative Party (an outgrowth of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) can be seen as a 'CanSoc' equivalent. In Mexico the Mexican Socialist Workers' Party has held control for over two decades.

The map depicts the state of play in Europe, with short, medium and long ranges for US air bases in Britain overlaid. Unlike the book, there's no massive ongoing war - Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four before the concept of a Cold War, which we know was equally effective at providing an impetus for communist states. However, tensions remain, especially between the remains of WEPA (the Western European Protection Association) and the 4Intern (Neo-Bolshevik) states. Shading indicates where each state is on the pan-socialist spectrum, where red represents absolute Neo-Bolshevism with a system of sovietist councils, blue represents EngSoc's brand of democratic socialism, yellow represents East Asian agrarian socialism (co-dominated by Communist China and India) and green is Adab socialism under Islamic courts. Darker brown implies Neo-Bolshevism but in a non-worker's council context, whilst pink suggests some influence of Spanish communitary anarchism.

* "I've come to fight against fascism" - Blair/Orwell's words when enlisting with the International Brigades in Spain. Curiously enough "I've Come To Fight" will be the mirror image of my other project "A Bayonet of Milk"; Eric Blair is not injured whilst George Orwell was and becomes hooked on revolutionary action. Benny Mussolini doesn't escape the injury that ended his counterpart's military career, but takes away the message that war is hell, whilst Benito became addicted to military glory.

** I know, I know - I couldn't resist. I reasoned that if Nineteen Eighty-Four follows roughly the timeline Blair/Orwell lays out (WW2 goes nuclear, followed by a revolution in the 60s, later redacted by the Party into the 40s) Big Brother must logically be alive in WW2. I considered someone who had died in WW1/2, but couldn't find anyone who looks even vaguely like Orwell's description of BB; then I noticed the man himself. And then I realised; it's him! It's bloody him! "At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features." How old was Orwell when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published? You've got it. It's a bloody self-portrait. Now, Orwell would be an old man if he survived to 1984 (which happily flows on from his not getting shot in Spain, which seems to be my POD, as he would probably have avoided picking up tuberculosis in hospital). But he would have been in his 40s at the height of his political prowess and his 50s when he was consolidating socialist control over Britain; just as posters featuring Stalin often featured a dark-haired younger Stalin, it's quite possible posters featuring 'Big Brother' would avoid showing the older, frailer Blair. If he already had the outline for Nineteen Eighty-Four floating around in his head, all the better, as it means that even if he thought the ideas were bad at the time they at least have a plausible way of appearing in ATL. Animal Farm is probably butterflied away, but if some version of the manuscript survives, it would be interesting to see what Party members make of it. Most likely they see it as a cautionary tale against the radically egalitarian Neo-Bolshevism in vogue in Comintern Europe, with Snowball representing English Socialism.