“War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.” There are probably only a few of us who don’t recognise these sayings. To clarify, these lines are the three slogans of the Party in George Orwell’s 1984. Before last month, and I say this with great shame, I was one of the few who wouldn’t have recognised the slogans. Perhaps that is exactly what caused 1984 to have such a huge impact on me. The stories told by my peers who had already read 1984, the hailing of the novel being one of the greatest of the 20th century and the often made connection between 1984 and Brave New World (which happens to be one of my favourite novels) raised my expectations to a maximum. Often, high expectations only lead to disappointment or disillusionment. Orwell’s great dystopia, however, did not only live up to my expectations, it also blew me away.
Given the fact that so many of us have already read 1984, it seems illogical to portray merely a summary of it in this blog. Rather, I’d like to share with you my perception of the novel. First, for the ones who share the same shame as I did one month ago, let me provide a small summary. The novel is set in alternate reality 20th century London, which is now called Airstrip One and has been integrated into the greater nation of Oceania (the America’s, Australia, Great Britain and several other parts of the world). Oceania is ruled by the Party, an ultra-authoritarian government led by the mysterious and almost godlike Big Brother. The Party regulates and monitors every aspect of daily life: work, marriage, exercise, family and spare time. Even the history and language of Oceania are under direct influence and regulation of Party policy. By altering history and thereby altering knowledge, the Party has an incredible power over its subjects: “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” All in all, Oceania has become a nation which has abandoned freedom, rights and love as we know them. On the other hand, the nation has embraced domination, fear and hatred.

Orwell shows us the life of a simple Inner Party worker, Winston Smith. Winston works for the Ministry of Truth and is burdened with the task of creating and erasing history. More and more, Winston realises the brutality and cruelty of the Party and “inwardly rebels” against the life he is forced to live. Despite the realisation that rebelling against the Party will lead to inevitable death, Winston finds himself increasingly resisting the Party rule. Irrevocably, the Party, through its methods of monitoring and regulation, arrests Winston for his crimes against Big Brother. Finally and unfortunately , Winston has to pay the price for his unorthodox actions.

What struck me most about the novel was the extreme methods the Party used in observing, monitoring and controlling its population and the therewith involved consequences. It was not only the types of methods that disturbed me, but also the motivations and implications behind them. The portrayed denial of peoples’ rights, freedoms and privacy on such a scale and to such an extent made me realise that we should always remember to cherish those rights and freedoms that our predecessors have bitterly fought for. In the end, I assume this is what George Orwell intended with writing 1984: ensuring that we remember the importance of personal freedom and privacy. The irony here is that many of us don’t seem to realise that we are unconsciously already giving up many of our privacies through aspects of daily life. Take, for instance, the widespread registration of individual data connected to the OV-card (a card that has to be used for many parts of public transportation). Or another example: yesterday I was throwing away the trash with my little brother. Since two years, there is one location where to dispose of your domestic waste per street. Every household in the particular street is given an individual key to open the waste containers which are provided by the municipality. When walking back home after throwing away the trash, my little brother told me that the municipality registers every time trash is thrown away by a household. This is done through a chip put into every single key given to households. Of course, this is only a small and unimportant example of the giving up of individual privacy, but we should realise that small examples like these occur on a very frequent basis in daily life. Furthermore, we don’t only give up our rights through direct and possibly harmless government registration, but also through exposure by the use of public networks such as Facebook or Twitter. If a government had the ill will to monitor its citizens for wrong purposes, it wouldn’t even have to install the methods as seen in 1984: they would just have to check our Facebook updates. For now, enough cheesy talk of this undergraduate student with his naïve views on life. However, I would like to end this blog entry with a funny and ironic little screenshot I took today from my own Facebook page:

Jules van de Sneppen, 1st year student, LUC

The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester.

The first ever cohort of students of Leiden University College The Hague are in the midst of an interdisciplinary methodology course entitled "Designing Academic Inquiry", which springs off disciplinary building blocks to reach higher planes of academic thinking. This systematic mapping of method and knowledge will not only equip our honours students with concrete skills in research design and analysis in a liberal arts and sciences framework, but will also culminate in the first ever LUC student research poster conference on 12 May 2011.

Having completed the lecture component of the course, with individual assignments based on the themes below,
* Objectivity + Subjectivity
* Deduction + Induction
* Causation + Correlation
* Language + Representation
* Structure + Agency

all LUC students are now applying their conceptual and methodological understanding by finalising their group research project. Each seminar will present a set of academic posters on one of the following topics pertaining to the city of The Hague:
* Public transportation
* Healthcare
* Recycling and waste management
* Sporting and leisure facilities
* Museums and cultural provisions
* Parks and open public spaces

With the guidance of their course instructors, the students are excited to deliver their findings to an audience within and beyond LUC, including key representatives from City Hall. It will be a pleasure to welcome you to this special event; please do join us on 12 May, 13:00 - 15:00, at Lange Voorhout 44 for a glimpse into a foundational step towards addressing global challenges.

Posted by Cissie Fu

LUC is happy to invite you to the final seminar in our Visiting Speakers Series 2010/2011.

We are delighted to be able to host Dr. Claire Moon of the London School of Economics, to talk about 'Who will pay reparations for my soul? Compensation, Social Suffering and Social Control in Argentina.' In her seminar, Dr Moon will discuss how state reparation to victims of (state) atrocities can work to administer and control social suffering but can, in some cases, intensify the trauma rather than ameliorate it. She will use the refusal of state reparations by the Argentinian mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as an example to make this argument.
Claire Moon is senior lecturer in the sociology of human rights at LSE, a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, LSE. She is the convenor of the Atrocity, Suffering and Human Rights Research Group and has been reviews editor of the British Journal of Sociology since 2007. Dr. Moon is also a member of the British Sociological Association.

As usual, this seminar will take place in the LUC Manor, Lange Voorhout 44, at 16.15-18.00.

‘Obama > Osama’

- Rron Nushi, Facebook status 2/5/2011

‘I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.’

- Martin Luther King

‘I welcome the death of Osama Bin Laden’

- Julia Gillard, Australian Prime Minister

‘The operation shows those who commit acts of terror against the innocent will be brought to justice, however long it takes’

- Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minster

‘Finally the leader of the terrorist al-Qaeda group faced his inevitable destiny. What an exciting end. He was killed by Americans in Pakistan and not in Afghanistan. The man they nicknamed "the leader of the mujahideen" was killed in his spacious house and not on the battlefield or carrying out jihad. He died with his wife and not with the youth he misled.’

- Tariq Abd-al-Hami, in Al-Sharq al-Awsat (pan-Arab newspaper)


‘Following Bin Laden's crimes, the US manufactured an excuse to wage an unholy war on Muslim countries… Now, after US President Barack Obama's announcement of Osama Bin Laden's killing, will the end of the war against terror be declared or does the US still have outstanding goals?’

- Unknown, editorial in Al-Jumhuriyah (Egyptian newspaper)


Please leave your responses to either the above reactions of politicians, journalists and editorials, or your general reaction to the recent events surrounding Osama bin Laden's death.

Cecilia Diemont, 1st year student, LUC

Published in 1974, at the height of the Cold War, Le Guin shows us a possible third way away from the capitalist structure of America and the state-run enterprise of the USSR: a Stateless society. In The Dispossessed, the idealist anarchists, following the teaching of a certain ‘Odo’, leave the planet of Urras to form an utopia on its moon, Anarres. Urras, in turn, mirrors our world during the Cold War: A-Io is a wealthy nation driven on capitalism, with a clear hierarchical system based on the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. In Thu, they chose to follow the teachings of ‘Odo’, centered on freedom and equality, towards a authoritarian State ruled in name of the proletariat. These nations even fight proxy wars over nations that follow their ideological structure, as becomes apparent when in the second half of the book war breaks out in Benbili.
The society of Anarres is based on anarcho-syndicalism: the idea that you should not be a ‘slave to the wage’, but rather work for your needs. To this end, the Anarresti abandon the concept of ‘ownership’. You do not own your goods, as ownership means that you have control over that product, and can decide which people can and cannot use this product. This is problematic as this creates a power imbalance (opposing egality) and does not necessarily distributes goods according to what people actually need. Therefore, you do not own things on Anarresti, but you take what you, as an individual, need to survive. As a consequence, a societal norm exists that you also actively contribute towards the production of goods that can meet the needs of society. The anarchists furthermore eradicate ownership so completely that they construct a language, Pravic, that does not know these concepts in words. The usage of possessive pronouns, for instance, is eradicated. At birth, one is separated from its parents in order not to feel attachment, or stake a claim upon their parents. Characters stress that Anarres is a voluntarily society: all the work that is done, is done because the people want do these specific jobs (egoistically) or feel that they have a certain skill or aptitude towards a certain type of work that would suit the community (altruistically). The first mode of reasoning, however, is cancelled out by the societal norm which deems ‘egoizing’ to be the worst possible act.

The book is written as the story of the anarchist Shevek, a brilliant scholar of physics, who comes to visit Urras in an attempt to understand the society that his people have left behind and broke contact with. A second storyline unfolds in which his motivations for leaving Anarres – at least temporarily – become clear, and the tensions within this utopian society unfold.
Because it seems that a certain form of centralization is unavoidable when you effectively want to distribute goods and labours, and when you need to deal with foreign nations, and therefore a certain power imbalance will necessarily be created, and that issues arise when the economical and the collective take precedence over the social and individual desires, as humans value emotional ties more than ties towards the collective. But, more importantly, le Guin shows the problematic aspects of dogmatic reasoning. Shevek’s first inquiries into physics are frustrated by the senior physician, whose theory were developed in a conflicting field with Shevek’s, and therefore denies these theories publication. Discussing the social norm of collective altruism is also considered a taboo and frowned upon: challenging the status quo is straw manned as ‘egoizing’ by most people in Anarresti society. But also on Urras freedom of information is ostracized, with the newspapers being considered fodder for the lowly educated, and the upper class relying on insider information and mouth-to-mouth storytelling (One could argue that in this way the upper class ‘possesses’ information as well as material goods). This creates problems as it tempers the revolutionary spirit, it tempers the critical reflexion of the ideals that made the Anarresti go to Anarres in the first place, and it allows ideological flaws within the system to be sustained. In this way, le Guin shows us the problem of dogma in the era of McCarthyism.
Another pressing and prevalent problem in The Dispossessed deals with resource scarcity. Halfway through the book Shevek mentions that Odo’s ideas were specifically written with the resource-abundant planet of Urras in mind. In contrast, Anarres is a planet plagued with droughts, infertile soil and a lack of natural resources and biodiversity. This forces the anarchists to put the economical above the social ; it is a necessary evil for survival, because if you don’t co-operate, we all will die.

The question, however, is whether resource abundance would solve this problem. Le Guin remains vague on this, but I suspect myself that this is not the case: as the social norm against profiteering is more effectively coerced in times of need, when you realize the consequences of going against that norm directly, it could logically follow that people would not be so much bothered by the norm when they could leave the society and start ‘profiteering’.
But is this ‘third way’ then doomed to fail? No, not in the way that it is worse than the options known to men in 1974, or maybe even today. Because the Dispossessed does not deny – and certainly spends a lot of time in pointing out – the flaws that capitalism and communism have. The interesting omission, of course, is the role of liberal democracy within le Guin’s framework, as this form of government now used by an enormous amount of countries in the world is lacking in voice in this narrative. However, ‘liberalism’, might be the victorious voice in the end. Because the reader, having realized the imperfections of these State systems, is then introduced to the Hainish. This old alien society, the presumed ‘ancestor’ of the human civilizations, has ‘tried’ all State forms, and they too realized the imperfections of all systems. Their solution is daunting: the individual Hainish can all choose to try out the system they think suits them best. It is a solution that does not only need the eradication of a State, and of a social contract binding you to a State or society. It needs the dismissal of emotional ties, it needs to dismiss that we have a moral obligation towards caring for people who cared for us, or for the survival of the ones near to you. Le Guin’s final suggestion is that individuals need to be free in order to choose ones personal utopia.

Daan Welling, 1st year student, LUC

The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester.