Gaza, Orwell and the Failure of Europe

 “we have no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation”, so T.S. Eliot wrote to George Orwell in 1944, in a letter informing Orwell about Faber & Faber’s decision not to publish Animal Farm. Eliot was not the only one: all in all the famous British writer got four rejections. Orwell was not amused and, in his characteristic no-nonsense style, criticized the attitude of publishers and intellectuals towards Russia: in the planned foreword to Animal Farm, which seemed lost and only reappeared in 1972, he talked about ‘intellectual cowardice’ and voluntary literary censorship. Don’t offend the big red ally, was the widely accepted motto. In 1945, shortly after the Second World War, Animal Farm was finally published: the book, with the villainous pig Napoleon in the leading role, immediately became a gigantic success and the world finally got to see Stalin’s true face.

I have been thinking a lot about Orwell these days: after all, it is not that difficult to draw parallels between the way T.S. Eliot and his well-read contemporaries distanced themselves eighty years ago from Orwell’s criticism of Stalin’s Russia and the hesitant attitude that European leaders today take in the bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas. Hendrik Vos recently put it like this: “those who attack Ukrainians will suffer and pay, but those who attack Palestinians will at most have to take a short break every now and then” (DS 31 October). This attitude is disastrous for Europe’s moral authority in the world, Vos believes. And indeed, with what right can Europe still speak out about injustice when it is flooded tsunami-like by images of bombed-out schools and hospitals in ruins? Or also: knowing that Palestinians are being locked up en masse in Israeli prisons, where electricity, visitors and water supplies are deliberately cut off?

The international community needs to wake up and images of horror and suffering play an important role, so it is argued: “The more images we see, the more difficult it becomes to continue to claim that one violence is ‘evidently’ more immoral than another” , writes Marlies De Munck (DS 27 October). It is a seductive thought, which also appealed to Orwell. In his essay “Politics and the English Language”, which was published a year after Animal Farm (1946), Orwell analyzed how the greatest horror is made palatable through euphemisms and distortions. He talked about the excesses of British colonialism in India, the Russian purges and deportations and the atomic bombs in Japan. How is language used to defend the indefensible?, he wondered. Orwell added that images could be helpful in breaking through obfuscating or condoning language. “Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them”, Orwell wrote.

But Orwell overestimated the power of the image. This becomes most clear in the experiences of Stanley Cohen, sociologist at the LSE and notorious admirer of Orwell, who died in 2013. Cohen investigated torture practices by the Israeli security services during the first intifada. In the report for human rights organization B’Tselem, which was published in 1991, 40 cases of torture of Palestinian prisoners were meticulously documented. Following Orwell’s advice, Cohen and his co-author Daphna Golan added pencil sketches of the torture techniques used by the security services: such images should help prevent the abuses from being covered up. However, to no avail. In 2001 Cohen wrote in his book States of Denial how the B’Tselem report quickly became a plaything in a ‘politics of denial’: the torture was denied, the organization was discredited, the practices were renamed or justified.

Images themselves tend to become objects of discussion and struggle. This also applies to the conflict that is unfolding before our eyes today in Gaza and elsewhere: “Are the images real or are they generated by AI?”, “Is the suffering being staged by Hamas?”, “Can the impact of a bomb on a hospital really cause such human havoc?”, and so on. Such reactions, which question the veracity of the many images, are ubiquitous. Too much attention for the world of images is therefore not only dangerous for a possible ‘psychologization of the conflict’, as Hanna Vandenbussche puts it (DS 2 November), but also because this ignores the pervasive reality of a politics of denial.

A way out of the current impasse only seems possible if the international community recognizes this epistemological dimension of the conflict and engages in the ongoing ‘struggle to define reality’, as Cohen put it in 1991, in an essay for Tikkun on torture in Israel. And that struggle also requires a sustained and unequivocal commitment from European leaders to stand up and, using the language that is our own, namely the language of humanitarian law and human rights, to name the horror for what it is: unacceptable and indefensible.

Tom Daems is professor of criminology (KU Leuven)

(this piece is translated from Dutch and was originally published as ‘Een beeld zegt meer dan duizend woorden, tot de echtheid ervan in vraag wordt gesteld’, De Standaard, 3 november 2023)

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