Texts and Human Experiences: Orwell, Stalin, and the History Paradox

I forgot how much fun teaching Nineteen Eighty-Four was. Perhaps that's a paradoxical statement, considering the miserable nature of the text and the misery-inducing state it can inspire in the reader (Orwell's masterpiece is more likely appreciated than 'enjoyed'). That said, paradox works here due to the text's inclusion as part of the Year 12 HSC Common Module Texts and Human Experiences, in which readers gain insight into 'anomalies, paradoxes and inconsistencies in human behaviour'. I can see that Nineteen Eighty-Four isn't a joyful book and yet... I enjoy teaching it so much!

There's a certain comorbidity between the Advanced English and Extension History courses in that both involve interrogating the text to identify degrees of subjectivity. If you're lucky enough to have students who do both courses you'll notice their growing aptitude in relation to this. In regards to Nineteen Eighty-Four there's also a lot to be gained from students who do the Modern History course with all its political -isms. One key concept from Orwell's text that benefits from this increased historical understanding is the idea of a palimpsest.

The palimpsest is an ancient or medieval manuscript page that has been 'cleaned' of its original text and re-used. There's nothing sinister about this; in pre-Gutenberg times parchment was invaluable and hard to come by so repurposing was par for the course. In Winston Smith's world, however, Orwell uses the term to refer to the Party's habit of literally re-writing historical and journalistic documents. Smith's occupation is to locate any documents that contain information the Party has decided no longer fits with their official history and then rewrite them to fit with the new 'facts'.

Orwell was inspired by real practices in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Every time Stalin 'purged' an offending member from his Party and made them 'disappear' an order would go out to schools to have the students paste new text into their textbooks over the old information, essentially rendering the figure a non-person; someone who never existed. Stalin's comfort with rewriting history can also be observed in the doctored photographs from this era, whereby purged members were painted out of the pictures as if they were never there. 

Activity

My friend Kira told me that she likes to start her students off in studying Nineteen Eighty-Four by imposing an Orwellian atmosphere on the classroom with a series of strict rules designed to get them thinking about totalitarianism. It can be hard for us, having grown up with relatively high levels of privilege, to understand what it might have been like to live in the kind of nightmarish government-controlled state that Orwell describes. I wanted to do something like this and help students get their heads around the palimpsests that Winston is tasked to make throughout the course of the novel.

I don't know how else to relay this other than just describe what I did. So here it is:

• I wordlessly stopped the students at the door. This was automatically different for them because I've never been one for making kids line up outside the classroom. I usually say hello to them too but this time I just held my hand up and went back into the room for a bit as I wanted to heighten their anxiety a little.
• I drew up a table on the board, like this:

• Then I beckoned the students in and told them to place all their bags at the front of the room, and that there was to be no talking or communication. I also had a cardboard box with 'Phone Haven' written on the front and told them to place their phones into it for their 'safekeeping'. The students were very confused by this point and my straight face and lack of eye contact seemed to prevent any discussion around what was going on.
• I then dictated the following:

Year 12 HSC Advanced English is a very intense subject and requires concentration and consistent engagement. In order to foster a better working arrangement it has been decreed that you can now call your teacher by his first name within the confines of this class room. There will also be a rotating roster in which one of you must walk the room every four minutes and check that everyone is OnTask. Infractions or OffTask behaviour will be reported to the teacher immediately.

• Students then copied the table into their books, with four student names placed into the roster.
• I then gave them this context sheet to work on and had Student A start their rounds, checking that each person was doing their work. I asked Student A quietly (the room was so silent that everyone could hear me still) to report back on who was working well and who wasn't. 
• Student B had to report to me on who they thought was enjoying the activity the most and who wasn't. 
• At this point I was admittedly getting a little bored, so I gave Student C a ruler and asked them to make sure that everyone's things were at least 5cm from the edge of the table.
• Student D was told to make each individual student raise their index finger on their non-dominant hand and count slowly to five. There wasn't any relevance to this, I just wanted to emphasise how arbitrary the rules were.  
• This is where the palimpsest comes in. I looked at the roster on the board and decided which student had complied least willingly. To be truthful, all of the students had gone along with the activity with surprisingly little complaining, so I just randomly picked Student A. I told him that he hadn't done a very good job and that he was to stand outside the classroom. I then removed his name from the roster on the board, replaced it with another student's name, told this new student in front of everyone that they had done a good job as the first monitor, and then provided the whole class with paper, glue and scissors.
• I told them that they needed to change the roster in their books to reflect what was on the board. That this had always been the roster. Furthermore, I was to only be referred to as 'Sir' and not my first name and that the text in their book should reflect this. Students wrote out this new information and pasted it over the 'offending' parts of the dictated text. 

All in all, this took about 30-40 minutes. I couldn't help but laugh by the end of it, having kept a straight face for so long, and the students were relieved for the spell to be broken. This Advanced English class had only had me for a teacher for 1 lesson before this (I didn't have them for their Preliminary HSC) so a few were seriously worried that this would be how the class was like from now on!

We discussed the purpose of the activity, what a palimpsest was, and some of the students who'd already read to the end of the book told me that they'd cottoned on partway through. I have some of Stalin's doctored photographs on the back wall so we looked at those and spoke about Stalin's sinister censorship practices in the Soviet Union and how this would have influenced Orwell.

This links back really well to the rubric's mention of 'paradoxes in human behaviour', after all, what greater paradox could there be than history itself being rewritten? If history is meant to be true then how can it be changed? And yet, it happens all the time.

Evaluating the Cultural Revolution

After students engage with some of the terrifying history of this period it will be necessary to guide them towards offering their own evaluation of events. This can be modelled through source analysis of what historians say about the Cultural Revolution. Students should read over the following opinions; assess them for their content, and usefulness and reliability, and then arrange them into an order of personal agreement.

Craig Dietrich, author of People's China, 1986

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution took the whole world by surprise. Suddenly, China was at war with itself... Nobody could quite understand what was going on or why, partly because systematic reporting was impossible. Millions of students were on the march; entire cities were festooned with wall posters; mighty leaders were wearing dunce caps; thousands of victims were dying in pitched battles; foreign embassies were being mobbed, even burned to the ground. And always words, a Niagara of rhetoric, slogans, accusations, denials, directives, and, above all, Mao Zedong Thought. Clearly, it was a power struggle... Mao Zedong occupied the centre of this maelstrom. It was declared to be his personal revolution. Only gradually did it become clear that he had a rational purpose, albeit an audacious one.

 Richard M. Pfeffer, author of China in Ferment, 1971

The Cultural Revolution was really three things in one: an enigmatic multiple power struggle, wrapped in a crusade, and superimposed on a scattering of more or less spontaneous, more or less politicised student riots, strikes, peasant uprisings, mutinies, and palace coups.

Anne Thurston, author of Enemies of the People, 1987

The Cultural Revolution was an extreme situation characterised by loss - loss of culture, loss of spiritual values and religion, loss of status and honour, loss of career, loss of dignity, and loss of trust.

Maurice Meisner, author of Mao's China and After, 1999

Unity was to prove an elusive goal, and the nature of the victory was hard to define. The Cultural Revolution had begun with a wholesale attack on the Communist Party; it had ended with the resurrection of the Party in its orthodox Leninist form, albeit shorn of Mao's more prominent opponents. In 1966-67 a massive popular movement had flourished on the basis of the principle that 'the masses must liberate themselves'; by 1969 the mass movement had disintegrated, and selected remnants of it had been absorbed by old bureaucratic apparatuses. Much blood had been shed, but what had changed? The Cultural Revolution not only failed to produce permanent institutions of popular self-government but also failed to resolve the more immediate problems of political succession. One of the original aims of the Cultural Revolution was to 'train revolutionary successors'.

Alexander V. Pantsov, author of Deng Xiaoping, 2015

Strange to say, the nightmare that was the Cultural Revolution at least had the positive effect of restraining the potential for self-indulgence of the Chinese ruling elite.

Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, author of China Without Mao, 1990

Mao sought ideological purity through intensified class struggle and the purge of high party and government leaders and intellectuals.

Frank Dikotter, authorof The Cultural Revolution, 2016

The Cultural Revolution was about an old man settling persona scores at the end of his life. Mao had a great capacity for malice and revenge, and had little regard for loss of human life. Mao's ego meant that he saw little distinction between himself and the revolution - he was the revolution. If someone wronged him, they wronged China. Any dissatisfaction with his authority was a direct threat to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Most of the above information can be found on the downloadable sheet below. As mentioned earlier, students should analyse and engage with the opinions by comparing and contrasting their differences and similarities, and acknowledging possible reasons for bias. It would also be useful to link the content of the sources with the identified causes for the Cultural Revolution. For example, Dikotter's opinion just above links quite neatly with the idea that Mao's personality was a primary factor behind the Cultural Revolution.

Resource: Evaluations of the Cultural Revolution

I would recommend all of the above texts are great teacher resources for anyone looking to read up on the Cultural Revolution in support of the new Modern History Stage 6 syllabus.

Why Germany Lost WWI

Although credited with the strategy that kicked off Germany's invasion of France, Alfred von Schlieffen died at the age of 79 one year before the outbreak of WWI.

About a year and a half ago I was fortunate enough to see Richard Evans speak at the University of Sydney. The focus of his talk was on the rise of Germany's Weimar Republic in the 1930s and how it was able to last so long. Flipping the usual historical approach in which Modern Teachers ask the driving question, "Why did it fail?", Evans posited the approach of "Why did the Weimar Republic last as long as it did?" It was a fascinating talk and it reminds me of another talk I saw, a bit later, given by Dr Bruce Dennett about Germany and WWI, this time asking the question "Why did Germany lose the war?" 

It's a different way of looking at the turning points of WWI, shifting the narrative focus from the entry of America and withdrawal of Russia to a collection of cumulative factors that contributed to Germany's eventual collapse in 1918. This approach encourages students to think of the bigger picture when it comes to WWI; about which events were most significant, why people might contest the significance of certain events as contributing factors to German failure, and how the chain of cause and effect can be interpreted.

Here's a resource that summarises this approach.

The main reasons given include:

• The failure of the Schlieffen Plan. This was a strategy that was dependent on France and England being beaten within 40 days. That didn't happen, partially due to General von Moltke making changes to the plan, and the fact that the plan required already demoralised soldiers to march an unreasonable distance.
• The Germans were fighting a war on two fronts - France and Russia. The fighting on the eastern front prevented the Germans from sending enough troops to win in the west.
• The nature of trench warfare meant that the defending side always had the advantage. Neither side had the weapons or numbers to punch their way through to victory. 
• The British naval blockade of the Germans meant that shortages on the German homefront were exacerbated further.
• German generals could not break free of the 'war of attrition' mindset that had them believe the only way of winning was to overwhelm the enemy with superior numbers of foot soldiers. Germany's strategy relied on the Allied armies running out of men before them, something that became increasingly unlikely as the war dragged on.
• Germany unwittingly encouraged U.S. entry into the war through their ordering of unrestricted U-boat attacks on neutral ships.
• The German homefront faced so much hardship that war weariness had set in by 1917-1918, something that would almost lead to German socialist revolution.
• Germany's allies (Turkey, Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary) were weakening, and required German resources and troops to 'prop them up' on the southern front.

Students can read through the resource and then answer the following questions, which involve them engaging with the material in a variety of ways, such as describing, evaluating, and analysing - hitting the History Continuum in terms of Significance, Contestability, and Cause and Effect:

1. Outline the reasons historians most commonly give for Germany losing the war.
2. Rate these reasons in order of your agreement with them in terms of their significance.
3. Why is your top reason the correct one?
4. List the ways in which the Germany army's moral was breaking down.
5. Why did General Ludendorff decide to ask for an armistice?
6. Make explicit reference to Source C to describe the events leading up to the armistice of 11 November.