Orwell's novel is full of meaningless announcements about the continuous achievement of ridiculous "production targets," which form a sort of background noise to the drabness and scarcity of daily life.

It was details like this which won Orwell a tremendous literary compliment that he didn't live to see. Today, Czeslaw Milosz is the acknowledged literary laureate of his native Poland. But in 1951, he was a minor cultural official in recently Stalinised Warsaw and experiencing the first stirrings of dissent. In his incisive book The Captive Mind, which was eventually published in 1953, he wrote about his fellow heretics within the apparatus:

A few have become acquainted with Orwell's 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.

So—Orwell writes a book that is published in 1949. His novel describes a secret book that is circulated clandestinely within an "inner party." And within two years, it is itself being passed secretly from hand to hand, by members of an inner party....

I am writing these words in January 2003, the first month of Orwell's centenary year. (He only lived to see the first half of the twentieth century, dying in January of 1950.) As I write, all political discussion is dominated by an impending confrontation with two totalitarian states—Iraq and North Korea. In these countries, absolute power is held by leaders who demand incessant worship of themselves. Membership of a party—the Iraqi Ba'ath Party or the Workers Party of Korea—is a prerequisite for access to power at any level of the army or the police. Total control is exercised over all forms of printing and communication. The citizen is unambiguously the property of the state and can be tortured or murdered or made to "disappear" on a whim. In each case, a nationalist form of collectivist socialism is the ruling ideology, though in the service of an individual Caligula. I have visited both of these states and seen their "hate" parades, their youth rallies, their round-the-clock cult of the Big Brother and their exaltation of force and cruelty. In each case, my fellow writers and I had little choice but to employ the term "Orwellian" to describe what we had seen. We knew it was a bit of a cliche, in other words, but we also knew that it could not be improved upon. In a lesser way than Milosz, and at much less risk, we too pay our compliments.

It is also true that Orwell warned against militarisation, especially in its nuclear form, wherever it occurred. (It's not often pointed out that the slave society he evokes in 1984 has been created in part by the misery that follows a short atomic war.) There is no doubt that Orwell meant his work to put people on guard against chauvinism and regimentation and hysteria in all their forms: he was highly suspicious of the emerging Cold War system of competing superpowers who might use the excuse of each other's existence to impose their will at home and abroad. And in the United States, which has recently taken extraordinary measures in its fight against theocratic nihilism, the excesses of "Homeland Security" and "Total Awareness," with their new bureaucratic vocabulary, have also led people to reach for the expression "Orwellian." This, again, is a tribute to his persistent relevance. The insistence upon the importance of language, and of the danger posed by sloganised thinking and official idiom, is among the debts we owe to Orwell. In "The Principles of Newspeak," an appendix to 1984, the author quotes Jefferson's preamble to the Declaration of Independence—"We hold these truths to be self-evident..."—as an instance of something that would be quite impossible to re-cast in Newspeak terminology. Long may this incompatibility continue and be upheld.

Neither of these two novels is faultless in historical terms. To take one example that is so glaring that few people notice it, there is no Lenin either in Animal Farm or 1984. There is a Stalin figure in each—Napoleon and Big Brother respectively—and a Trotsky figure in each—Snowball and Goldstein—but a whole phase of history and indeed of allegory seems to have been skipped. We have no means of knowing what Orwell intended by this astonishing omission, of which he may only have been semi-conscious himself, but it seems probable that he regarded the self-immolation of Communism to have been at least partly a great tragedy, as well as a great crime. It was this insight and this perspective that allowed him to re-create the mental atmosphere so hauntingly. It is also this imaginative gift that posthumously made him one of the moral heroes of the revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe, and of those who led it. It will, one day, give him the same eminence in China and North Korea.

Having been among the bullies and among the bullied at different times of his life, Orwell had an innate understanding of what Nietzsche called the "master-slave" relationship. He knew that there are guilty thrills to be obtained from domination, and he also realised what few people fully appreciate—that there are also guilty thrills to be had from subjecting and abasing oneself. These books can be read, independently of their time and place, as a strong preventive medicine against the mentality of servility, and especially against the lethal temptation to exchange freedom for security: a bargain that invariably ends up with the surrender of both.

I have dwelt somewhat on the circumstances in which these works were written and published, because they illustrate another point.