Saturday, June 8, 2019

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on the State’s Inversion of Reality—or, ‘1984’ at 70)


“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

When it was published 70 years ago today published in London by Secker & Warburg, then five days later in New York, 1984 struck a chord in the Free World, a transatlantic alliance that, over the last two decades, had experienced the rise of totalitarian regimes. 

The dystopian fantasy from George Orwell took the real nightmares through which people had just lived to another level entirely: a world divided into three “spheres” (much as Orwell had feared that Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin were creating at the Teheran Conference in WWII). The three slogans in today’s “Quote of the Day” were carved into the walls of the “Ministry of Truth” in one of these “spheres,” Oceania.

During the years when the Soviet Union wrongly appeared to be not only on the march but unstoppable, 1984 was considered a spot-on critique of how such dictatorships could come to exercise complete tyranny of thought over the individual’s mind. 

Four decades later, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defiance flung by Chinese students at their own aging rulers, the sense of urgency transmitted by Orwell had faded. The year 1984 had passed with no regime possessing anything like the hegemony he had imagined with such terrifying authenticity.

Rather than being an indispensable lever of dictatorship, as in the "telescreen," technology came to be seen as a weapon of defiance, perhaps best symbolized by the TV ad for Apple’s Macintosh. 

Typical of this new way of thinking was the characteristically sunny prediction by ex-President Ronald Reagan, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, that “the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.” 

How naïve we all were. Not only does the gerontocracy endure in China, but it has used the nation’s vast clout to persuade telecon companies not to push content opposed by the regime. From the flotsam of the USSR has emerged Vladimir Putin, who has applied the disinformation techniques he learned as a KGB officer to the social media, sowing confusion and division in the Western democracies he loathes. 

Even the United States has not proved impervious to the Big Lie that is the ultimate product of Orwell’s ironically named Ministry of Truth. Although the ubiquitous indoctrination that represents the final stage of this ministry’s thought control process has not yet arrived in America, the black arts of propaganda are flourishing in the highest office in the land. 

“Doublethink”—defined, in a penetrating essay on the novel by clinical psychologist Natalie Frank, as “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind simultaneously” —is created by a President who calls climate change “a hoax” but whose company has used the phenomenon to press for constructing a seawall to guard against erosion at his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland. 

That denial of what ordinary citizens can see and hear for themselves has been facilitated by adviser Kellyanne Conway coining the phrase “alternative facts” to justify the President’s silly insistence on record-setting crowd sizes for his inauguration; by personal attorney Rudy Giuliani claiming that “Truth isn’t truth”; and by their boss himself telling a crowd, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

For a novel that took root when Orwell grew enraged over Soviet agents discrediting Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies, then became bleaker as he fell victim, one cold winter on a Scottish island, to TB, 1984 has, not surprisingly, taken on unexpected relevance since January 20, 2017.  When the leaders of a democracy seek to rewrite its past and deny its present, they imperil its future.

For the citizenry manipulated by such leaders, it is all too sadly the case that “Ignorance is Strength.”

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