“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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