Here’s a simple test for detecting whether you are living in George Orwell’s “1984.” If you feel free to tell everyone you’re living in “1984,” you aren’t.
Proving that they remain completely unable to distinguish between “I don’t like this” and “This is some serious HitlerStalin stuff right here,” America’s Party of the Intellectuals (™) has been screeching that the Trump era represents a fulfillment of Orwell’s prophecy.
CNN, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and other outlets have all run pieces warning that “1984” is here.
My voice is being silenced, the citizens scream. Protest is being stamped out, cry the protesters. Dissent is no longer allowed, people say as they watch a clip of Alec Baldwin ridiculing Trump for the 45th time.
Hey, didn’t Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway refer to lies as “alternative facts?” Orwellian! The 1949 novel hit No. 1 on Amazon.com shortly after Conway’s remarks.
Now columnists are competing with one another to make the most ludicrous “1984” comparisons, proving that what columnists love most is the easiest-to-reach cliché on the shelf.
In a column for CNN, lawyer Alexander J. Urbelis wrote, “We are treading into territories more treacherous than even Orwell himself contemplated. We now have a president and an administration in power that expects its own versions of reality and events to be created for it.”
Here’s the thing about totalitarianism, though: It’s a complete system. Totalitarianism brooks no escape from its ruthless imperatives.
If Big Brother were actually sitting in the Oval Office, he wouldn’t be whining on Twitter that Meryl Streep is overrated. He’d just have her disappeared.
Trying to draw people’s attention to “alternative facts” — putting your administration’s spin on things — is the normal order of business for political regimes. And political figures routinely wind up lying in the process of defending themselves (which is why Politifact awarded then-President Barack Obama its 2013 “lie of the year” honors for falsely claiming those who liked their health-care plan could keep it.)
The media should call out President Trump whenever he says things that aren’t true. But it isn’t the lying, or the cute euphemisms for lying, that make a society Orwellian.
We reach that point when the citizens have internalized the lies out of violence and intimidation, when the brainwashing has succeeded so well that we convince ourselves our masters are always correct, even if what they say today contradicts with what they said yesterday.
Instead, the situation today is the reverse: We mock the administration, and the administration is afraid of what we think of it. After Melissa McCarthy lampooned White House spokesman Sean Spicer on “Saturday Night Live,” administration sources told Politico that the president’s feelings were hurt, particularly because Spicer appeared extra-ridiculous by being portrayed by a woman in drag. “Trump doesn’t like his people to look weak,” a major Trump donor told the site.
“I wish the comedians weren’t so mean” is not a thought that ever crossed Big Brother’s mind. Big Brother would have had a cage containing a rat affixed to Melissa McCarthy’s face pronto. Instead, McCarthy was celebrated on CNN, The New Yorker, The Atlantic.
Mentioning ‘1984’ is armchair courage-signalling, an attempt by “dissidents” to make it seem like they’re risking everything
Mentioning “1984” is armchair courage-signalling, an attempt by “dissidents” to make it seem like they’re risking everything (just as describing themselves as “dissidents” is a moral self-promotion). Given that we all know true courage is rare, the sheer volume of Trump-bashing indicates that the risk involved is zilch.
Painting the Trump administration as more dire and threatening than it actually is is an essential component of the “1984” fallacy, the other half of which is the self-aggrandizement that allows you to think your blog post or op-ed has raised you to the same level as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who were, respectively, exiled to a gulag and executed for opposing Stalin and Hitler).
Illustrating this tendency to the histrionic, an editor at the panicky left-wing site Think Progress, Ian Millhiser, tweeted on Feb. 3, “I have not been arrested by anyone in Donald Trump’s government. This tweet will repeat tomorrow if it remains true.”
You can imagine Millhiser, contemplating his own derring-do, stripping down to his shorts and practicing what he’s going to say when the Secret Police knock on his door: “You talkin’ to me?”
Back here in reality, though, there is no reason to suspect Donald Trump (who reportedly consumes print media and TV but does not read online news) has even heard the name Ian Millhiser.
As for the many media figures more important than Millhiser whom Trump has heard of (such as reporters for CNN and The New York Times), they don’t seem to be getting arrested. Until you hear Jake Tapper or Wolf Blitzer in brainwash mode saying, “Big Brother Trump is always correct,” the latest DC attempt to impose double-think probably isn’t working.
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