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Wednesday
Yesterday David Corn of Mother Jones made perfect use of Nineteen Eighty-Four to explain what has happened to memories of Donald Trump’s January 6 coup attempt five years ago. His column sent me back to George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, where I discovered that the novel also provides insight into Trump’s motivations for invading Venezuela and threatening other countries in the western hemisphere.
First, January 6 amnesia. Here’s Corn:
In 1984, George Orwell observed that a fascist state relies upon its ability to control—or obliterate—memory. As Winston Smith, the ill-fated protagonist, ponders the Party’s ability to manipulate reality and history, Orwell writes, “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” Another passage in the novel describes the Party’s relentless effort to construct the dominant narrative: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Sound familiar?
In a small news item that shows how thorough the erasure has been, the GOP is refusing to mount a plaque honoring the Capitol police who protected legislators and staff from the mob of Trump supporters.
Corn continues,
Like the Party in Orwell’s dystopia, Trump and the Republicans have sought to rewrite history and erase the stain of Trump’s profound betrayal of America. He pardoned the violent marauders, and his henchmen in charge of the FBI and Justice Department have fired agents and prosecutors who participated in the investigation and prosecution of these thugs. And Trump’s MAGA legions mounted a disinformation campaign that advanced various conspiracy theories—the FBI did it! Antifa did it!—to absolve Trump and his thugs.
Most important is that
an entire political party and tens of millions of American voters memory-holed Trump’s war on American democracy and his embrace of political violence. What is perhaps the gravest transgression ever committed by a US president has been airbrushed out of the picture and the perp allowed (by a majority of voters) to return to the scene of the crime. This is one of the most worrisome turns in American history. If our democracy cannot protect itself from such peril and repel such a dangerous threat, can it survive?
In a clear instance of Newspeak, some Republicans are even attempting to defend Trump’s incitement to riot as freedom of speech, a kind of “freedom is slavery” jiujitsu. Special counsel Jack Smith, who would have brought insurrection charges against Trump has our rightwing Supreme Court not intervened, refused to back down when questioned by Republicans. Corn reports,
A key exchange occurred when a Republican staffer (whose name is redacted in the transcript) asked, “The President’s statements that he believed the election was rife with fraud, those certainly are statements that are protected by the First Amendment, correct?” This has been a central contention of the Trump cult: You cannot prosecute Trump for stating his opinion that the election was rigged against him. But Smith fired back: “Absolutely not. If [these false statements] are made to target a lawful government function and they are made with knowing falsity, no, they are not.” Statements made to promote a fraud are not protected by the First Amendment.
Somewhat ironically sharing a name with Winston Smith, Jack Smith insisted that 2+2=4 as he reported to the Congressional committee:
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power,” Smith said at the start. He added, “Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”
And:
Smith patiently explained how Trump’s (alleged) crime related to January 6: “January 6th was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 140 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police that day. Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election.”
In its own attempts at erasure, the GOP-run committee refused to allow Smith to testify publicly (as he requested) and then released the report of the hearing at a time when it would be most overlooked—which is to say, on New Year’s Eve.
Now to the Venezuela invasion and to the threats Trump is making against Colombia, Cuba, Canada, and Greenland. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there are three countries that have absorbed the rest of the world. Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are involved in forever wars whose purpose, in part, is to keep their populations impoverished and docile. While Orwell doesn’t get everything right, we can see our own situation in how the three countries use showy wars to distract the public from extreme wealth inequality:
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
In short, after passing a Big Beautiful Bill that elevates billionaires while hammering everyone else, Trump attempts to take the public mind off the economy by invading Venezuela and promising a Donroe Doctrine reminiscent of the 19thcentury—a world where the United States in fact becomes Oceania.
The irony is that, before Trump, the United States commanded more influence that any of the three superpowers in Nineteen Eighty-Four, what with NATO in Europe and alliances with those countries worried about China in the Pacific Rim. But I guess Orwell’s point is that an increase in global prosperity brought about by this political stability was bad for the elites. Kleptocrats prefer chaos.
Further thought: After writing this piece, I noted an Anne Applebaum article in the Atlantic where she too references the three countries in Nineteen Eighty-Four and makes the same point about Trump weakening America:
If America is just a regional bully, after all, then our former allies in Europe and Asia will close their doors and their markets to us. Sooner or later, “our” Western Hemisphere will organize against us and fight back. Far from making us more powerful, the pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all.
