Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Friday
As evidence that Vladimir Putin is getting desperate about his invasion of Ukraine upon its one-year anniversary, Atlantic columnist David Frum summed up his recent national address with a familiar quotation: “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.” In other words, the Russian dictator was blaming all of his troubles on a foreign entity.
Putin’s Eurasia, of course, is the United States. Oh, and NATO.
Orwell’s Eurasia, meanwhile, is one of the countries with which Big Brother’s Oceania is always at war, the other being Eastasia. Or rather, Big Brother is generally at war with one and allied with the other, although which is which changes regularly. In any event, whenever things are going wrong in his own country, he always blames it on the enemy, even while, at the same time, touting glorious victories. Note the following television report:
A trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:
’Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash— —’
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty….
‘Oceania, ‘tis for thee’ gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.
If Putin is willing to sacrifice thousands of men to capture strategically unimportant Bakhmut, it may be so that he can trumpet “a glorious victory.” Meanwhile, think of those 20-30 bombs as Russia’s reversals in Ukraine—Russian casualties and deaths are approaching the 200,000 mark. Putin figures he can escape blame, however, if he can get Russians to focus all their anger on nebulous outside forces. To date, Putin has been as effective in this tactic as Big Brother:
A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four meters high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual.
In 1984, a foreign adversary is not enough so Big Brother adds a domestic one in the figure of Goldstein. As always, Jews make the most effective scapegoats:
The programs of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumored—in some hiding place in Oceania itself.
I’m not sure if Putin has a Goldstein to blame along with the United States and NATO—surely he has—but we certainly know who American rightwing extremists have chosen: that pedophile commie Joe Biden and his band of Democrats. As Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green tweeted earlier this week, “Today on our President’s Day, Joe Biden, the President of the United States chose Ukraine over America, while forcing the American people to pay for Ukraine’s government and war. I can not express how much Americans hate Joe Biden.”
No wonder Greene and her ilk are rooting for a Putin victory.
Past posts on the Russo-Ukraine War
Jan. 3, 2023—Victor Hugo: Zelensky as Hugo’s Enjorlas
Nov. 2, 2022– Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky: Can Russian Lit Lead to Atrocities?
Oct. 24, 2022—Putin as Murakami’s Manskinner Borus and Russia’s Terror Tactics
Oct. 10, 2022—Russian Rockets, Male Insecurity, and Gravity’s Rainbow
Oct. 9, 2022—The Crimean Bridge and Bridge over the River Kwai
Oct. 3, 2022— Will Putin Use Jadis’s “Deplorable Word”?
Sept. 28, 2022—Think of Russia in Ukraine as Doctor Frankenstein
Sept. 25, 2022—Henry IV, Parts I & II: Russia’s Falstaffian Mobilization
Sept 20, 2022— Ukraine Must Unite Athena with Poseidon
Sept. 14, 2022—Bulgakov: Ukrainian Grass Will Grow Again
Sept. 13, 2022—A Shevchenko Poem Papered over by Russian Invaders
Sept. 12, 2022: Panic Reminiscent of Red Badge of Courage Gripping Russian Soldiers
Aug. 28, 2022—The War Song of Vladimir Putin
August 24, 2022—Katie Ferris: Poems of Love in a Burning World
August 3, 2022 – A Murakami Villain Surfaces in Ukraine
June 6, 2022— Putin and Gaiman’s Good Omens
June 1, 2022—Farewell to Arms: Hemingway’s Insights into War Atrocities
May 29, 2022— John Greenleaf Whittier: How Can We Weigh the Cost of the War Dead?
May 23, 2022—Which Poets Should Ukraine Honor?
May 16, 2022— For Whom the Bell Tolls: Hemingway Would Understand Ukrainian Resistance
May 11, 2022— Russia Has Always Hated Ukrainian Lit
May 4, 2022— The Russian Invaders as Tolkien’s Orcs
May 2, 2022—Cavafy’s Thermopylae and Mariupol
April 27, 2022—During War, Poetry a Necessity
April 26, 2022— Comparing Housman’s Thermopylae with the Battle of Mariupol
April 20, 2022—Russian Poet Brodsky’s Controversial Take on Ukrainian Independence
April 19, 2022— Russia vs. Ukraine, Pushkin vs. Shevchenko
April 4, 2022—Brecht on Dictators Who Give War a Bad Name
April 3, 2022—Brecht: Don’t Become Numb to Suffering
March 30, 2022—Chekhov, Babel, Pushkin: Authors as Nationalist Symbols
March 27, 2022—I Am the Very Model of a Modern Russian General
March 13, 2022—Did Russian Officials Recruit Gogolian Dead Souls
March 12, 2022—Malcolm Guite: He Beholds the City with Tears in His Eyes
March 9, 2022—Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down: What Russia Can Expect If It Wins
March 8, 2022—Murakami and Kyiv’s Zoo Crisis
March 7, 2022—Cavafy, Adrienne Rich, and Ukrainians’ Decision to Stay or Leave
March 6, 2022—Putin, Like Milton’s Satan, Assaults Mankind
March 4, 2022—A Bakhtinian Reading of Zelensky
March 3, 2022—Vladimir Putin as Sauron
March 2, 2022—Serhiy Zhadan: Where Fears Meets Courage
Feb. 27, 2022—Ukrainian Poet Kaminsky’s Call to Resist Oppression
Feb. 24, 2022—Zelensky Cites Russian Poet Yevtushenko
Feb. 22, 2022—On Stalin, Putin, and Orwell’s Napoleon