Wednesday
As I look back at important political developments in 2021, the continuing rise of authoritarian governments around the world ranks up there with Covid-19. While the United States experienced the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s continuing takeover of the GOP, countries like Hungary, Turkey, Russia, the Philippines, Nicaragua, China and others experienced strong men attempting to assert their will while silencing their opponents.
In other words, George Orwell’s 1984, written in 1948, remains only too relevant. Here’s the post I wrote about the novel on May 11.
Reprinted from May 11, 2021
Thursday
Tim O’Brien of Bloomberg had a perfect response to a threat the other day from Lindsey Graham, Trump sycophant and senator from South Carolina. He simply tweeted out a passage from George Orwell’s 1984:
Targeting Trump’s opponents, including his Republic opponents, Graham had written,
The people who are trying to erase him are going to wind up getting erased.
To which O’Brien tweeted:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Those who most loudly decry “cancel culture” are the most interested in canceling others.
While we’re on the subject of the novel, let’s remind ourselves of one of its most important observations: autocrats lie, not because they expect to be believed, but to test their followers’ loyalty. Donald Trump tested his followers with his 30,500+ lies while president, and now GOP politicians must sign on to the Big Lie about a stolen election (or at least not publicly dispute it) if they want to remain in the party. As Orwell puts it,
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Orwell would understand well why the GOP is currently attempting to don a populist mantle while, at the same time, opposing labor unions, minimum wage hikes, and higher taxes on the wealthy. Orwell has Stalin’s Soviet Union in mind as he describes the Party’s hypocrisy:
The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty.
We’re getting such policy incoherence from the GOP across the board at the moment: they are for and against free trade, for and against big deficits, for and against a strong executive, for and against free speech, for and against law and order. It all makes sense, however, if their real aim is power. As Big Brother explains to Winston,
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
I once remember contending, in a 1984 faculty panel on 1984, that Orwell’s dystopia was no longer relevant. It struck me at the time as hysterical and overly gloomy. I now consider it an indispensable account of how autocracies and autocratic thinking work. Orwell studied Hitler and Stalin and got it right.
