Wednesday
The current impeachment investigation began with a whistleblower’s complaint, followed up by a transcript of a phone call between Donald Trump and the Ukrainian president. While strategically edited, the transcript nevertheless makes clear that Trump tried to shake down Ukraine for information on Joe Biden, using desperately needed military assistance as leverage. Everything we have learned from subsequent Congressional hearings confirms Trump’s extortion attempts.
Now, however, Trump is claiming that the transcript shows that he’s innocent. He’s having ”Read the Transcript!” printed on tee-shirts and insisting that Republicans repeat his assertion he did nothing wrong. We are learning the extent to which he functions as his own Ministry of Truth, at least as far as the GOP is concerned.
Of course, it helps that he has Fox News backing him up every step of the way.
The Ministry of Truth, of course, is the propaganda office of 1984’s Big Brother. Even though I’ve been applying Orwell’s masterpiece to Trump for a while, it still took me a while to grasp one of the author’s great insights: autocrats lie, not in order to persuade people, but to test them. The more outrageous the lie, the more supporters can demonstrate their loyalty.
So far, the GOP appears to be passing Trump’s test, but they’ve never been as challenged as they are at the moment. After all, anyone who isn’t absolutely brainwashed recognizes that Trump was up to.
Orwell shows loyalty tested in Big Brother’s account of the wars Oceania is conducting. The example is particularly applicable to our situation since Republicans used to champion Ukraine against Russia. Now, somehow, they’ve switched seamlessly from Eurasia to Eastasia:
Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war…But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
I believe it is at this point in the novel that we first hear the phrase “doublethink,” also called “reality control.”
Particularly frightening for us is how others have picked up Trump’s technique. As we saw recently with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, it’s no longer just the president who claims he didn’t say things we just witnessed him saying. Winston Smith regards as “more terrifying than mere torture and death” the way the Party can “thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED”:
[I]f all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed–if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.
Or in the case of the transcript, a victory over our own eyes.