{Spam?} Revisiting George Orwell ’s Nineteen Eighty- Four in 2010

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A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010
By Richard Mynick
12 June 2010

Since first appearing in the popular lexicon, the term “Orwellian” has conjured
up a vision of the prototypical “totalitarian state”: a one-party dictatorship
that swarmed with secret police, spied on its own people, quashed dissent, made
arbitrary arrests, tortured prisoners, waged perpetual war, rewrote history for
mere expedience, impoverished its own working population, and rooted its
political discourse in doublethink—a thought system defined as “the power of
holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting
both of them.”

Many Americans would easily recognize this description of “Oceania,” the
futuristic dystopia immortalized by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of
the most influential English-language novels of the mid-twentieth century.

Whether many Americans recognize that this description applies to their own
society as well is another matter. But since the theft of the 2000 election—a
period marked by such events as the 9/11 attacks, the invasion of Iraq based on
fictitious “WMD” (weapons of mass destruction), the torture scandals, and the
2008 financial crash—it’s a point that increasing numbers of Americans seem to
be grasping.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June 1949, amid rising Cold War tensions.
For most Western readers, the book was readily interpreted through the
anticommunist prism of that period.

The novel’s police state bore an obvious resemblance to Stalin’s USSR. Coming
from Orwell—a self-described democratic socialist who was deeply hostile to
Stalinism—this was unsurprising. But while Orwell was too clear-sighted to
conflate Stalinism with socialism (writing, for example, “My recent novel
[‘1984’] is NOT intended as an attack on socialism…but as a show-up of the
perversions...which have already been partly realized in Communism and
Fascism.…”[1]), his Cold War-era readership was often blind to this distinction.
His cautionary notes (“The scene of the book is laid in Britain…to emphasize
that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and
that totalitarianism…could triumph anywhere”) were largely overlooked, and in
the public mind, the novel’s grim prophesy (“If you want a picture of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”) attached itself mainly
to political systems seen as enemies of Western-style capitalist “democracies.”(2)

Yet Nineteen Eighty-Four was no endorsement of the West. It posits only an
unaccountable elite that rules in its own interests and maintains power by
taking state-run mind control to its logical extreme. It examines what’s
operationally involved in compelling a population to submit to exploitative
rule—without regard to the nominal form of economic organization. Put a bit
differently, the book considers the psycho-social machinery of unaccountable
state power in general—regardless whether it originates from a ruling
bureaucracy or from finance capital. It explores the general problem of
maintaining social stability in a highly unequal society, which can be done only
through some combination of repression, and controlling the population’s
consciousness.

Crude tyrannies rely primarily on repression. Sophisticated tyrannies find
subtler means of controlling consciousness. Consciousness, in turn, is deeply
intertwined with a society’s public use of language. Oceania and America are
sophisticated shapers of consciousness. This is why the two societies
increasingly share core characteristics, and why Nineteen Eighty-Four has
arguably even more relevance for readers in 2010 than it did during the Cold
War—when it was already recognized for its keen insights into the connections
between language, consciousness, conformity and power.
Mind control in Oceania, 1984

In Orwell’s fictional Oceania, the psychosocial machinery worked roughly like
this: all power was held by The Party. Perpetual war was the mainspring of state
policy. The media was a simple conduit for state propaganda. The population was
held in check by constant surveillance, enforced by the Thought Police; and also
by development of a new language, Newspeak, whose express purpose was narrowing
the range of thought so that thoughtcrime (unorthodox thought) was in principle
rendered impossible (since the language itself lacked the constructs needed for
formulating heretical thoughts).

The state devised rituals, such as public hangings of prisoners and the Two
Minutes Hate, to generate enthusiasm for crude nationalism and bellicose
chauvinism. The “proles”—85 percent of the population—were flooded with
mind-numbing media diversions (focused mainly on sports, crime, the Lottery, and
sex) to prevent them from developing political consciousness. The proles were
thus kept “without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.”

Party members, meanwhile (both of the Inner Party, which was less than 2 percent
of the population; and of the Outer Party of lesser functionaries), had to
master the art of doublethink to avoid committing thoughtcrime. A Party member
was “supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and
internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power
and wisdom of the Party.” Those unskilled at self-regulating their thoughts, and
who thus posed a potential threat to orthodoxy, were systematically culled from
the population. Recalcitrants were tortured in ways scientifically designed to
crush their humanity.

How it works in the USA, 2010

Every one of the above-named features is recognizably present in American
society in 2010—some in full-blown form; others in more primitive (and still
evolving) form. An exhaustive list of the many modern-day parallels would fill
an entire book. Such a book would include such minor correspondences as the fact
that Oceania’s ironically-named “Ministry of Peace” is no more Orwellian a
euphemism than the US “Department of Defense.”

It would include more substantial parallels, such as the many ways in which the
US media function as a kind of Newspeak, systematically attempting to deprive
the population of the concepts and perspectives required for developing
“unorthodox thoughts” (i.e., rational critiques of the existing
politico-economic system). It would include the logic underlying the Wall Street
bailout, which is essentially that the global financial crisis should be paid
for by the victims of that crisis, while the perpetrators of the crisis should
be indemnified against loss; and that this policy should be imposed on the
victims (i.e., almost the entire population) by a government they
“democratically elected.” (Marx: “The oppressed are allowed once every few years
to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to
represent and repress them.”)

Sketched below are some of the parallels underscoring how far we’ve come in the
few decades since Orwell’s vision was considered a futuristic fantasy; and since
the West’s forms of limited capitalist “democracy” were considered bulwarks
against Oceania-style tyranny.

It should be noted that Orwell had in mind conditions under which the working
class had suffered a historic defeat, in the case of fascist Germany or Italy,
or had power usurped from it by a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy, in the
Soviet Union. In the US today the official view of things is increasingly
contested and rejected, even if that often still occurs in a confused manner.
Certainly, as far as the authoritarian aims and ambitions of America's rulers
are concerned, nothing in Orwell's conception would have to be modified.

    * Perpetual War: Like Oceania, today’s United States exists in a state of
perpetual war—a condition accepted as “normal” in both societies. Former US Vice
President Cheney said in 2001 that the US War on Terror “may never end. At
least, not in our lifetime”—a remark that elicited no outcry from either big
business party, nor from the corporate media. To this day, the remark has gone
unchallenged. The issue of perpetual war wasn’t deemed important enough to be
mentioned (let alone debated) in any of the four national elections since Cheney
made that assertion.

    * War for Maintaining Society’s Class Structure: Speaking through his
character “Goldstein” (loosely based on the historical figure of Trotsky),
Orwell wrote, “The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects,
and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but
to keep the structure of society intact.” He continued, “But in a physical sense
war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists,
and causes comparatively few casualties.... And at the same time the
consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over
of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.”

These remarks are quite applicable, respectively, to the US “War on Terror”; to
the use of so-called “Special Forces” and “predator drones”; and to the
relentless associated fear-mongering and demonization campaigns. Scarcely a word
needs to be changed, with the exception that the US war is indeed aimed at
territorial gain—namely, domination of regions that are oil-rich, or of
strategic value for pipeline routes and/or military bases. This exception in no
way invalidates Orwell’s points that “the object of the war is [at least in
part] to keep the structure of society intact” and that “The war is waged by
each ruling group against its own subjects.”

    * The One-Party State: Like Oceania, the US is virtually a one-party state.
Its two big business parties are falsely presented as two “opposing” parties. In
reality, they are little more than soft-rhetoric and hard-rhetoric factions of
the one real party—the financial aristocracy—that has unchallenged sway over all
matters of economic significance and resource deployment. The US variant of the
one-party state is actually more dangerously Orwellian than Oceania’s variant,
because it superficially appears to be something it’s manifestly not. Oceania,
at least, was “honest” enough not to bother with the pretense of democracy.

Americans have been conditioned to accept the limited, mostly rhetorical
differences between Republicans and Democrats as “evidence” that the US is a
“democracy.” The march of events is relentlessly exposing the grievous
deficiencies of this thesis, but its broad general acceptance over the years
(taking into account as well the residual strength of American imperialism and
the role played by the AFL-CIO and various “left” forces) testifies to the
official political culture’s power to dominate and mold mass consciousness.
(Marx: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”)

    * Media as a Conduit for State Propaganda: As in Oceania, today’s US media
are essentially conduits for state propaganda. A brief examination of the news
coverage of the last decade’s major events would amply bear out this
characterization, and every passing day provides innumerable examples of this
behavior. Oceania’s telescreen constantly touted increases in pig iron
production and chocolate rations, mixed with triumphant reports on the glorious
victories won by “the heroes on the Malabar front.”

There is little essential difference between this and the fare of American news
programs (except perhaps for the existence of advertisements, whose forced
cheeriness makes for a merrier tone than that heard on Oceania’s bleak, martial
“newscasts”). In 2009, the US media expressed uniform “outrage” about an
allegedly stolen election in Iran. No serious evidence was offered to support
allegations of the election’s theft; and none of these same media outlets had
even acknowledged (let alone were outraged by) the blatantly stolen US
presidential election of 2000. (In fact, they unanimously hailed the 2000
election outcome as proof that “the system worked,” on grounds that power was
transferred without violence—in other words, that elites were able to steal the
election without resistance from the citizenry.)

    * Surveillance: On page 2 of the novel, we are introduced to the Thought
Police. “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any
individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time.” Since about 2004, these surveillance functions have
been implemented in the US by institutions such as the National Security Agency,
with its massive eavesdropping on the private communications of American
citizens. This issue was not mentioned in any of the three national elections
since 2004, and the New York Times (complying with a request from the Bush
administration) deliberately spiked a report on the NSA eavesdropping programs
prior to the 2004 election. The newspaper finally “reported” it more than a year
later (just before publication of a book on the subject by James Risen, the
Times reporter whose story the paper had suppressed).

    * Elite-Driven Cultural Crippling of Mass Political Consciousness: Orwell’s
vision of using mass culture as a tool for crippling the population’s political
consciousness has been realized in the efforts of the American ruling elite. He
named the main mind-numbing diversions as the Lottery, and “rubbishy newspapers
containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational
five-cent novelettes…films oozing with sex…(and) the lowest kind of
pornography.” He overlooked such important categories as celebrity gossip and
stock-market chatter, but was in principle squarely on the mark. A population
that reads celebrity magazines and watches entertainment TV is far less prepared
to understand the social forces responsible for its declining living standards,
and thus less able to defend itself.

    * The Cult of the Leader: The novel is set in the drab London of the
“future”—April 1984. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, lives in a crumbling
apartment building that’s named “Victory Mansions” and smells of boiled cabbage.
Prominently displayed on the building’s every landing is a large colored poster
depicting “an enormous face…of a man about forty-five, with a heavy black
moustache and ruggedly handsome features.” In 2010, one can hardly read of the
ubiquitous Big Brother posters in a grim dilapidated London, without thinking of
the “Barack Obama Hope” posters, visible throughout today’s decaying American
cities.

Big Brother is described as “the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit
itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear,
and reverence, emotions which are felt more easily towards an individual than an
organization.” This passage captures the essential PR strategy used to sell
Obama—the candidate of Wall Street—to US voters in 2008. Indeed, Obama’s whole
campaign was designed to exploit the idea that emotions like love and hope “are
felt more easily towards an individual” than towards organizations—such as the
banks, whose interests he essentially represents.

    * “Who Controls the Present Controls the Past….”: Winston works in the
Ministry of Truth, whose mission is the “day-to-day falsification of the
past…[which] is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of
repression.” Oceania’s Ministry of Truth functions have been implemented by the
US corporate media, which demonizes groups like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban on a
round-the-clock basis, while carefully “forgetting” that both these groups were
weaned and nurtured on millions of dollars of CIA funding in recent decades.
Such inconvenient facts are regularly jettisoned down the memory hole because
they no longer harmonize with state policy. The facts must therefore be modified
to make them “correct” in the context of the present. (As the head of British
MI6 paraphrased Bush in 2002 regarding “WMD” and the planned invasion of Iraq:
“the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”). Just as
Oceania was one day allied with Eastasia and the next day at war with Eastasia,
the US is one day at war with Saddam Hussein and Islamic fundamentalism, while
in the Reagan years, was aggressively supporting both. (Reagan called the
mujahedeen in Afghanistan “freedom fighters” and the “moral equivalent of the
Founding Fathers.”)

    * Public Rituals for Demonizing State Enemies: The “Two Minutes Hate” is
essentially what happens on American television whenever names of official
enemies like Saddam Hussein, Hamas, Ahmadinejad, Castro, and Hugo Chavez are
mentioned. This occurs in its most blatant form on explicitly right-wing outlets
like FOX News and the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page, but is no less present in
the supposedly “liberal” outlets, where the blatancy is toned down but the
viewpoint is substantially the same. The hanging of Hussein was greeted by the
US media with the same breathless, panting bloodlust as Oceania’s public
hangings. “Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?,” Winston is asked
by his colleague Syme, sitting down to lunch one day in the ministry canteen.
This scene doubtless had its counterparts across the US, when Hussein was
executed in December 2006.

    * Bombing Civilian “Enemies” as Entertainment: Winston goes to the movies on
page 7 and sees a war newsreel; he notes in his diary that the audience is “much
amused” by footage of helpless civilians being blown to pieces by Oceania’s
helicopter gunships. Broad swaths of American TV programming, movies and video
games attempt to feed on, and encourage, the same base instincts.

    * A Political Culture Cloaking Itself in the Virtue of Its Opposite:
“Goldstein” observes that “the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for
which the Socialist movement originally stood, and…[does so] in the name of
socialism.” This was Orwell’s thoroughly justified assessment of Stalinism in
1949. The passage suggests its modern-day analogue: “the US government
undermines or eviscerates the substantive essence of democracy, and does so in
the name of democracy.”

    * Police Intimidation of Citizens: Oceania’s most fearsome and physically
imposing government ministry, the Ministry of Love, is guarded by “gorilla-faced
guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.” The real-life
counterparts of these guards appear at US political conventions and outside WTO
meetings, clad in Kevlar, menacing, shoving, or even beating unarmed protestors
with truncheons. The media regularly describe the protestors as “hoodlums” and
“anarchists,” while approvingly citing Iranian protests against Ahmadinejad or
Venezuelan protests against Chavez as examples of “legitimate dissent.”
(Speaking of “Orwellian:” antiwar protestors who wished to demonstrate at recent
US political conventions were placed in fenced-off pens topped with concertina
wire, out of sight of the media and many blocks distant from the convention
halls. These pens were called “Free Speech Zones”—with no irony intended.)

    * Depravity and Dehumanization as State Policy: The novel is chillingly
imaginative in its depiction of torture. At one point, the interrogator O’Brien
rips out one of Winston’s rotting teeth with his bare hand, to show Winston how
futile and pathetic his resistance is. Then follows the famous climactic torture
scene in Room 101, where the rat-cage mask is placed over Winston’s head. A
present-day reader might immediately think of the “insects” variation revealed
in the recent US torture memos, where “stinging insects” were released into a
closed box containing a helpless and terrified prisoner. But even this falls
short of the full scope of US torture methods, which have included rape, sexual
humiliation, and deliberate offense of religious beliefs, as in draping women’s
panties covered with menstrual blood over Muslim prisoners’ heads. When it comes
to depravity and torture, even the adjective “Orwellian” doesn’t quite do
justice to the ingenuity of the US military-intelligence apparatus.

Class consciousness and social equality

Orwell’s book was enthusiastically received in the US. Two weeks after its
publication, Time called it his “finest work of fiction,” but construed it
primarily (along with Animal Farm) as an attack on “Communism.” (3) Orwell,
however (as alluded to earlier), meant both books as warnings about trends in
Western democracies as well. The book’s warm reception in the US was somewhat
paradoxical, since it presented a clear and compelling class-based analysis of
the driving forces in society. This perspective defied the emerging political
norms of 1949, when class awareness was in the process of being systematically
expunged from permissible American thought. The novel’s apparent
“anti-Communism” may well have protected it from a backlash against its
class-consciousness—which was certainly a thoughtcrime in the US of 1949, and
remains one today.

Winston had a decidedly sympathetic and hopeful attitude towards the “proles.”
At least four times, he said the proles were the only hope for the future,
describing them in terms like these: “if there was hope, it MUST lie in the
proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five
per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever
be generated.” The proles, Winston believed, “if only they could somehow become
conscious of their own strength…needed only to rise up and shake themselves like
a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the Party to pieces
tomorrow morning.” The Oceania ruling stratum had succeeded in crushing Party
members’ feelings of interpersonal solidarity, while “the proles had stayed
human. They had not become hardened.” They had a “vitality which the Party did
not share and could not kill…the future belonged to the proles.”

Winston reflects that “where there is equality, there can be sanity”—a point of
singular relevance to an America characterized by skyrocketing social
inequality. The relation between social hierarchy and the distribution of wealth
is limned in these terms: “an all-round increase in wealth threatened the
destruction…of a hierarchical society.… It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a
society in which ‘wealth’…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…realize that the privileged minority had no function,
and…would sweep it away.” From the rulers’ viewpoint in a highly unequal
society, this is a dangerous and indeed, subversive thought.

These are authentically radical ideas—unsurprising for an author who volunteered
to fight with the POUM against fascism in Spain. In particular, the
identification of the working class as the only genuinely revolutionary social
force directly echoes Marx and Engels. The passage about the proles becoming
conscious, rising up, and “like a horse shaking off flies,” blowing the Party to
pieces—this graphically renders the idea of a mass uprising from below,
resulting from a working class articulating demands conceived through its own
awareness of itself as a class, with an independent sense of its own interests.

Training the population in “doublethink”

Winston reflects that “the world-view of the Party imposed itself most
successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to
accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they…were not
sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.” And a
bit later: “Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent,
industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary
that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are
fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is appropriate
that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.” It would be
hard to find a more accurate description of the attitudes encouraged by
modern-day America’s official political culture.

The full definition of doublethink is: “The power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.… To tell
deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has
become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back
from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of
objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one
denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink
it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that
one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this
knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

This passage characterizes the official versions of the signal events in US
politics since the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush president in the 2000
election. Virtually every major event since that time was presented to the
public on the basis of doublethink.

For example, within months of the Iraq invasion, the US media were forced to
acknowledge that there were no WMD after all. But this fact was presented as
though devoid of meaning or consequence. Media accounts casually dismissed it as
matter of “flawed intelligence.” Applying such a phrase to a major war crime (as
defined at Nuremberg) is doublethink because on the one hand, it acknowledges
error. But no sooner is error acknowledged than two new lies are introduced:
that the intelligence error was only very slight; and that only the exactitude
of US intelligence was at issue (“the lie always one leap ahead of the truth”).

Acknowledging the non-existence of WMD while defending the general character of
the war (the job of US officials and media spokesmen) is another instance of
doublethink, since a war can hardly be justified when the stated reason for
waging it is false. One can hold both beliefs simultaneously only by juggling
them—momentarily banishing one belief to oblivion while discussing the other.

In the novel, the interrogator O’Brien famously holds up four fingers and
demands that Winston see five. This demand does no more violence to logic than
Obama’s position on torture, expressed in his May 21, 2009, speech from the
National Archives. Posturing as a champion of the Rule of Law, and standing next
to the original parchment of the US Constitution, Obama declared that torture is
wrong; that we must uphold our constitutional values; that “We do not
torture”—then added that US officials who ordered torture will not be prosecuted
for it, and photographs documenting US torture would be withheld from the
public. He proceeded to defend “extraordinary renditions,” and to propose the
medieval policy of indefinite “preventive detention” in the same speech.

“War is Peace”

Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 2009, Obama continued in this
vein, at an event incisively reviewed by the WSWS, and fairly described as an
unsurpassably Orwellian spectacle. The commander-in-chief of history’s most
grotesquely bloated war machine, currently in the midst of two wars of
aggression (one that he himself had sharply escalated) and head of an
administration whose chief diplomat has threatened Iran with “annihilation,” was
honored as the world’s outstanding peacemaker. Opening his remarks with the most
perfunctory possible nod to “the creed and lives” of Gandhi and Martin Luther
King Jr., Obama pivoted in the next sentence to dispatch any illusions that his
own foreign policy would be informed by their philosophy. (“But as a head of
state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their
examples alone.”)

The US president then plunged directly into a full-throated defense of state
violence (provided, of course, that it’s led by the United States). He intoned,
“I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the
Balkans” (i.e., War is Peace). The president of the state that invaded Iraq in
defiance of both world opinion and the UN Security Council claimed that neither
his nation nor any other “can insist that others follow the rules of the road if
we refuse to follow them ourselves.” The president of a state closely allied
with the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan claimed “our closest
friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens.” The
president of the nation whose military and CIA have overthrown dozens of
democracies since World War II and replaced them with brutal dictatorships
claimed “America has never fought a war against a democracy.”

With breathtaking sanctimony, he said, “Let us reach for the world that ought to
be—that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.…
Somewhere today, in the here and now, in the world as it is, a soldier sees he’s
outgunned, but stands firm to keep the peace. Somewhere today, in this world, a
young protestor awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to
march on. Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the
time to teach her child, scrapes together what few coins she has to send that
child to school—because she believes that a cruel world still has a place for
that child’s dreams.”

This kind of rhetoric—deemed “eloquent” by the US media during the 2008
campaign—recalls Orwell’s observation that “political language …is designed to
make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of
solidity to pure wind.”(4) Obama’s “peace-keeping” soldier would presumably be a
US (or allied) soldier occupying a country for the usual predatory reasons. The
“young protestor” would naturally be protesting against a government regarded as
an official enemy by Washington, such as Iran or Venezuela.

The “government brutality” Obama decries is doubtless not a reference to the
violence and torture perpetrated against civilians either directly by US
military and mercenary forces, or by US-backed puppet governments and other
proxies. The “mother facing punishing poverty” is an abstract, theoretical
mother, not one living “in the here and now” whose poverty results from concrete
conditions—such as unemployment caused by outsourcing or by the Wall
Street-induced financial crisis, or by the gutting of social services consequent
to that crisis—i.e., from conditions imposed on the US working population by
corporate America, with the support of the entire political establishment.

“In a Time of Universal Deceit…”

As “Goldstein” explains, “Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short…at the
threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping
analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the
simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc [“English Socialism,” the
official ideology of the totalitarian regime in Oceania], and of being bored or
repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical
direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

Replace “Ingsoc” by “official US policy,” and the passage applies perfectly to
the process via which the US media pretend to “discuss” issues of the day. For
instance, “military aggression” is frowned upon by the US media, unless the US
or its allies are the aggressors, in which case the action becomes
stabilization, peace-keeping, or even liberation. One must master the art of not
grasping analogies, to fail to see that US military aggression is “aggression.”
Coups d’état are similarly frowned upon, unless of course the US supports the
coup, in which case it becomes a democracy movement (the “color” revolutions,
etc.). Similarly, torture becomes enhanced interrogation techniques, while
civilian deaths become regrettable but unavoidable collateral damage, when
caused by US policy or personnel. Far from innocent “euphemism,” such
perversions of language reveal the essential character of the dominant
thought-system in American political culture.

While being “re-educated” in the Ministry of Love, Winston “set to work to
exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions—‘the Party
says the earth is flat,’ ‘the Party says that ice is heavier than water’—and
trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that
contradicted them. It was not easy.… It needed…a sort of athleticism of mind, an
ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to
be unconscious of the crudest logical errors.”

A similar “athleticism of mind” is required to digest the logic of a proposition
offered by Obama in a televised interview just before his inauguration. Asked if
he’d appoint a special prosecutor “to independently investigate the greatest
crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless
wiretapping,” the Harvard-trained former constitutional law professor answered
that he had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking
backwards”—a principle that would preclude ever prosecuting anyone for anything
(but which, one may be sure, will be invoked only for crimes committed by the US
state, or by the financial oligarchy whose interests that state represents).

Early in the novel, Winston undertakes to commit a subversive act: he begins
writing a personal diary. He wistfully addresses it “To the future or the past,
to a time when thought is free.” Orwell has elsewhere been credited with “In a
time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Assaulted
by the Newspeak of the US political class, we manifestly live in a time of
universal deceit. We are all Winston Smith, and must look to revolutionary acts
of telling the truth to light the way to a time when thought is free.

Notes:

(1) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4 (“In
Front of Your Nose”), 1945–1950 p. 546 (Penguin)
(2) For analysis of Orwell’s political trajectory, see Vicky Short,
http://wsws.org/articles/2002/apr2002/orwe-all.shtml; and Fred Mazelis,
http://wsws.org/articles/1998/sep1998/orw-s09.shtml
(3) Time Magazine, June 20, 1949, available at
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,800425-1,00.html
(4) “Politics and the English Language,” essay (for example:
http://www.george-orwell.org/Politics_and_the_English_Language/0.html)
New Today

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/1984-j12.shtml

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