George Orwell would have despised Donald Trump
Defining the word "Orwellian" for totalitarian Trumpians in denial ...
George Orwell, who died in 1950, would have despised Donald Trump and everyone who supported him.
Orwell would have especially despised Trump and his supporters for the way they have abused the English language to spout toxic propaganda and spew shameless gaslighting.
Let’s first explain Orwell’s politics.
He was not a conservative nor a capitalist, nor did this British citizen ever express any kind of fondness for America. Rather, George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, described himself as a Democratic Socialist. But he was definitely to the left of Bernie Sanders.
Orwell thought the best thing that could happen to Britain was a socialist revolution by the little people.
He also literally went to war against the system of governing closest to Trump’s world view: Fascism. In 1937, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell joined a Marxist brigade supporting the socialist government fighting against Franco’s Fascist insurgency.
Animal Farm, published in 1945 and his first big success, was the work of a disillusioned radical. Orwell’s anthropomorphic satire attacked Stalin’s Bolshevism because it had hijacked a Marxist uprising to install a demented autocratic minority where people demanding freedom of thought were called “enemies of the people.”
“Enemies of the people” included anyone and everyone who opposed the Soviet state and the cult of personality created by Stalin.
Like Hitler, Stalin was also skilled at maintaining BIG LIES. For example, Stalin fooled leftist intellectuals in the West into thinking that the Soviet Union was a big, happy commune of social progress when it was instead a bullshit factory at war with nature, history and reality.
By the time Orwell published 1984, in 1949, he had also determined that the birth of the atomic bomb, four years earlier, would lead to the creation of repressive super states in a constant Cold War with each other.
“It is commonplace that the history of civilization is largely the history of weapons,” Orwell wrote. ”Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.”
Or, to put it another way, since Orwell’s drinking buddies at the local pub couldn’t possibly afford to build a nuclear weapon, there was no chance they could take part in a bloody socialist revolution using just knives and pitchforks.
The hero of 1984 is a miserable middle-aged Englishman named Winston Smith. The hallway of his apartment building smells of “boiled cabbage and old rag mats.” He lives in a world that has been split into three super states: Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia.
Wherever Smith goes, there are posters advising: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. All citizens are subordinate to the dictates of the party, which has three essential slogans:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
In 1984, the state is engaged in round-the-clock gaslighting – the psychological tactic of trying to get people to question their own reality.
Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, or Ministry of Gaslighting, rewriting history on a machine called a speakwrite. Winston helps to ensure that reality is only what Big Brother says it is. At the edge of his desk is the “memory hole,” in which documents containing discarded facts are dropped.
Winston begins an inner rebellion, writing in his diary: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. He begins to think of himself as:
… a lonely ghost uttering a truth that no one would ever hear, but as long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage … The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command … Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two makes four. If that is granted all else follows.
Let us begin to count the ways Trump and his supporters have sounded a lot like the propagandists working for Big Brother at the Ministry of Truth.
Under Trump, lies have become alternative facts; critical journalism and nasty revelations have been reframed as fake news produced by enemies of the people; conspiracies and fantasies have informed policies; the White House has enjoyed regular fluffing by state TV channels; the only purpose of holding office has been figuring out how to stay in power forever; and reality has had to be seen through the eyes of Big Brother.
“Just remember,” Trump told a gathering of veterans, “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.”
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News ⎼ Trump’s largest media booster ⎼ still maintains they’re engaged in fair and balanced journalism while actually conducting a very profitable mind control experiment designed to keep conservatives in a state of perpetual fury against liberals.
Fox’s cynical programming bears a striking resemblance to Big Brother’s Two Minutes Hate from 1984, a daily public screening featuring enemies of the state and intended to stir the audience into rage:
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
The favorite pronoun of Fox’s primetime hosts is they, usually spoken in a menacing tone. They are any and all liberals who are destroying America. The advantage of using this plural pronoun is that it does not require ever identifying who they are.
As President, Donald Trump’s favorite plural word has been people. Trump often speaks of people who either praise him to the heavens or excuse his inexcusable behavior. The advantage of using this vague plural noun is that it does not require ever identifying who the people are.
Donald Trump’s political rise began with a BIG LIE, peddling birtherism to delegitimize Barack Obama. He hoped the resiliency of his conspiracy would make him a favorite among those who supported white supremacy. Turned out, there were a lot of receptive white supremacists in the Republican Party. His disgraceful ploy worked.
Trump opened his campaign by demonizing immigrants and immigration policies even though 1) he is married to an immigrant (who likely lied when she got a visa) and 2) has hired illegal immigrants his entire life.
Mexico was never ever going to pay for the wall and the new sections of wall Trump has built were charged to U.S. taxpayers and illogically erected in a harsh wilderness desert that could truly be described as a no-man’s land.
At his inauguration, Donald Trump promised that the forgotten men and women would be his focus. But his first major legislative effort gave billionaires and corporations a huge tax cut.
Although Trump made clear he would drain the swamp, he staffed his Administration with a historic number of well-established swamp creatures .
Trump promised he would replace Obamacare after repealing it, but when he tried to repeal it, he had no replacement. Nor was there ever going to be one.
As it became clear that core members of his Presidential campaign were in constant communication with Russia’s military intelligence unit, Trump reframed legitimate law enforcement investigations as the work of a nebulous deep state, which was conspiring against him by leaking to the fake news media, who were, of course, enemies of the people.
Trump claimed he never obstructed justice in the Russia investigation despite his never-ending and well-documented efforts to shut down the Russia investigation.
He claimed no collusion with the Kremlin, though his campaign had 272 well-documented contacts with Kremlin-linked operatives.
“Truth isn’t truth,” said Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, explaining why he couldn’t let Trump testify before Robert Mueller because he knew his client’s version of the “truth” would be a verifiable lie.
A “perfect phone call” to the Ukrainian President in order to compel a contrived investigation of Joe Biden somehow managed to alarm Trump’s entire national security team and swiftly produced an impeachment, after which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held a trial without a single witness, ignored a shit ton of incriminating evidence, and rapidly exonerated the President.
Throughout Trump’s term, the GOP has used Russian propaganda to defend Trump, which has delivered an enormous propaganda victory to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB Colonel and disinformation expert who has never tried to hide that he’s on Team Trump.
Trump and the GOP ecosystem have backed those claiming that their freedom is being denied by COVID restrictions even though their freedom to ignore a highly contagious and very deadly pandemic might kill someone else.
Trump responded to Black Lives Matter protests by demanding law and order, though many of his closest advisors have been charged with felonies and he has made it a daily habit of defying the Constitution.
Stop the Steal, which would become the most dangerous BIG LIE of all, was the mantra for Trump’s effort to plot the steal of a free and fair election. In this effort, Trump’s legal team would repeatedly claim there was sweeping fraud. But before judges, where these lawyers were bound by professional ethics and the prospect of punishment, they said no such thing.
At the same time, many GOP members elected in 2020 also asserted sweeping fraud. But though the fraud was alleged to be massive in scope, it somehow didn’t affect any of their elections. Not a one.
Trump often touted cutting regulations for private business, but he’s now demanding regulations on long solicitous private social media companies that had tolerated his daily hateful prevarications until his rhetoric got people killed.
Orwell would have chuckled about Senator Josh Hawley being hoisted with his own petard. After aiding and abetting Trump’s BIG LIE of a stolen election, the BIG LIE has bit him in the ass with the loss of book deal and the likely demise of his incredibly transparent Presidential aspirations.
What Hawley is calling cancel culture is a business deciding he will hurt the bottom line and the logical condemnation following the lethal consequences from objecting to the certification of an election that Joe Biden had won by seven million votes ⎼ and with plenty of room to spare in the Electoral College.
Finally, in what may be Trump’s final blast of Orwellian doublespeak as President, our Divider-in-Chief is shirking blame and calling for unity after he incited the violence that nearly ended America’s experiment with democracy.
As any parent of a misbehaving child knows, demanding accountability from the transgressor and imposing consequences is the only way to find lasting peace.