Twenty Fifty-six?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 7/17/21

            We can hardly fault writer George Orwell for getting the exact date wrong. The important point is that Orwell was right about the emergence of Big Brother, Orwell’s name for the impending governmental tyranny that the entire world faced.

In his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written barely four years after Europe was delivered from the Nazi nightmare, Orwell warned that Hitler’s efforts at European domination would not be the last. Other anti-freedom personalities and efforts would rise and the demise of civilization would be certain. Orwell posited that in 35 years totalitarianism would swallow the West if not the entire world.

  But the year 1984 has come and gone. Americans, Europeans, and certain Asians are still voting and selecting their leaders. Furthermore 1984 found America with a president who throughout his presidency warned the nation about intrusive government. That brave president stood in a divided city in the divided nation of Germany, alas, and spoke with anger to the Soviet ruler, “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall.”

What, then, shall we make of Orwell’s prophetic pen and his dire warnings about “Party doctrine” and superstates? Was Orwell wrong? Indeed not. Since the publishing of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, the world has endured Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Tito, Franco, Batista,  Castro, Kaddafi, Hussein, and many a petty tyrant in Central America and Africa. “Man would be free,” wrote Rousseau, “but is everywhere in chains.”

 If Orwell were alive – he died in 1950 – he would still be alarmed. Ironically, he claimed he was a socialist, but wrote often of socialism’s “dangerous ends.” What Orwell addressed most was how bureaucracy and language affect freedom. He argued that tyranny doesn’t always come from traditional tyrants. It was Orwell who introduced the terms “newspeak” and “thought crime.” (You know, “hate crime” legislation, punishing people for what they think, not what they do.) Exploring how corrupt language can be used to advance political oppression, Orwell stressed the connection between language, thought, and power.  

Can we not see how language is used today to hide agendas? Can we not recognize tricky semantics? How did most of us define infrastructure before Biden became president? Can a Black person be a racist? How is it that progressives define free speech so differently from how the liberal “tell it like it is” college youths of the sixties defined it? What is “reproductive freedom” but weasel words?

Today we are awash in a language revolution. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “All revolutions are doctrinal. You cannot upset things unless you believe something outside them.”

And what do the America-haters believe? They believe (or do they really?) that American civilization began in 1619 with the arrival of the first slaves rather than 1776 with the shedding of patriot blood. They believe Al Sharpton and Stacey Abrams rather than Martin Luther King, Alveta King, Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Tim Scott, Hershel Walker, Clarence Thomas and thousands of other Blacks who competed and succeeded rather than hiding behind the color of their skin and claiming victimhood. Like the Islamic group, ISIS, they believe that history and monuments they don’t like should be canceled. Their inability to name another country they prefer belies their true motives.

America-haters are driving us toward the realization of Orwell’s prophecy. They are proving Orwell’s declaration that it doesn’t take dictators to effect a revolution. Re-defining and “re-imagining” will do the job, especially if you involve children and youth. Hence, Critical Race Theory (a Calvinistic-like notion that tells schoolchildren all Whites are necessarily born racist), Defund the Police, the incredulity of “a third gender,” a doomed burning earth, government-encouraged snitching, and a Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who believe it’s dandy to require the indoctrination of our troops with Critical Race Theory. Who needs a dictator for revolution when you can ease it in through bureaucratic edict, schools, the military, and oh yeah, our transnational, radicalized, customer base be-damned corporations who ought to stick to making money?

There’s another problem. More and more good, ordinary Americans are choosing security over freedom. Forgetting that scientists and “experts” of all stripes often disagree vehemently with each other, they’re letting fear-mongers control them. Such is the evil power of influence about which Orwell wrote.

Americans had better wake up before November of 2022, acknowledge which political party has fostered the ongoing revolution, and vote accordingly.

Orwell predicted freedom would die within 35 years. Thank God, he was wrong. Dare we allow another 35 years to pass (2056), to find that our kids and grandkids are living under Orwellian Big Brother dystopia? If we do, Jefferson, Madison, and 1.4 million American soldiers labored and died in vain.

 

Roger Hines

7/15/21