Seraphic Secret was asked to participate in the Watcher’s Forum. Every week on Monday morning , invited guests weigh in with their opinions on a major issue of the day, the culture, or topics of daily life.
This week’s question: Whom Would You Name For Person Of The Year?
Seraphic Secret’s Person of the Year is George Orwell.
Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, was published 64 years ago. For Americans living under Obama, this prophetic novel is more relevant than ever.
1984 imagines a country called Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain) a province of a super state called Oceania. The country is under the control of a central party, guided by a quasi-divine leader, Big Brother. The government justifies their oppressive rule in the name of the collective good. All individualism is crushed, and those who think independently are guilty of Thoughtcrimes.
Orwell’s understood that those who control language control culture. Distort the meaning of words and you warp the mind into Doublethink. Ultimately, thought and behavior are colonized by the bureaucratic state.
Thus, the Ministry of Peace makes perpetual war. The Ministry of Plenty is responsible for starving the population. The Ministry of Love tortures prisoners. And the Ministry of Truth pumps out endless streams of propaganda, Newspeak.
Big Brother teaches that War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength.
The ruling party is constantly revising history to make it conform to their ever-shifting versions of the truth. And of course, there is an eternal scapegoat, Emmanuel Goldstein, the reviled public enemy who heads up the counter-revolutionary forces of The Brotherhood, which may or may not exist.
Private contracts do not abide under Big Brother.
Big Brother makes the laws. And the laws mean whatever Big Brother says they mean at any given moment
Postmodern Liberalism is evolving into the Orwellian Big Brother state.
Barack Obama was packaged and sold as a cult leader. A radical leftist, Obama’s entire political education and career has been at the service of big and bigger government. For Obama and the Democrat party, the individual is merely a cog in the joyous machinery of the state.
Of course this conformity of thought is achieved through the use and abuse of language. If you disagree with Obama’s policies, you are a racist. If you believe in the sacred Judeo/Christian covenant of marriage between one man and one woman, you are homophobic. If you warn of the dangers posed by IslamoNazis, you are an Islamophobe. If you question the wisdom of granting non-citizens all the rights of citizens, you are xenophobic. If you defy the politically correct culture of postmodern liberalism, they clamp down on free speech through “speech codes.”
These liberal charges are classic Orwellian Thoughtcrimes, using Newspeak as a weapon of demonization.
Obama and his administration tell lie upon lie to the American people: Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS, ObamaCare. The swamp of lies and propaganda is thick and deep. To cover, Obama and his liberal followers, like Big Brother, furiously rewrite the past. A lie as blatant as “If you like your insurance, you can keep it, period,” has been revised to mean something that was never said, never intended.
Newspeak is taken to new and novel heights when the N.Y. Times defines Obama’s blatant lies as “unfulfilled promises.”
Big Brother’s scapegoat, Emmanuel Goldstein, is alive and well under Obama. Orwell understood that anti-Semitism is the eternal hatred used by oppressive regimes to unite citizens who, might otherwise become disaffected and unruly. For Obama, Goldstein is Israel. Does anyone doubt for a moment that Obama plans to neutralize the Jewish State by throwing in with the nuclear IslamoNazis of Iran?
Under ObamaCare, private contracts have been dissolved through state intervention. And the very laws that Obama and the Democrats pass are as liquid as mercury. From day to day, just as Big Brother shifted the meanings of law and order, the Obama regime makes laws, revises and sometimes simply ignores the very same laws — all in the name of, ahem, social justice.
If a contract is not a contract, what is it?
If a law is not a law, what is it?
Answer: It is 1984.
In 1984, Winston Smith and Julia rebel against Big Brother by meeting in what they think is a secret room, and falling in love. Both are crimes against the collective. Orwell understood that if man has no right to be left alone, he has no rights at all. In the end, after being mercilessly tortured, the lovers betray one another.
“I betrayed you,” she said baldly.
“I betrayed you,” he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
“Sometimes,” she said, “they threaten you with something – something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.”
“All you care about is yourself,” he echoed.“And after that, you don’t feel the same toward the other person any longer.”
“No,” he said, “you don’t feel the same.”
This is the ultimate 1984 prophesy. When love becomes a weapon of the state. And this is our future. Unless America wakes up to the fact that the fiction of George Orwell’s 1984 is fast becoming reality.
Head on over to Joshua Pundit to read the other fascinating entries.
Orwell’s “Emmanual Goldstein” was supposed to be Leon Trotsky, who was no boyscout!!!
Does anyone besides me think Orwell should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature?
Prizes don’t matter much, and no to your question.
Has anyone ever run across the suggestion that Orwell was thinking, when he worked on 1984, of writing a prequel? A book that described Big Brother’s rise to power? I suspect that, kicking around in Orwell’s mind, as he worked on 1984, was the idea of writing a book that linked it to Keep the Aspidistra Flying and created a trilogy. Winston Smith’s GIRLFRIEND and Gordon Comstock’s (the protagonist of Keep the Aspidistra Flying) SISTER are both named Julia and Gordon Comstock’s girlfriend, Rosemary, looks like 1984 Julia and has some of her mannerisms. I suspect Orwell was thinking of writing a book that linked 1984 to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, described Big Brother’s rise to power, and included, as characters, Gordon Comstock, as an old man, and Winston Smith’s girlfriend, when she was a little girl, and his granddaughter. 1984 Julia even mentions her grandfather.
If you want a fascinating insight into Orwell’s mind and imagination when he was writing 1984, read his early comic novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. From big, main plot outlines down to tiny details, it is PACKED with farce versions of the terrifying material in 1984.
This is satire, right?
Yours is a dumb comment, right?
Sorry. Wasn’t sure if it was or not. Pretty good satire.
Was very sure that yours was. Pretty dumb comment.
Are you going to write anything about O”Toole? I have something I would like to say about him, but I’m having to think about how I’ll write it.
I’m thinking about it.
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/67990/t-e-lawrence-of-arabia-demanded-ethnic-cleansing-of-jews-from-jerusalem-should-be-assimilated-by-arabs/#comments
Read Debbie Schlussel on T.E. Lawrence, who, I understand, DID visit Jabotinsky in prison, before you comment on Peter O’Toole.
Nothing much to do with O’Toole, but I have always seen Lawrence as a weak-little-man celebrated by other, spiritually at least, weak people.
” But in foreign policy, the Jewish state is at the top of his hit list.” you’ve got that right. Speaking of North Korea apparently the holiday dinner Obamacare talk with the crazy uncle took an unfortunate turn for the uncle.
Orwell’s other insight, which came as he worked for the BBC, was that totalitarian states were as likely to come from the desire to do good as to do evil. This is what we have here now. The IRS bureaucrats are doing what they are doing in certainty that it is for our own good. Doubt me ? Read the Huffington Post.
And, as always, Jews are the canaries in the coal mine.
And, to quote one despot, “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet”
And to paraphrase a Soviet dissident in reply (don’t know which one, sorry), “I keep seeing broken eggs, but I have never tasted the omelet.”
Well, yeah, the broken eggs are the omelet; they don’t get to taste it. The lucky few for whom the omelet was made sure tasted it.
Have you noticed a subtle shift in the government’s focus – it is suddenly right to peer into the private lives of citizens – whether it is the NSA or Obamacare.
The ultimate manifestation of Orwell’s prophesy was under Hitler and Stalin though…
New speak, a fine is now a tax, global warming is now climate change, and so on.
During the Reagan presidency as we approached the year 1984, the media tried to equate America under Reagan with Orwell’s 1984. It failed because Reagan knew how to get an economy to recover from high unemployment and high inflation (Obama can’t solve only one of these). I knew Time and Newsweek were doomed to irrelevancy when they failed to convince anyone of the meme.
Of course now that we have an administration that decides to rewrite any law that is too inconvenient to pass Congress we get a media that still believes 1984 is only possible under a Republican. And the way our elites in D.C. never have to feel the effects of a recession or the crappy laws and regulations they make the rest of follow, Animal Farm is another Orwell novel for our times. (On Morning Joe today, Chuck Schumer was talking about the budget deal and how everyone had to share in the cuts when Scarborough sensibly asked what cuts have affected Congress. Schumer’s response, worthy of anything Mark Twain could have come up with, was that Congress has sacrificed plenty in the last few years. Which I guess explains why so many congresscritters retire to their homes after two or three terms – NOT!)
I read 1984 and Animal House when I was in middle school and I remember discussing the political aspects of both books — especially the socialism aspects. Perhaps I was too young in middle school to grasp the reasoning, but why did Orwell (his real name was Eric Blair), a devoted socialist, name the evil government (a.k.a – Big Brother) of Oceania as INGSOC (short for “English Socialism”)? It seems like he would (should) have named it CAPKYL (“Capitalism Kills”) if he was promoting Socialism…
As an aside, look at Orwell’s pre-World War II passport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OrwellBurmaPassport.jpg) and tell me who you think he resembles. 🙂
LOL. Animal FARM, not Animal House…
That would be awesome if Orwell had written Animal House in addition to 1984. He’d be right up there with Shakespeare as the greatest writers of modern English.
Some are more equal than others – the mantra of all tyrants.
And… Motzei Shabbos; Saturday night, I was discussing 1984 with my 8 year old grandson and his parents. As I am the “political pundit” in the family, my daughter-in-law wanted to know if I thought that 1984 had come to pass. Between trying to explain what this book was about to our 8 year old and trying to answer her question, I basically said both yes and no.
My yes was similar to what Robert wrote above. However, my no was in that the “Superstate” can never hold…. As is seen throughout history, massive Government Control inevitably leads to massive breakdowns and anarchy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the universe tends towards entropy. This is also true of history.
If the “Obamanation” continues after the next Presidential election and afterwards for another few terms then, “the center cannot hold” and our nation, and the world, will break down…
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Moishe:
The center may not hold, but while it does millions are murdered and millions more suffer. Meanwhile, North Korea seems to be holding just fine. And thanks for quoting one of the loveliest poems in the English language.
Good point. However, North Korea holds only as the result of being a total welfare State 100% relying on handouts from South Korea; China; the US; and the rest of the world.
If that largess were stopped, North Korea would collapse tomorrow.
For that matter, if the world stopped buying Chinese product nowadays, that country would collapse into anarchy.
But, you are correct, millions suffer and it will continue to get worse as the Obamanation rolls forward, crushing all independent thought in its past…
You know… Somebody could probably do a really good; either a totally scary action film; or a complete hysterical comedic parody, of the Obama/ Democrat Administration…
So, in keeping with a recent parsha in the Torah…
“And I’m sure it’s crossed your mind
What it is you have to find
Find a man to lead you through the famine
With a flair for economic planning
But who this man could be
I just don’t know
Who this man could be
I just don’t know
Who this man could be
I just don’t know”
– Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Totalitarian states hold indefinitely… until they don’t anymore. Theodore Dalrymple has a book “The Wilder Shores of Marx,” written after he spent some time in the early 1990s traveling to the remaining Communist states. One of those states was Romania, and the first half of the section of his book on Romania talks about how he feels things are never going to change, the regime is very stable, etc. Then he literally interrupts the chapter halfway through to write that, contrary to his assertions earlier in the chapter that nothing would change, the Romanian people were currently in the process of overthrowing the regime. The lesson being that while overthrows of totalitarian regimes are inevitable, their timing is not predictable.
I remember when the Soviet Union fell. Nobody predicted it – it just fell. I’m wondering about China.
Look, 1984 is a perfectly fine metaphor for some of what’s going on, but it most emphatically has not come to pass. If it had, writing this would land you in a jail cell, with a rat cage tied to your face.
Kishke:
You are correct. 1984 is not here as described by Orwell. But 1984 is here in a modified form. Instead of a caged rat on your face you have the IRS auditing taxes. The government apparatus does not persecute lovers, but it does suggest that during Thanksgiving liberals should advovcate for ObamaCare to their Conservative relatives. Thus, government politicizes the family unit. And a thousand other tiny cuts to society and culture gradually bleed away the foundations of liberty.
Agreed. Which is what I mean when I say it’s a good mtaphor for some of what’s going on. But for Moishe to say it has come to pass is nonsense. B/c in fact such societies have existed and still do exist, and for all our current faults, they bear almost no resemblance to ours.
I don’t doubt that Obama doesn’t like Israel, or that he doesn’t exactly wish the country well, but I don’t think it’s his main scapegoat. It’s just too hard to set up even a fake chain of logic between most of his failed initiatives and the Jewish state. His main scapegoats are Republicans, white people (especially men) and religious people (fundie Christians, though I’m sure he’d include fundie Jews if he thought about it).
You know, I never thought about it before, but “Emmanuel Goldstein” is such a very Jewish name….
Brianna:
I agree with you. Obama’s scapegoats, domestically, are whites and Republicans. But in foreign policy, the Jewish state is at the top of his hit list.