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Other Parallels with Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

Other Parallels with Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

Last updated on: May 15, 2022 at 5:17 pm by Gene Veith

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Other Parallels with Orwell’s Ministry of Truth 2022-05-15T17:17:20-04:00 Gene Veith

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The Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board is being compared to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984.

In that novel, the protagonist, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, the agency of Big Brother’s totalitarian regime that controls information, not only by putting out lies to promote the ruling party but by suppressing the expression of any ideas contrary to those of the ruling party. The parallels to the Disinformation Governance Board are obvious.

But the specific techniques used by the Ministry of Truth and Big Brother’s regime to control the thoughts of citizens are also painfully close to what we are seeing today.

The Memory Hole

Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth was in the Department of Records. His job was to “rectify” historical records so that they corresponded with the party’s current positions. He did this by revising newspaper articles and other documents, cutting out the offending bits and replacing them with something favorable, whereupon the publication would be reprinted so there would be no record of the original statement. Or by just dropping material not in line with party ideology down the “memory hole,” a slot that led to an incinerator. As Orwell describes it,

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. . . .

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

Similarly, the impulse today is to revise history so that it accords with the prevailing ideologies today. Also to remove references to the past–statues, monuments, names on buildings, curriculum topics, books by disapproved authors–and thus consign them to the memory hole.

Thoughtcrime & Thought Police

Big Brother’s regime criminalizes not only actions but thoughts. Any thought that conflicts with the party’s ideology is illegal. And if you commit a thoughtcrime, the Thought Police will come after you.

The parallels to today should be obvious.

Newspeak

The Ministry of Truth is also concerned with controlling language. It does so by promoting “Newspeak,” a language that can only express the approved ideas. “‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?,” says a colleague of Winston’s. “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Thus we have today the whole range of politically-correct language.

Doublethink

The capacity cultivated by Newspeak to hold contradictory ideas and to believe lies:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again

Examples for us abound: Calling for compassion for the marginalized, while insisting on the right to abort children. Claiming to champion workers while despising them as deplorables. The corporate class condemning big corporations. The powerful and privileged denouncing power and privilege. Feminists defending men identifying as women. Moral relativists imposing their morality. Anti-racists judging people by their race. And we could go on. . . .(Feel free to give other examples in the comments.)

The Telescreen

Big Brother keeps the whole population under surveillance by means of ever-present two-way screens, which can monitor everything you do or say. Here is how Orwell describes it:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. 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. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live–did live, from habit that became instinct–in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Sound familiar?

Two Minutes Hate

Every day, workplaces would take a two-minute break in which citizens would pour out their hatred for the enemies of the ruling party. On the telescreen would appear a program depicting the leader of the opposition, now in hiding. Whereupon the employees would scream at him:

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 pretence 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.

I have heard people applying Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate to what happens on social media and to the emotions displayed in protests, as in those in front of the Supreme Court. (And see what the Babylon Bee does with this.)

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

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