George Orwell’s 1984 Describes Liberal Television Polemics Today
Somehow the voices of liberalism today sound less like traditional partisan pep-talks and more like Oceania’s “Two-Minute Hate” sessions, where party members screamed at a giant telescreen filled with the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, one of Big Brother’s objective enemies.
The purpose was to deflect rage against miserable social conditions by directing it to a foreign source, to siphon off the hatred by venting against Big Brother’s enemies. — Marvin Folkertsma
The parallels go beyond hurling epithets at that massive Leon Trotsky lookalike in one of 1984’s most memorable scenes. Consider the three slogans of the Party applied to today’s Orwellian liberalism: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” As explained in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, “the book” within the book, the purpose of war was to preserve the domestic power structure.
As applied to today, Orwellian liberalism’s increasingly vicious attacks against the Tea Party and Republicans perform the same function, which is to preserve the current liberal power structure by blaming others for its colossal failures. High unemployment, failed foreign policies, high energy prices, horrible housing markets, disastrous federal deficits — they’re all the fault of liberalism’s enemies. Republicans, Tea Party members — meet Emmanuel Goldstein.
“Freedom is Slavery” offers a host of villains in civil society to whom the American public is “enslaved” under the guise of being free, though the slogan offers a variant of what Orwell had in mind. Thus, freedom to choose one’s own health care plan or no health care plan at all is slavery to the insurance companies; Americans “addicted” to oil driving gas-guzzlers are slaves to Exxon and its partners; freedom to eat French fries is slavery to clever McDonald’s advertising campaigns; and freedom to make your own investment decisions is slavery to Wall Street.
In fact, Orwellian liberalism assumes that citizens’ own decisions to live their lives pretty much as they please constitute slavery to someone or another in a so-called “free country,” which is why Big Brother in the form of the nanny state is becoming so enormous, so oppressive.
