Big Brother is here

 

Victor Davis Hanson sees frightening parallels to our societal decline and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  His column at American Greatness (“Did Americans Come to Love Big Brother?”) concludes:

Under memory-hole rules, just as everything good under the prior administration is now “bad,” so everything bad under the new administration will be presented as “good.” 

Americans in the new calm of all good news, and no bad news, then will supposedly come to appreciate that our Ministry of Truth’s Wokespeak—our version of Orwell’s “Newspeak”—was for our own good. 

Will it be easier to sleep when President Xi Jinping smiles at us on CNN, when we read in the New York Times how Joe Biden is reining in Benjamin Netanyahu, and when MSNBC hosts a town hall with John Kerry and Javad Zarif to announce a new and improved Iran Deal? 

When you are tired, and stuck in commute traffic, would you rather hear yet another NPR theory about how the sinister Donald Trump never paid his taxes and made millions while in office—or listen to a softer, upbeat voice narrate how the Biden Foundation is helping needy, undocumented workers?

So will Americans, exhausted by Trump-Goldstein, at least confess that the Ministry of Truth’s new rosy fantasies are not as nerve-wracking and depressing as its old angry hate-Trump propaganda? 

In other words, too many Americans may come to resemble Winston Smith, the defeated hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four, who at last accepts the false calm—in his appreciation that all the devilish enemies of the past have faded away and there is only the tranquility of media triumph: “Everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Full column is here.

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