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.
# # #
