From 1984 to 2022Ingsoc, Amsoc, and life in Stalinist Covidistan.
By Lloyd Billingsley
January 31, 2022
The gap is actually decades wider because, as readers in the USSR and the Soviet Bloc understood, 1984 was all about 1948, and Orwell was on record that the book was anti-Stalin. The Stalinist conditions of 1948 are now going on, big time, in the United States of America.
Under Ingsoc, English Socialism, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. As Winston Smith observes, only the Thought Police are efficient. The subjects of Oceania must not only follow Party orthodoxy but show the requisite level of enthusiasm, lest the Thought Police arrest them for facecrime or ownlife, living in any way at odds with Party orthodoxy.
“Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think,” Orwell explains. “Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” Children had been “systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations.” This is a reference to Pavlik Morozov who denounced his father to Soviet authorities.
In Oceania, “the family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.” Children were “ungovernable little savages” with “no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party.” They harass Winston Smith, who has memories of those old fashioned loyalties.
His mother, “had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own and could not be altered from outside.
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Winston and his lover Julia pledge to fight the Party but are quickly uncovered, arrested and tortured. As Party inquisitor O’Brien explains: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only pure power.” As Winston Smith learns:
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
In 2022, embattled Americans are beginning to understand the parallels.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/31/from-1984-to-2022/
