"Has Orwell’s 1984 Become Reality?"
by Bert Olivier
Excerpt: "To some readers it may seem like a rhetorical question to ask whether the narrative of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (or 1984), first published in Britain in 1949, has somehow left its pages and settled, like an ominous miasma, over the contours of social reality. Yet, closer inspection – which means avoiding compromised mainstream news outlets – discloses a disquieting state of affairs.
Everywhere we look in Western countries, from the United Kingdom, through Europe to America (and even India, whose ‘Orwellian digital ID system’ was lavishly praised by British prime minister Keir Starmer recently), what meets the eye is a set of social conditions exhibiting varying stages of precisely the no-longer-fictional totalitarian state depicted by Orwell in 1984. Needless to stress, this constitutes a warning against totalitarianism with its unapologetic manipulation of information and mass surveillance.
I am by no means the first person to perceive the ominous contours of Orwell’s nightmarish vision taking shape before our very eyes. Back in 2023 Jack Watson did, too, when he wrote (among other things): "Thoughtcrime is another of Orwell’s conjectures that has come true. When I first read 1984, I would never have thought that this made up word would be taken seriously; nobody should have the right to ask what you are thinking. Obviously, nobody can read your mind and surely you could not be arrested simply for thinking? However, I was dead wrong. A woman was arrested recently for silently praying in her head and, extraordinarily, prosecutors were asked to provide evidence of her ‘thoughtcrime.’ Needless to say, they did not have any. But knowing that we can now be accused of, essentially, thinking the wrong thoughts is a worrying development. Freedom of speech is already under threat, but this goes beyond free speech. This is about free thought. Everybody should have a right to think what they want, and they should not feel obliged or forced to express certain beliefs or only think certain thoughts."
Most people would know that totalitarianism is not a desirable social or political set of circumstances. Even the word sounds ominous, but that is probably only to those who already know what it denotes. I have written on it before, in different contexts, but it is now more relevant than ever. We should remind ourselves what Orwell wrote in that uncannily premonitory novel.
Considering the rapidly expanding and intensifying, electronically mediated strategies of surveillance being implemented globally – no doubt aimed at inculcating in citizens a subliminal awareness that privacy is fast becoming but a distant memory – the following excerpt from Orwell’s text strikes one as disturbingly prophetic, considering the time it was written.
"Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. 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."
Before adducing compelling instances of the contemporary, real-world surveillance equivalents of 1984’s ‘telescreen,’ which have become sufficiently ‘normal’ to be accepted without much in the form of protest, and to refresh your memory further, here’s Hannah Arendt, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (New edition, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich 1979, p. 438): "Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other. The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only ‘freedom’ would consist in ‘preserving the species.’"
As Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben would say: totalitarianism reduces every singular human being to ‘bare life;’ nothing more, and after having been subjected to its mind-numbing techniques for a certain time, people start acting accordingly, as if they lack the capacity to manifest their natality (unique, singular birth) and plurality (the fact that all people are singular and irreplaceable). The final blow to our humanity comes when totalitarian rule’s coup de grȃce is delivered (Arendt 1979, quoting David Rousseton conditions in Nazi concentration camps,m p. 451):
"The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man. This is done in the main by making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible: ‘How many people here still believe that a protest has even historic importance? This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no longer be postponed is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond one’s own death. In order to be successful, a gesture must have social meaning…’"
Surveying the present social scene globally against this backdrop yields interesting, albeit disturbing results. For example, Niamh Harris reports that German MEP Christine Anderson and British politician Nigel Farage have both warned that globalists are frantically trying to establish a fully fledged surveillance state ‘before too many people wake up’ to this state of affairs. Anderson – whose caution is echoed by Farage – points to the irony that people are waking up precisely because globalist efforts to hasten the installation of a totalitarian surveillance state are accelerating and becoming conspicuous. Hence, the more the process is ramped up, the louder critical voices become (and protests are likely to occur), and correlatively, the more anxious the neo-fascists become, to close the net around citizens of the world. She warns that: "Digital identity is not so your life is easier. It’s so government has total control over you.’ Digital currency [is] the crème de la crème of all control mechanisms…What do you think is going to happen the next time you refuse to take an mRNA shot? With the flip of a switch, they just cancel your account. You cannot buy food anymore. You cannot do anything anymore."
Full, highly recommended article is here:
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Freely download "1984", by George Orwell, here:
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