George Orwell’s ‘1984’ can teach us how to fight today’s totalitarians 75 years after he wrote it

Americans still read George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” 75 years after it was first publ🌄ished on June 8, 1👍949.

At th🐠e time, the year 1984 was far in the future — now it’s 40 years in the past.

Yet our preseꦚnt feels more than ever like Orwell’s dystopia.

The novel is set on Airstrip One, a totalitarian version of what is today🔜 Britain.

Its protagonist i💛s Winston Smith, a censor working in thဣe Ministry of Truth.

His job is to alter historical records𒉰 to conform to whatever the ruling party ൲now decrees.

He rewrites history and the very documents on which🦋 ꦦhistorians rely.

Reality is whatever ℱthe Party says it is — who could prove otheꩲrwise?

Surveillanc🍃e is inescapable: Every screen watches the people who watch it.

Even thin🍌king the wrong thoughts is a cri𒁃me, though the authorities do everything in their power to prevent thoughtcrime before it happens by mutilating language itself.

“We’re destroying words — scores🥀 of them, hundreds of them, every day,” boasts one of Winston’s col💮leagues who’s working on the latest Newspeak dictionary.    

There will be no mo🐟re words like “excellent” or “bad,” only “doubleplusgood” or “ungood,” variations on a single base term.

The 1984 of Orwel๊l’s imagination resembled the Soviet Union of his lifeﷺtime in many ways.

But he intended the book as a warning about what could happen in th💧e Wes✅t, too.

The Soviet Union is long gone, yet much of what Orwell feared is coming to pa𓆏ss in the free world today, not under a tot♉alitarian dictatorship but through the pervasive power of politically correct ideology.

“Nineteen Eig𓆉hty-Four” presents a simple picౠture of a state run by one party.

We have compe🅠ting parties in government, but in effect one ideological Party dominates our schools, our media and the federal bureauc꧋racy, as well as much of corporate America — particularly human resources departments.

And what does the Party do?

I🍷t destroys words, alters books and documents, surveilles us all and polices opinion.

When a dissent♑er is made to disappear in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” he’s “vaporizᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚed.”

Our Newspeak word for that today is “canceled.”

If we’re better off because the Thought Police of 2024 don’t employ torture, as the Ministry of Love does in “Ninetee𒆙n Eighty-Four,” we’re also worse off in one way:

We have no excuse — we aren’t violently🐎 coerced into obedience, we’re simply nudged, nagged and incentivized into goi🥀ng along with insanity.

A Supreme Court nominee doesn’t know what the word “woman” means — well, how could s🉐he, if the Newspeak dictionary hasn’t been perfected yet?

The Canadian Cancer Society can’t use the terms “cervix” or “vagina,” instead it’s “fronꦯt hole.”

When someone like Bruce Jenner changes sex, a Winston Smith in 202𝄹4 amends birth certificate🌳s and encyclopedias to say Jenner was always a woman.

The modern Winston also rewrites novels by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to reflect today’s political ꧋sensitivities — not under orders from the government but in compliance with self-censoring publishers and copyright holders.

In the⛎ novel, the Ministry of Plenty procla🀅ims nothing but good news about the economy, even as chocolate rations are reduced.

Here and now, economists in step with the Party flock to op-ed pages and social media to insist that America is prospering, even as inflation reduces what every shopper can buy at the groce💫ry stores.

And of course, surveillance is ubiquitous in 2024, too — only the screens that watch us are the ones we carry in our pockets🐻.

Sometimes there’s even a totalitarian state on the oth🎉er sidﷺe of the screen, if the app you’re using happens to be TikTok.

Re-reading “Nineteen Eighty-Four” 🌳in 2024 casts new light on 🦄our world in other ways, too.

The sloganeering and mindless rage of th🌼e Two Minutes’ Hate, directed against a Jew in Orwell’s novel — the Party’s great subversive enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein — echo the hatred directed at Jews on many college campuses and in other bastions of the Party in Americಌa and Europe today.

In the book, the Party is an elite; most of society consists of “proles” who are politically disempowere꧑d but otherwise, to a surprising extent, left alone — and lonely:

The Party keeps them docile with pornography.

Within the Party, on the other hand, a strict code of sexual ꦉregulation is ob🤡served, encouraged by the Anti-Sex League.

Unfettered sexual ✅attraction and strong emotional ties between men and women are subversive of Party discipline, or even a spur to rebellion, as Winston di🍃scovers.

In Orwellian America, pornography is ubiquitous, but men and women h🐎ave been taught to be suspicious of each oth💝er.

Unlike in “💝Nineteen Eighty-Four,” however, the Party we live under is not all-powerful.

It can be stopped, if w⛦e stop accepting its lies — if, after 75 years, we heed Orwell.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.