From George Orwell’s essential essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War”, where he reflects on all the lies and falsifications of that essential conflict, the rehearsal for Hitler-Stalin and all the monstrousness that followed. (It is the Spanish civil war that served as the breeding ground for 1984, although evidence of the dystopian nature of totalitarianism would become mechanistic and even more monstrous in the years following the war. This essay pre-dates the writing of 1984 by a decade:)
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world: After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such an event, “It never happened”–well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five.
2+2=5. I have written about this concept so much – in fact I see it all around me, even in billboards – and have done so since the birth of this here blog. 2+2=5. The essential description of fascism/propaganda/brainwashing (so complete that the brainwashed eventually brainwash themselves) and what Orwell called “thoughtcrime”. It’s all you need.
I read 1984 before I understood all of these issues, although I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War and knew in my bones the horror/intimidation of this faceless enemy, and the threat of annihilation hovering over everything. It was very real. I wrote about this period – and the proliferation of nuclear winter movies at the time – on my Substack. So maybe a part of me grokked it from that. I was 16 when I read 1984 and it got under my skin. I barely need to re-read it now because it is IN me. I am grateful. It has helped me stay the course as I maneuvered through propaganda as well as peer pressure, those who want me to say that 2+2=5. And it’s not just one side of the political fence demanding it. I credit Orwell for keeping my senses sharp, or as sharp as they can be. I think the books you read when you are young, before you understand context or history, sometimes enter you in a deeper and more permanent way than books you read when you’ve grown up a bit and are supposedly wiser to the ways of the world.