CommentsACCORDING TO LIZ - George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four was published 75 years ago this coming June.
It presented as a science fiction novel of a dystopian future, a future of eternal war, pervasive government surveillance, constant denial of historical events, and brainwashing.
Sound familiar?
From a socialist’s point of view, the ubiquitous militarism served Oceania’s economy by destroying the products of human labor so they could be manufactured again and again and again. This state of affairs is every capitalist’s wet dream with the labor of the proletariat being destroyed by the state, and the state expending all its resources not on improving the lives of its citizens but in maintaining the state of war to further its own ends.
Basic labor did not require education beyond being a Chaplinesque cog-in-the-wheel, so Orwell projected that in 1984 no worker in Oceania would have the knowledge or awareness to challenge the status quo or seek to improve their own lives. And it is through the eyes of Winston Smith, a Party member rewriting history, that the reader first sees rebellion and then the reassertion of Big Brother’s power.
Right now in the United States we have Fox News hosts expressing lies as if they were the gospel truth, so much so that the Russian government holds Tucker Carlson’s pronouncements up as the American public’s support for Putin’s war crimes.
Right now we have not been able to effectively keep the government out of our bedrooms and our children’s schools.
Right now we see whole families crowding into single room apartments due to the lack of affordable housing.
How many years since 1950 has America not been at war?
How much historical “fact” has been proved fictitious when brave Americans shine the light of day on slavery, oppression of indigenous peoples, harassment of minorities, redlining and more?
And how hard are certain groups fighting to hide those same facts again?
Nineteen Eighty-four had its thought police, Newspeak, and Big Brother’s cult of personality. In recent years we have had textbooks pulled or rewritten, professors fired or hired because of learning institution’s right-wing endowment demands, calls of fake news, and… Trump.
More sophisticated infotainment, home schooling, evangelical leaders still promoting the Big Lie, special-interest funded think tanks use selective isolation and people’s fears to build movements supporting personal agendas that, ultimately, are not in the best interests of their followers.
Newspeak – the meanings of words have changed, in some cases have been inverted.
Neoconservatives were liberals dissatisfied by the growth of leftwing, antiwar and pro-global elements in the Democratic Party.
Neoliberals were conservatives looking backward to the free-market capitalism of the robber barons of the 19th century calling for deregulation, privatization and restriction of government power to control their actions
Neither benefit ordinary Americans.
The shift from the conservatism of DDE and Nixon started in the 1960s with the funding of think tanks in response to the rise of a liberal establishment that was moving away from the America-first domination of world affairs and a commitment to a shared world.
The rise of Reagan conservatism in the 1980s ushered America from covert CIA machinations in Iran and Vietnam into an era of overt political meddling and military domination from Syria to Panama to Chile to maintain America’s economic hegemony.
The meaning of conservatism under Republicans has shifted from conservation or wise use of resources and not overspending in the 1950s to using those same concepts to concentrate those resources in the hands of and for the use of the few to exploit at the expense of the many.
They use the lie of shrinking government as an excuse to expand the military, promote wars, and to eviscerate privacy and personal freedoms.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has shifted from the New Deal of FDR and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson to a perverted democracy where some people are more equal than others, evoking the pigs of Orwell’s Animal Farm.
All the years of both parties portraying Communism as the boogeyman has paid off with multinational corporate interests making a mockery of our so-called democratic process.
The world wide web of international banking took a grand step forward in expanding the power of money when the World Bank imposed economically ruinous "structural adjustment programs" on the poorer countries caught up in the debt crises of the end of the twentieth century and in the wake of the EU financial meltdown following the Great Recession.
Too often these crises were not of the countries’ own making, or at least not of their peoples, but due to intervention of powerful corporations, bribery of people of influence, and the chess-playing of other governments on the world stage.
The resultant economic empire – sometimes erroneously referred to as the new American empire as it transcends national borders – depends less on physical ownership of things and more on the control of debt through which they can leverage… just about anything. From the repeal of laws to fiscal servitude.
Corporate greed today is built on keeping the little guy from rising up.
And to steal a phrase from Kim Stanley Robinson: “the neoliberal order was all about efficiency in its purest economic definition: the speed and frictionlessness with which money moved from the poor to the rich.”
People are worried, rightly, about the midterm elections but the real test – whether America will elect a Macron or a Le Pen – will come in 2024.
Those who are suffering and don’t think they have the power need to seize it back and build it up, registering to vote and educating themselves on the issues. They need to start with the primaries in June and practice requesting their mail-in ballot or trekking to the polls.
Get out and vote. Or there will be no future.
And those who have benefited under the present system need to start voting for the common good or beware the fates of Ancient Rome , Marie Antoinette’s France, the Romanov’s Russia or China or Cuba or Haiti or…
Right now we have a chance for a better future… but only if people take responsibility and vote for it.
(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
