1984.

WAR IS PEACE.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

One of the interesting things about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is that we do not witness the transition to the totalitarian state of affairs described in the book.  We enter the dystopian future of Winston Smith in medias res, rather than observing the process whereby the world of Newspeak and Ingsoc comes into being.

However, it's very easy to look at the current state of affairs in the United States and think that it could be showing us the first steps down the horrifying road that results in Smith's milieu, a comparison driven home sharply by the recent comment from Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Guiliani that "truth is not truth".

Although Guiliani has since attempted to explain that he didn't mean that statement in the way that it's been interpreted, it follows hard on far too many similar examples from the White House such as the obvious doublethink of "alternative facts" - described by Orwell as “an unending series of victories over your own memory” - which is matched by Trump's recent exhortation to a crowd in Kansas City that "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening." Or, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

As with the government of Oceania, one-time allies become foes, and foes become allies.  Members of the inner circle are cast out and demonized: a role played in Nineteen Eighty-Four by Emmanuel Goldstein, once a member of the government and now the Enemy of the People, accused of crimes such as "advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought”.  (Remember Trump's announcement that the media is "an enemy of the people"?)

After a while, it starts to feel like Trump has based his rhetoric on some long-forgotten reading of Orwell's text.  In 1984, "nothing is illegal, because there are no laws", and the government is opposed by " a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State."

One wonders if the Trump government would ever take the final step as described in the novel:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

It seems unlikely, but then, they've certainly managed to nail the "ignorance is strength" part - once you have that, the rest must be easy.

- Sid