The Novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is Increasingly Relevant

The photo above, taken at my local bookstore, reminded me of several earlier posts that, to be fair, should have received more attention than they did.

Back in October, when the recent U.S. presidential contest was in progress, there was this one: The Rise of Hitler and the Current U.S. Election. (Please click on that link to read the full posting.)





In that post, I wrote: "Just as Kirsch (who reviewed the book on Hitler depicted above)  notes that history suggests many Germans seemed to be secretly waiting for someone like Hitler to come along, and embraced him when he did, many Americans seem to have been secretly waiting for the emergence of someone like Donald Trump." And so far, in the hopes that Trump will make America "great" again, they have been willing to dismiss his numerous untruths and "alternative facts" just as many Germans dismissed Hitler's more problematic behavior.

Trump's untruths and alternative facts are positively Orwellian, a topic I also previously addressed.

About a year ago, I wrote a post entitled "George Orwell: Frighteningly Prescient With More To Come" which referenced an astonishingly good article on Orwell's 1940 classic novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

And in an even earlier post entitled "Fiction of the Future" I justified writing about these topics because one of the roles of fiction is to look into the future.

All of the above was brought to mind by a front-page article in the print edition of today's New York Times entitled "'Up is Down:' Unreality Show Echoes a History of False Claims" that discusses Donald Trump's proclivity to be fast and loose with the truth throughout his business career.

Among other things, the article quotes Steve Schmidt, a political adviser who helped manage Republican Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, as saying that when he heard Trump's adviser Kellyanne Conway defend the administration's "alternative facts" on NBC's "Meet the Press," he thought of George Orwell's "Nighteen Eighty-Four" in which the Ministry of Truth is emblazoned with three slogans: "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength."

“In a democratic government, there must be truth in order to hold elected officials accountable to their sovereign, which is the people,” Mr. Schmidt said. “All authoritarian societies are built on a foundation of lies and alternative facts, and what is true is what the leader believes, or what is best for the state.”

As I said in one of the earlier postings referenced above, I suspect I will return again to these matters and I am sure that will indeed be the case during the period ahead.