The machine-gun in the cloister

by David Benjamin

“… Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants are driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification…”

— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

MADISON, Wis. — There’s something I can’t resist about George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, 1984. Every time I see it in a bookstore, I fight the urge to buy another copy. I have at least five now, all with different cover images.

Lately, I’m drawn to Orwell by the tortured “framing” process that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has applied to his attempted anschluss of Ukraine. Analyses of Putin’s folly cover everything from military strategy and the philosophy of conquest to Eastern Europe’s tangled history and Vlad’s warped psyche. But for me, the most relatable aspect of this atrocity is one that would, I suspect, tickle Orwell’s fancy—the abuse, manipulation and distortion of language. 

Putin is maven and master of propaganda. He has sealed the Russian people into a hermetic hell that evokes Oceania, the empire of lies imagined by Orwell.

As in 1984, our current Big Brother has crudely cast a Jew as boogeyman. In Orwell’s story, the Enemy of the State who triggers apoplexy among the raving mob during Two Minutes Hate is Emmanuel Goldstein, a long-departed apostate from Big Brother’s malignant orthodoxy. Today, in “real life,” the Putin-designated monster of Ukraine is Volodymyr Zelenskly, a Jewish comedian turned president turned hero turned—in Kremlinspeak—Nazi thug. 

In 1984, hatred of the mythic Goldstein triggers mob frenzies familiar to anyone who has seen Hitler newsreels (or video of the January 6 “Hang Pence” mob) and to which Putin must almost certainly aspire. Orwell: “… A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic…”

As in 1984, opposites become truths: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Putin’s war, similarly, is a “special military operation,” images of dead children and bombed hospitals are deemed “fake news.” And love becomes paranoia. Orwell’s depiction of the Ministry of Love is evocative of Putin’s barricaded isolation: “… It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms. armed with jointed truncheons…”

Picture Putin at that long, long table, a hundred feet between him and his general, itching to get away, to retreat to his cloister.

Within his personal Oceania, Putin has enhanced Big Brother’s power to silence the least discouraging word. He has means of mendacity superior to those that immortalized such predecessors as Joseph Paul Goebbels, Joseph Stalin and Joe McCarthy, all of whom spewed their propaganda via broadcast media. 

Indeed. it remains axiomatic that the first act in a coup d’etat is to seize the radio stations and TV networks. Even with these media in chains, however, control of the “news” is never absolute. As was proven by Marina Ovsyannikova, a Russian state TV staffer who—both bravely and somewhat comically—interrupted a newscast by flashing an anti-war message, broadcast propaganda is vulnerable to truth seepage. Opposing voices can sneak into radio programs or—as in World War II and Radio Free Europe—filter across borders, over the air, in coded poetry.

Cyberspace, Putin’s preferred megaphone, is easier to seal. This is, of course, ironic. The creators and profiteers of the Web have long touted it as the triumph of populist democracy, an oasis of free speech, where everyone can say what they will, without fear, favor, interference or expurgation. To which Vlad responds: “чушь собачья!” (“Bullshit!”)

The magic of the Internet, for a tyrant who reigns absolutely over his corner of cyberspace, is the power to seal an entire nation from both outside sources and internal dissent. By design, the progenitors of Google, Twitter, Facebook—oops! Meta, Instagram and other Internet… Wait!

You see, I was going to say “platforms.” This is misleading because a platform, by definition, is horizontal. The Internet, however, has evolved vertically, into a vast array of silos.

Suddenly, I recall a scene in Witness. A gunman enters an actual silo—in a barn—in search of John Book (Harrison Ford). The bad guy can get into the silo but when John Book, hidden in the shadows, trips a latch and sends tons of corn pelting down, the gunman can’t open the door and escape. He suffocates. 

Likewise, a cybersurfer can enter easily, curiously, any of a thousand social-media echo chambers. But when the torrent of lies descends, pouring in, constricting, blinding and overwhelming, there’s no way out. 

We’re told, by social-media experts, that denying access to online dissent is an imperfect prohibition. It can be foiled through connection to a virtual private network (VPN). Unfortunately, the technical skill required to successfully link to a VPN, without detection by Big Brother, reduces the constituency for the actual facts down to a handful of nerds. Everyone else is stuck in the silo, listening to echoes, coughing up lies, running out of air. 

As in 1984, the absence of contradictory information enables the propagandist to feed a captive audience an absurdist banquet of crapola, which regular people, too passive, preoccupied, terrified or stupid to examine, accept as gospel. In 1984, the mob worships the lies blasted at them during Two Minutes Hate. In Russia, likewise, on TV, on radio, online, there is no voice, no medium, no website or app to say that Ukraine’s leaders are not drug-addled gangsters. Nor does anyone dare to doubt that Zelensky has American bioweapon labs, from which trained birds and reptiles carry deadly pathogens into Mother Russia. Russians are saddened to learn, from their president—but they believe—that Ukrainians are bombing Ukrainian cities, killing their own children and strafing their own maternity wards, all for the sake of slandering Uncle Vlad.

They see it on the Web, so it must be true. There’s nothing else on the Web, so it must be true. 

As a Russian pollster, Denis Volkov, said, “What seems to fit is accepted, what doesn’t fit is simply rejected. What is true or not true doesn’t matter.”

Here, in the birthplace of the First Amendment, we are not immune to its cybernetic abuses. America is, after all, the mother of entrepreneurial propaganda, where anyone with two thumbs can go viral with the Big Lie. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Kitanji Brown Jackson were highjacked by a conspiracy theory. Because pedophilia is the most elusive and underground of crimes, it has become the Excalibur of the militant right. Without offering up a shred of evidence, one can accuse someone of sympathy for chicken hawks and pederasts, because disproof is virtually impossible. In the 21st-century, cyberspace is Salem and Judge Jackson is Tituba. 

And so, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton can conjure the ghastly specter of Democrat white slavers spiriting blue-eyed toddlers from government day-care centers, raping them on bloodsoaked altars in infernal pizzerias, then eating their little livers and tiny fingers while giant black Voodoo priests circle in a naked conga line and sing Bob Marley’s greatest hits.

Yeah. Two Minutes Hate. New version. Still fiction.