Hail, Oceania!

by David Benjamin

“By word and deed, Trump treats Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as his only real peers. Our allies, by contrast, are our subordinates. It’s as if Putin, Xi and Trump were feudal lords and each were entitled to his own feudal domain.”
—David French, NY Times, 23 March

MADISON, Wis.—Writing in 1948, George Orwell predicted that the world, in less than four decades, would spiral into a hellscape of perpetual war, universal surveillance and mass brainwashing. In his novel, 1984, Orwell envisioned three murderous and paranoid autocracies, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. It seems hardly coincidental that these three great fictional hegemons match Donald Trump’s preferred triumvirate of world power today—himself as caesar of the American Empire (Oceania), Vladimir Putin, premier of Russia and all the Soviet satellites he wants back (Eurasia) and Xi Jinping, despot of a People’s Republic of China that covets control over a feudal domain (Eastasia) that stretches from Pakistan in the east to Mongolia in the north and south as far as Australia.

The endless worldwide bloodshed that Orwell foresaw has not yet come to pass. The post-World War II era instead initiated a Cold War in which regional conflicts—Korea, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, etc.—kept the arms industries obscenely rich and war “hawks” like John Foster Dulles and Henry Kissinger hip-deep in gore.

As noted by David French in the Times, treaty organizations like NATO made obsolete “the competing spheres of imperial influence in the 19th century … France, Russia, Britain and Germany … constantly colliding with one another.”

This tenuous truce doesn’t sit well with Donald Trump, Vlad the Invader and Xi. They see comity among nations and they get the heebie-jeebies. Collision is their lifeblood—as it is in 1984 for the forces of Big Brother. In Orwell’s novel, Big Brother is more symbolic than corporeal, an all-seeing and omnipotent abstraction so distant from his subjugants and overwhelming larger-than-life than no one living has ever beheld him in the flesh. He is as God.

Since its publication in 1949, 1984 has been reprinted with countless different cover designs. The commonest—and creepiest—motif is the inescapable eye of Big Brother “watching you.” Donald Trump’s favorite photo, the mug shot taken at the Fulton County Jail, evokes Big Brother’s malignant glare more vividly than any portrait of any world leader since the Third Reich’s fall and the death of Stalin. It’s a creepy picture. But it’s one that Trump, were he to work his will, would be burned onto the retina of his every subject. If he could so decree it in one of his Sharpie-scrawled encyclicals, that scowl would be framed and mounted—beside JFK and the sacred heart of Jesus—in every devout American kitchen.

Currently, alas, Trump remains a mere mortal, more tangible and accessible than Putin and Xi, and even less regal than tinpots like Kim Jong Un. Were he to take the advice of O’Brien, the sadistic philosopher of 1984, our Orange Jesus might well attain the sort of unquestioned power that transcends politics and defeats death. There is a dialog in 1984 between O’Brien and Winston Smith that unsettles the meaning of reality in a way that rings familiar in the era of Trump.

“Does Big Brother exist?”

“Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.”

“Does he exist in the same way as I exist?”

“You do not exist,” said O’Brien.

In this long, tortuous conversation, O’Brien reveals that constant war—the daily threat of invasion and conquest—gives sustenance to power. It renders the leader a saint of patriotism whose disparagement would be heresy. A war with a distant, invisible enemy that never ends, a war against secret agents in our midst, a war so costly that life shrinks to a daily struggle for mere survival, exhausts the mind as well as the body. It smothers dissent and skepticism under a shroud of martial unity and hatred of an enemy both vague and ubiquitous. O’Brien explains the importance of an enemy who never wins but never goes away.

“Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon—and yet they will always survive … Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible—and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power.”

Or, as Donald Trump boasted a decade ago: “We’re gonna win so much you may even get tired of winning and you’ll say, ‘Please please, it’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore.’”

In 1984, the war’s constant, relentless specter is made terribly manifest by falling bombs and body counts announced on state media (the only media). Fear is everywhere, not just fear of the enemy but of being seen as sympathetic—worse, complicit—with the enemy. Everyone must fear becoming the enemy, even if they don’t know that they have betrayed Big Brother unless they’re seized by the Thought Police and taken to Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where—like the “gangsters” of Tren de Aragua—they go poof.

In Oceania, there is no actual press, just the cynically titled Ministry of Truth, where “news” is manufactured and where Winston Smith stays busy revising history, changing old “facts” to ensure a match with the State’s latest fabrications.
The brilliance of the Ministry of Truth is that it defines reality on a tectonic foundation on which nothing can stand firm and hold its ground. Toward the end of the story, Winston Smith learns that Oceania is not at war with Eastasia. It’s at war with Eurasia and has always been at war with Eurasia. Eastasia is Oceania’s loyal ally. At the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith scrambles to erase all references in all the news and all of history to a war with Eastasia—and, more important, to believe that there was never a war with Eastasia.

Traitorously, Winston realizes that there is no war. There never was a war, with anyone. But never mind.

“Reality,” says O’Brien, “is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else … whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.”

Just as he must believe that two plus two is five when Big Brother signs an executive order that says two plus two is five, Smith must believe this because the only truth is Big Brother’s truth. He must understand—he must believe—that he is powerless against the truth of Big Brother, so that when Big Brother one day declares that two plus two is three, he believes. He forgets that there was ever five.

Orwell calls this pliability of faith “doublethink,” the ability to see something turn into its contradiction and—spontaneously, as a matter of self-preservation—to disbelieve your lying eyes. Or, in the words of Donald Trump, “Just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Smith ends up in Room 101 because he cannot believe the unbelievable. He cannot still his curiosity and silence questions as simple as “Why?”

Before completing the expungement of Smith’s mind, O’Brien gives him an explanation that is both fearfully truthful and, unless the Oceanic—oops, American—people relearn the right answer to two plus two, prophetic:

“We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power … The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand?”