Blue State Blues: The Mainstream Media Are Orwell’s Big Brother
by JOEL B. POLLAK
BreitBart.com
27 Jan 2017
The regime in George Orwell’s “1984” declared “War is Peace — Freedom is Slavery — Ignorance is Strength.” The dystopian fiction drew flocks of book buyers after Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway’s comment about “alternative facts.”
– Los Angeles Times, Jan. 25, 2017
The media, and the left in general, are taking pride in sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, as if these confirm their fantasies about Donald Trump as a totalitarian leader. One wonders if they have read the book.
Orwell’s novel is an attack on socialism, and particularly on the media’s role in an imagined socialist state.
The lead character, Winston Smith, is a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Truth whose role it is to rewrite history to suit the political preferences of the Party, and to destroy historical evidence that contradicts the official narrative.
(It is a state, interestingly, that suppresses gender roles to control sex. Only in a forbidden, and subversively traditional, sexual liaison does Smith briefly find refuge.)
One hopes, therefore, that the people rushing to buy Nineteen Eighty-Four because they see it as some kind of talking point against the Trump administration will actually read the novel.
Perhaps they will be shocked by the parallels between the Two Minutes Hate — an organized demonstration of outrage against a largely imagined adversary — and the unhinged anti-Trump protests last weekend.
Perhaps they will be alarmed at the degree to which our media also serve a “Party” — voluntarily.
The Rest…HERE
