Date: June 20, 2023
MOVCAC Contributor: Sean P. Keefe
If you have read George Orwell’s “1984,” you know it is a dry trudge of a read. The scenery is dark. The plotline and characters are bereft of happiness, joy, and hope. There is little reason to spend time with this book if all you are looking for is entertainment. However, if you wish to place our present into proper context, “1984” is required reading.
The book gave us phrases and ideas that have persisted throughout the years. The most famous term to come from this work of art is probably Big Brother. The term, as used in modern vocabulary, describes the ever-watchful eye of the government. Newspeak, though less part of the common vernacular, has obviously been used by big media and big government to dumb down our society. The idea of a permanent enemy used to keep the population in fear was introduced in this story as Eastasia and Eurasia. Oceana was always at war with one or the other. In our current world, Russia and China fill these roles quite comfortably.
As I watch events unfold in our everyday life, I struggle to understand if Mr. Orwell was a time-traveler trying to warn us of a dystopian future, or if the leaders of the world decided that the social control methods described within were so brilliant that they just had to try them out in the real world.
Programming occurs in so many different ways. A computer programmer writes coded instructions that a machine then uses to perform tasks. A pet owner uses food to program certain behaviors into his pet. The military uses discipline to program soldiers to perform tasks that go against every survival instinct nature had programmed into human DNA. In “1984,” Winston was programmed with fear, repetition, and ritual. Is our programming so much different today?
We are inundated every waking hour with programming. Television, radio, movies, the internet, apps, phones, books, magazines, websites, and social pressure are constantly programming us to fall into certain behavioral patterns. There is a viral video that has circulated in the last few years showing local television stations airing the same story using the exact same words spoken by local anchors (Independent Media – TikTok). How is this anything but programming? Unfortunately, convincing the brainwashed that they have been brainwashed is as easy as moving Mt. Everest. Or as Mark Twain said, “It is easier to fool a man than to convince him he has been fooled.”
George Orwell introduced the Two Minutes Hate about 13 pages into “1984.” The Two Minutes Hate was a compulsory task in which all citizens of Oceana were expected to participate. During these two minutes, citizens gathered together in front of a large screen where images and sounds were played. The images displayed were of the enemies of Big Brother – either Eastasia or Eurasia along with The Enemy of the People, Emmanuel Goldstein. This character was described as a member of the party’s inner circle who had become a renegade. The people were encouraged to scream their anger at the screen. They were encouraged to lay bare their emotions against the enemies of Big Brother. In this way, their entire society knew who the enemy was; and it wasn’t Big Brother. Of course, the plot of the book is Winston figuring out that Big Brother was the true enemy.
The point of this essay is to understand that methods are being used against us to ensure that our enemy is the same enemy our Big Brother sees. They have been programming us for quite some time on this topic.
Over the years we have been programmed to distrust and, in some cases, even hate Russia. We forget that Russia was conquered in the Bolshevik Revolution. The Tsar and his family were brutally murdered when the communists took over. After World War II, the iron curtain fell over the Soviet Union. I remember how Lech Walesa and the Polish people fought against communism. I remember when the Berlin Wall fell. I remember Mikhail Gorbachev admitting the failure of the Soviet Union, and I remember all the agreements that ended that tyrannical regime. The Russian people suffered greatly as their economic system failed. Russia became the Wild Wild West as oligarchs and western carpetbaggers pilfered the country. Through much of the nineties, Russia was pitied for its weakness and poverty. During this same time, China was a beggar nation just trying to compete on the world stage.
For a while we ignored these two countries as we blamed everything on that ambiguous enemy Bush liked fighting – Islamic Terrorism. That war allowed government elites to install the surveillance state via the Patriot Act. Having successfully created the Big Brother system, our government elites again turned to Russia and China. They have become our forever adversaries just like Eastasia and Eurasia.
And in 2016, the controllers of our country found their Emmanuel Goldstein. As soon as Donald and Melania Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president, the Two Minutes Hate began.
We were told over and over again how Donald Trump conspired with Russia and Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election. We were told consistently for four years that Donald Trump was a traitor:
Is Donald Trump a Traitor? – The Intercept February 16, 2018
As noted at the beginning of The Intercept article linked above:
I FIND IT hard to write about Donald Trump.
It is not that he is a complicated subject. Quite the opposite. It is that everything about him is so painfully obvious. He is a low-rent racist, a shameless misogynist, and an unbalanced narcissist. He is an unrelenting liar and a two-bit white identity demagogue. Lest anyone forget these things, he goes out of his way each day to remind us of them.
You see, you can call Trump a “low-rent racist” because in Charlottesville he said that there were very fine people on both sides. On both sides of what you might ask? Well, if you follow liberal news outlets, you probably think he was talking about the white nationalist and neo-Nazis. However, if you can remember back to that period of time when our culture was ripping down monuments, and if you have the attention span to hear or read all of what he said, you would know that he did condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Here is an excerpt of the news conference where the “very fine people” comment was made (Politifact – April 26, 2019):
Reporter: “The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest –“
Trump: “Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves — and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group. Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
Reporter: “George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.”
Trump: “George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down — excuse me, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?”
Reporter: “I do love Thomas Jefferson.”
Trump: “Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue?
“So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
“Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group.”
Bold in the excerpt added for emphasis.
President Trump made the accurate comparison of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Robert E. Lee. At the time, people thought it was a ridiculous argument. As we witnessed in the following years statues of our founding fathers being assaulted, Donald Trump’s comments were not racist, they were prescient.
It didn’t matter what he had done for minorities in his prior life as a businessman, nor did it matter that he had brought minority unemployment to the lowest levels in history (Don’t Look Now, But Minority Unemployment Is At Record Lows Under Trump – Investor’s Business Daily January 5, 2018). What mattered was the Two Minutes Hate. Donald Trump is your enemy and you cannot forget that.
So, we have established that he is a traitor and a racist. The television told me so – it has to be true. You can find studies comparing negative coverage by presidents (Study: News Coverage Of Trump More Negative Than For Other Presidents – NPR October 2, 2017):
I cannot tell you why the establishment wants you to hate Donald Trump. All I can tell you is that their actions cultivate and feed that hate. It does not matter that the Durham Report proved that Hillary Clinton and her campaign created the Russia hoax. It does not matter that CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other news platforms parroted Clinton’s accusations with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. What matters is the public was taught to hate the enemy of Big Brother.
Once that hate is embedded into the culture’s DNA, one no longer has to debate or consider the positions of the object of that hate. Why would we debate a known racist? Why would we debate a known traitor. Official news agencies cannot give credibility to a known criminal. You see, you can even change the names used once the public has been trained to hate – criminal, traitor, racist, whatever.
This cultural hate has a second more insidious effect; it silences those who oppose the hate for fear of being cast into the same abyss as the original object of the hate. Now not only is Donald Trump a racist, misogynist, traitorous scumbag, but his supporters are too. By similarly labeling his supporters, the public no longer has to deal with the policies enacted by or proposed by these racist criminals.
This tactic began with Donald Trump and continues with anything the powers-that-be wish to avoid discussing. You don’t want pornographic books available to children – you homophobic hate-monger. There can be no debating Nazi book-burners. You don’t want to take an experimental medical treatment for a disease with a 99.x% survival rate – you grandma-killing, anti-science bigot. You can’t work alongside good compliant citizens. You don’t think children should be sexually mutilated when they are convinced they’ve been born into the wrong body – you child-hating medical tyrant. You obviously have no business being a parent.
Recently, Dr. Peter Hotez called Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disseminators of disinformation (‘He Knows He’s Wrong’: Elon Musk Dumps Gasoline on a Flaming Twitter Feud Between Joe Rogan, RFK Jr. and a Noted Vaccine Doc). In response, Joe Rogan offered Dr. Hotez $100,000 toward any charity of his choice if he would just come on Rogan’s show and debate RFK Jr. Dr. Hotez has done everything he can to avoid that debate. If Rogan and RFK Jr. are such purveyors of disinformation, one would think a board-certified physician employed by a fine institution of higher learning (Baylor University) would relish the chance to educate both them and Mr. Rogan’s vast audience. That would be true if what Dr. Hotez espoused were based in any reality at all. Of course, Dr. Hotez is a propagandist protected by mainstream media who will never be required to back up his position. The Two Minutes Hate has done its job and placed RFK Jr. in the conspiracy theorist camp and, thus, not worthy of debate.
If those running our society can shut down debate by manipulating your feelings rather than convincing you with data, facts, argument, and the scientific method; we have moved from debate to religion. Our entire civilization is based on the scientific method of verification/validation of theories. Theories are argued, tested, confirmed/refuted and argued some more. If we remove the argument part of the process, we have moved from science to a priest system whereby the priests tell us what to believe. In this system we can no longer prove a theory’s value or validity; we must have faith in its value or validity.
There is a reason our very 1st Amendment protects speech, religion, and the press. It is the vigorous debate of public policy informed by religious beliefs and data as reported by a free press that helps society to evolve. Open debate with people with whom we will never agree helps elevate a topic bringing more and more minds to contemplate the subject at hand. Rigorous debate challenges consensus and groupthink. A healthy society welcomes this.
A sick society pits people against one another – rich against poor, Muslim against Christian, straight against gay, black against white. That is the point of Two Minutes Hate. Big Brother wants you angry. You are way easier to control if you are angry. And if Big Brother can control where your anger is aimed, Big Brother can control you.
Keep an open mind. Welcome debate. Live a life filled with love and truth.
And most importantly, be uncontrollable!
