A Trump anniversary needs an Orwell reminder

It may not be the best literary diet for a twelve-year-old, to read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World one week, and George Orwell’s 1984 the next. Not at least if he wants to retain an innocent, rose-tinted view of the world. I certainly didn’t when I raced through those two books, emerging somewhat shellshocked by the experience.

A mix not designed to encourage an adolescent

It was 1984 that hit me particularly hard. The book introduced the notion of ‘Big Brother’ to the world: Big Brother is a man, who might be no more than a propaganda fiction, presented as the leader of Oceania, the nation where the book’s protagonist Winston Smith lives. Big Brother’s face is on posters at every street corner or on screens in people’s houses. The slogan associated with the face was ‘Big Brother is watching you’, another phrase that has entered mainstream English.

The dystopia Orwell described saw the world divided into three blocs. He finished the book in 1948 (the title came from reversing the last two figures). That was just three years after the Second World War, which had been dominated by the Soviet Union fighting in alliance with the United States and the British Empire. At the end of the war, the Soviets had extended their control significantly westward, into Eastern and Central Europe. The British Empire was in decline, but both Britain itself and most of its former imperial holdings were closely bound to the United States.

A possible view of the world presented in Orwell’s 1984
Note who controls Greenland

It didn’t take a huge effort of imagination to conjure up the bloc Orwell called ‘Oceania’. It covers the Americas as a whole plus Britain and the whiter parts of its former empire. To defend itself against its rivals, it has become an authoritarian dictatorship, policing all thought, ostensibly because only such centralised power can defend against the other blocs.

The second of these, clearly based on the old Soviet Union and just as oppressive as the Soviet state and Oceania, is ‘Eurasia’. That’s Russia extended westward to the Atlantic and including all of continental Europe.

Meanwhile, in the Far East, a third bloc has emerged, covering China and Japan and their neighbours, called ‘Eastasia’. 

The three powers were in a constant state of war, in which Oceania allied with one or other against the third, but in a cynical but highly effective strategic move to guarantee their own survival, all three kept the fighting away from their homelands and concentrated mostly in Africa. There war would cause no damage at home while providing a distraction from domestic troubles.

Government in Oceania was provided through four ministries.

• Minipax, the Ministry of Peace, concerned with prosecuting war
• Miniplenty, the Ministry of Plenty, concerned with rationing 
• Minitrue, the Ministry of Truth, concerned with propaganda
• And Miniluv, the Ministry of Love, the most frightening of them all, concerned with crushing all possible dissent, though its secret police (the thought police – another phrase of Orwell’s that has entered the general language), its inquisitors and its torture chambers.

At the heart of the regime is the lie. It’s perhaps best summarised by its three slogans, picked out in giant lettering on the side of the ministry building:

WAR IS PEACE  

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The lie doesn’t concern only the present and future. Minitrue also brings the past into line with present concerns. So when Oceania ends an alliance with Eurasia to fight Eastasia, and instead allies with Eastasia to fight Eurasia, it’s important for history to record that this was always so. Winston Smith, who worked in the ministry, saw people quickly adapting to the new ‘truth’ that: 

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

At one point, Smith, who is increasingly at variance with the regime he serves and keeping a diary in which he illegally records his own opinions (behaviour officially classified as ‘thoughtcrime’), writes that he can understand how the system works, but not why. That will be made clear to him later by a senior member of the party:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.

Of course, Orwell meant all this as a cautionary tale, a warning of how things might go if we weren’t careful to ensure they didn’t. As the actual year 1984 arrived, many of us felt some relief that, while there were clear trends towards the kind of authoritarianism Orwell had warned against, overall things weren’t too bad and democracy seemed reasonably secure.

Today, on the first anniversary of the start of Donald Trump’s second term as president, anxiety seems much more appropriate than relief.

He’s busy constructing himself an Oceania of his own. He’s produced an updated, though not improved, version of the Monroe doctrine, which he calls the Donroe doctrine, identifying the Americas as an exclusive domain of the US. He wants to add Greenland to it. Britain, as attached as ever to belief in a special relationship with the US even though it isn’t reciprocated by the Americans, may let itself be sucked in. After all, Brexit pulled the UK out of its association with its European neighbours, leaving it vulnerable to increased US domination.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin seems intent on building Eurasia. For the moment, it hasn’t gone as far or as fast as he might like, with only Ukraine invaded and proving a harder nut to crack than he’d hoped. But it’s clear that he’d be more than happy to move further westward just as soon as he can.

And the great winner in all the global posturing has been China, rapidly moving ahead of the US in key sectors such as green energy production, electric cars and, with increasing probability, even AI. At the same time, it’s growing its military power fast. Doesn’t that sound like a great core for a real Eastasia? 

Internally, the latter day Eurasia and Eastasia are both despotically authoritarian and oppressive regimes. Now Trump is emulating them. He’s sending masked armed men into US cities not sufficiently devoted to his worship. We’ve seen them opening fire on civilians without justification, causing them serious injury or even, in at least one instance, death. And, as in Winston Smith’s Minitrue, this is all backed up by a tissue of lies that presents an innocent victim as a terrorist, and anyone who dares oppose Trump as a criminal. 

Will there be military force deployed at polling stations in the November midterm elections, to intimidate possible opponents? Will they be seizing ballot results to ‘correct’ them to suit Trump? Will this be endorsed by Trump acolytes in an ever-increasing circle of compliant – or complicit – courts and media organisations?

Trump’s turning what Orwell meant as a cautionary tale into an instruction manual.

It feels to me as though we ought to pay a lot more attention to Orwell’s warnings. At last, some statesmen seem to be waking up. Gavin Newsom, governor of California, today warned that it’s time for European leaders to end their complicity with Trump. The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has called for the non-Orwellian powers to pull together to resist abuse by the superpowers of Russia, China and the US. And French President Emmanuel Macron has warned against the emergence of a world ‘where international law is trampled under foot’.

We need to hear a lot more leaders voicing that kind of message. And a lot more voters backing them, even if it implies new costs. Because the alternative would mean that Orwell only got the date wrong. Perhaps by as little as half a century.

If we’re not careful, 1984 from being a past date will become a future destiny.

Postscript

I need to put in a good word for 1984 (the year, not the book). That was when our youngest son was born. While he could sometimes drive us crazy, he brought us a lot of joy, a lot more often. It’s certain that Trump has brought us much more vexation and, for anyone but his billionaire paymasters, practically nobody any joy at all.

Nicky, our 1984 kid, asleep. A couple of years later

Slavery and Trump: the poison lingers

We’re about to commemorate, because celebrate really isn’t the right word, the fourth centenary of the introduction of slavery on the North American continent, in 1619.

The first permanent European settlement in Virginia was established in 1608. So it took just eleven years before they were importing slaves from Africa. 

Anyone in Britain who feels any sense of superiority over their American cousins over this should think again. Those settlers in Virginia were decidedly and entirely British.

By a curious coincidence, as a Brit myself, I’m reminded of this dismal past regularly in my new home in the suburbs of the Spanish city of Valencia. Not far from where we live, in a wheat field, stand the ruins of a farm building. On the intact wall, an artist has painted a black man raising his fist as he looks at a field in which he has, no doubt, been working and will soon be working again.

Even today, even in Spain, still yearning to be free

It’s a curious sight not only because it reminds me of the Africans taken to America, but also because Africans come to Spain each year for the kind of work the man in the painting does. They’re paid, of course, and they go home afterwards, so they’re not slaves. But free? I’m not sure men driven by economic necessity so far from where they live can really be said to be free.

The institution of slavery marked American culture profoundly. If you believe that a group of people is so debased, so inferior that it is perfectly possible to buy and sell individuals from it, and you treat them as cattle for the best part of two and a half centuries, how long will it take you to understand that they are no different from you and certainly no less valuable?

There is something shocking in the fact that a movement has to be called ‘Black Lives Matter’, as though that were some kind of surprising new discovery. The United States was founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. How is it a shock to discover that it really applies to all women as much as all men, and all blacks as well as all whites?

However, it seems that this truth is still a shock. The L A Times recently reported that one in a thousand black men and boys can expect to die at the hands of police violence. That’s two and half times more than their white equivalents.

In passing, those figures are bad enough entirely independent of race. Something like three people are killed by police each day in the US. So far in 2019, two have been killed in the UK, 1 in 2018. US police kill as many people in a day as the UK police killed in each of the last two years.

But above all, it is the contrast between black and white deaths that is particularly striking. It underlines why a movement called ‘Black Lives Matter’ had to be set up. There is still an indifference to the value of black life permeating US society, and in particular its power structures such as the police. I’ve quoted these words before but they’re worth quoting again, since they reflect how that indifference came from the very top of US society. This is Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in 1857, talking about slaves and their descendants, whether free or not, who, at the time of the Declaration of Independence:

…had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…

Why is all this of any particular interest now? Well, it isn’t just because of the commemoration of the introduction of slavery. It’s also because, by an ironic coincidence, this is the week in which Donald Trump made his offer to buy Greenland from Denmark.

The Danes, sensible in their adoption of twenty-first century standards, and sensitive to the needs of the Greenlanders, dismissed this proposal as absurd. And Trump, far from admitting his error – and when will he ever? – responded by cancelling his planned visit to Denmark.

To him, what he was proposing was “essentially a large real estate deal”. That’s a far more telling statement than he and even most of his critics realised. Because he wanted to buy an entire country, including its 50,000 inhabitants. And that to him is just “real estate”.

Trump: buying and selling a nation and its people
is just a real estate deal

People who look or sound different from the ruling Anglos in the US just don’t matter to a certain section of those Anglos. They can be bought and sold like real estate, or indeed like cattle. They can no longer be enslaved as they once were, but it seems they’re still viewed as inferior can still be shot with casual frequency.

The poison that entered the US soul four centuries ago hasn’t yet been worked out of the system. It’s interesting that it still drives Trump’s attitudes. And isn’t it appropriate that this should be revealed in the week we commemorate its four hundredth anniversary?