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

How a chat with a child led to a 43rd anniversary

Dinosaurs. Planets. Two subjects that have fascinated kids for at least a couple of generations. What’s surprising is how impactful a conversation about either can turn out to be.

In my case the subject was the planets. I was in France and a nine-year-old boy, by curious coincidence sharing my name, David, visited the house where I was staying. We got into a chat about the solar system, and I ended up drawing a diagram with him showing all the planets, right out to Pluto – this was 1980 and we hadn’t yet learned to exclude Pluto from the list of true planets. 

How we thought of the planets in 1980

Please don’t think that the illustration here is a faithful copy of the diagram we produced back then. That’s long since been lost. This is a ChatGPT-generated reproduction, and far more sophisticated than anything either of us could have drawn. ChatGPT is just far too skilled (at least at this kind of thing) to lower itself to our level.

Still, unimpressive though our drawing was, it seems it impressed David enough for him to go home and tell his mother, Danielle, all about this curious Englishman he’d met. Curious enough to make her feel she’d like to see what he was like.

Jumping forward a couple of years, Danielle had thrown in her lot – and David’s – with mine and we were all three living together in England. Nor were we going to be just three for long. There came a dramatic day when I rang Danielle – from a public call box to a landline, you understand, mobiles still being a long way off – to tell her about some incident in my day that I obviously thought so important that I told her about it before she could give me her news, though now it seems so inconsequential, particularly compared to what she had to tell me, that I’ve forgotten all about it.

‘Don’t you want to hear my news, then?’ she asked. ‘About the result of the test?’

Memory flooded back. She’d been due to have a pregnancy test that morning. With the memory came certainty, given the solemnity with which she mentioned the test, about what its result had been.

‘It was positive,’ Danielle confirmed.

That was the starting pistol for a race. Those were the days of the Thatcher government, which had recently changed the laws concerning British nationality. If we were married, and the child was born in Britain, he or she would automatically inherit my nationality as well as Danielle’s, though I’d been born abroad (in Rome, since you ask) and Danielle was French. Otherwise, it would be down to the Home Secretary’s discretion. And I didn't know how discreet he was.

There was less of a practical consequence if the child was a girl. If however it was a boy and he received only French nationality from his mother, he would – as the law then stood – have been liable for military service in France when he turned 18. At the time, that represented 12 months out of a young man’s life which struck me as an appalling waste of time. Since there was no compulsory military service in Britain, getting him British citizenship would free him of tiresome obligation.

Shall I confess that I also rather liked the idea of my child sharing my nationality? I already shared a name with the lad who would become my stepson and, later on, precisely over the military service issue, would share a nationality with him too. I preferred it that my other children should not be technically foreigners to me.

Now, you may be thinking, ‘what was the problem? All you had to do was get married, right?’

Sadly, it wasn’t that simple. Danielle still had a husband back in France. As it happens, he was willing to grant a divorce, and there was no technical problem with getting an English divorce to a French marriage. There was just a linguistic one: her then husband spoke no English and the divorce papers would include no French.

He tried to be helpful. He signed the papers the court sent him on every page, but not in the one place where he had to, in the signature space. Danielle had to explain to him exactly where he had to sign and the court sent them back. By then time was getting very tight indeed. 

In the final stages of the exercise, the judge called Danielle, David and me in to see him in chambers. He checked with David that he was happy with the custody arrangements (term time with us, holidays with his dad); he said he was. The judge then looked at Danielle’s distended belly and said, ‘I expect you’d like me to reduce the delay between decree nisi and decree absolute’. 

Usually there’s a six-week gap between nisi and absolute, the provisional judgement for a divorce, and the definitive one that allows remarriage.

The judge reduced the time to one week.

As a result, when I started a new job on 4 January 1983, I had a request to make of my new boss.

‘I apologise for having to ask for a day off on the very day I’m starting work.’

His face fell. I could see him thinking, ‘What kind of guy have I taken on here?’

‘We’re about to have a baby and the only day my local registry office can marry us is 11 January, next Tuesday.’

He gave a roar of laughter and threw himself back in his chair.

‘David,’ he said, ‘there are few excuses I could have accepted, but that’s definitely one of them.’

So on Tuesday 11 January 1983, Danielle and I were married. And just eighteen days later, Michael was born – safely a British citizen – to join Danielle, David and me. 

incidentally, by the time Michael was eighteen, obligatory military service in France had been replaced by attendance at a one-day ‘citizen’s day' workshop.

Yesterday was 11 January 2026. Danielle and I joined a bunch of people with whom Danielle used to go out dragon-boating (check it out – it’s the Chinese answer to canoeing and good for health). They were there for their annual get-together.

Our 43rd wedding anniversary became a subsidiary factor in the general good cheer.

Celebrating our 43rd

We promised them all invitations to our golden wedding anniversary. We just have to survive another seven years. We’ll give it our best shot.

In the meantime, isn’t it fun to see where a casual chat about the planets can lead?