Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, August 19. Posted Thursday, August 30.
George Orwell (tall galoot, second from right) with fellow members of the BBC’s propaganda broadcasting team during World War II. Yep. Orwell worked as a propagandist. He wasn’t happy about it. Photo courtesy of the BBC.
In a move that goes to the heart of Orwell’s concerns about the modern state, the pigs begin revising their history. The fugitive Snowball is accused of not having been a hero at all, but a coward and a tool of the humans. Orwell had been mulling this tendency for years. “The peculiarity of the the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it doesn’t fix it,” in the sense of making it unchangeable, he had written in 1941. “It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day.”
In such a regime, reality is whatever the state holds it to be that given day. The accepted facts change and become simply a function of power. So in Animal Farm, the pigs steadily revise the rules of the fam to their own advantage, and along with it their accounts of the history of the farm. To Orwell, such behavior, controlling the past as well as the present and future, was an essential aspect of total state control. He later would conclude, “Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”
---from “Churchill & Orwell” by Thomas Ricks.
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“Truth isn’t truth.” ---Rudolph Giuliani on Meet the Press, this morning [Sunday, August 19, 2018].
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Bottom photo of Rudy Giuliani seeming to blithely wave away a belief in the existence of objective truth by Andrew Harnick/AP via Politico. To read the truth of Giuliani’s disbelief in the truth follow the link to Rebecca Morin and David Cohen’s post, “Giuliani: ‘Truth isn’t truth’”, at Politico.
“Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom” by Thomas E. Ricks is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.
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