Eric Blair (George Orwell) at his typewriter.

Orwell: “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act”
George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949 as a warning about totalitarianism and dictatorships after experiencing the reasons for World War II. 

The novel is set in Oceania, a country governed by Party and led by Big Brother, who has led a brainwashing of the population into unthinking obedience. 

There are two other warring states, Eastasia and Eurasia, that are constantly at war with each other and Oceania. The Party and Big Brother have developed a propagandistic language called Newspeak, designed to limit free thought and promote the Party’s doctrines. 

The word “doublethink” is very important to the language because it represents the belief a person can believe contradictory ideas at the same time. Three major slogans of the Party reflect the thoughts of the Party: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength.” 

The Party maintains strict surveillance of the press with an organization called the Thought Police. The press and other media can be the “enemy of the people.” 

Does this remind you of another time in history?

Each month Harper’s prints one page called Harper’s Index covering issues and incidents in the world. After the November 5 election in the December issue the editors listed 10 “happenings” which may affect many lives in this country:

1. Factor by which the number of abortion pills ordered in the U.S. on November 6 exceeded the daily average: 17

2. Estimated amount by which the total net worth of the world’s 10 wealthiest people increased that day (Nov.6) : $64,000,000,000

3. Portion of New York City public school students who are homeless:1/8

4. Percentage of people caught smuggling fentanyl into the U.S. since 2019 who are Mexican citizens:18. Who are American citizens: 81

5. Estimated percentage of Gazans killed by the Israeli military in the period that are women and children: 70

6. Estimated hospitals in Gaza that have been direct targets of Israeli missile strikes since October 7, 2023: 31/36

7. Estimated percentage of plant life Gaza that has been destroyed: 83

8. By which the price of a luxury handbag exceeded its production cost: 900

9. Portion of Americans who believed in 2010 that working hard would result in a better life: ½

10. Who believe this in 2025: ¼
With King Donald attempting to become Big Brother in the Divided States of America, we have a few Big Brothers already dominating the governments of some countries on Planet Earth. 
No wonder the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has just moved the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight.

Big Brother: “We are interested solely in power, pure power.”
George Orwell (pseudonym of Eric Blair) was born in Bengal, India, in 1903, educated at the classic university Eton after service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. His education led him to become a political writer, focusing his attention on his times. He demonstrated intense feelings and ability to fiercely hate. 

Opposed to totalitarians and dictators, he joined the Loyalists forces in the Spanish Civil War and fought against Francisco Franco’s army. He hated Communism and accepted Socialism. He hated intellectuals, although he was also classified as one. He despised cant, lying and cruelty in life and in literature. 

He died in 1950, leaving behind a growing reputation with works that bore the conviction that modern man was inadequate to cope with the demands of his history. 

With the setting of the Doomsday Clock changing almost every year, he may be right.

Orwell wrote the following paragraph more than 75 years ago in 1948, but it could have been written today by reporters at The New York Times, CNN, or MSNBC news anchors about the King Donald administration and his MAGA Trumplican Political Party. Big Brother is answering his own question: 
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested only in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.

“They pretended, perhaps they really believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

I know of no billionaire who could write this paragraph to describe what is happening in the once-United States of America today, but many billionaire Big Brothers in 2025 are desperately trying to make Orwell’s words come alive again by using King Donald as the puppet of their dreams to gain everlasting power. 

Trump has no ideology. Ideologues come up with ideas, issues and policies. The felon who has 34 convictions on his charge sheet has been certified by 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts to be a malignant narcissist who loves only himself, and, according to the Manuel of Mental Deficiencies #5, possesses the characteristics of a socio-psychopath: pathological liar, petty, cruel, vindictive, condescending, deceitful, prideful, angry, sadistic, hostile, aggressive, lacks conscience, empathy and kindness. A

t the end of this list we must also add three masculine traits. He is also a jerk, prick and sexual predator.

The King’s message: “Big Brother is watching you!”
The main character in Orwell’s novel about governance is Winston, a member of the Outer Party employed to rewrite history in the Ministry of Truth, a building equal to King Donald’s White House today. 

His main job is to change history to the current political thinking. As he walks to work in the morning, he passes signs and posters on every block with the words “Big Brother is watching you.” 

I’m sure we have many rewriters in Musk’s and Trump’s White house today walking down streets with cameras on lightposts and buildings checking employees listening to Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and the Murdochs “rewriting” Jan. 6 and reviewing climate change as a hoax.

Winston has a longing for the real truth so he joins a secret society called the  Brotherhood. He has a loving affair with Julia and moves to an apartment area which houses many believers of the policies of the Outer Party and Big Brother. 

An undercover agent of Inner Party who appears to be a secret member of the Brotherhood rats on Winston and Julia and they are arrested and sent to the Ministry of Love for a violent re-education. They are both tortured, and he panics when a cageful of rats is attached to his head. 
To stop the torture, Winston yells: “Do it to Julia!” They do, he betrays her – and ends up loving Big Brother. 

Somehow, this reminds me how the MAGA cult was established, even if none of them can remember when the Divided States of America were really “great.”

A few quotes from Orwell that might remind you of where we are today
1. “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

2. “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

3. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

4. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”

5. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them back together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

6. “In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

7. “Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”

8. “Being in a minority, even in minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

9. “Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two is four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

10. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Like most of us, Orwell was capable of both love and hate. Britannica has an excellent analysis of Nineteen Eight-Four: “Orwell wrote it as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. Its depiction of a state where daring to think differently is rewarded with torture, where people are monitored every second of the day, and where party propaganda trumps free speech and thought is a sobering reminder of the evils of unaccountable  governments. Winston is the symbol of the values of a civilized life, and his defeat is a poignant reminder of the vulnerability of such values in the midst of all powerful states.”

Look at what Putin and his oligarchs have done to Russia in the last three decades. Look at what Putin is doing to Ukraine today, trying to resurrect the glory days of the great Peters and Stalin by torturing and killing dissenters and filling all the gulags on the huge archipelago. 

Look at what China is doing with its dissenters, “disappearing” many and putting millions in re-education and labor camps. 

And then take a look at home with what billionaires King Donald-Elon and 800 billionaires are doing – trying to turn the Divided States of America into a White Nationalist inferno equal to Dante’s nine levels of Hell for the bottom Ninety-Nine Percent.

One more quote for the day. One of my favorite columnists was Texan Mollie Ivins. who used to put the Bushes on a hot grill every time she wrote about them. She also thought that politicians were leased, rented and bought by billionaires. This is her description of the Texas legislature: “Our very own dreaded legislature is almost upon us. They’ll be here, leaving many a village without its idiot.” 

I’m sure the village of Manhattan in New York has some idiots, but King Donald stands out. Only an unschooled, ignorant, pathological idiot would drink bleach to kill Covid germs in the body. 

Congressional Republicans seem scared shitless when full of it by a coward with fake bone spurs and real brain worms. 

They also seem to be populated by sickly vermin who are poisoning our government. 

And then we have the addition of a Musk stinking up the same government.