Down with Big Brother!
By: Doug Mann
Tags: Social Media, Covid 19 Crisis, Identitarianism, Capitalism, Orwell

The Genius of Orwell

By Doug Mann, December 2020

Winston and Julia, 1956 Style

Last night, some time around 13 o’clock, I stumbled across a newly colourized copy of the 1956 film version of Orwell’s classic novel 1984 on YouTube. Despite the leaden performance from American actors Edmund O’Brien and Jan Sterling as Winston and Julia, miscast in this quintessentially British drama, Orwell’s core message was still there — that even in liberal democracies with the best of intentions, freedom is a fragile thing.

It lead me to think about 2020, our own 1984. In our annus horribilis, the pegs of Orwell’s fictional dystopia fit into the holes of our reality all too easily, as the darker corners of YouTube have been warning us for years.

The Inner Party is now the power elites in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood and the Democratic Party.

The Outer Party is more widely spread: big media (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, BBC, CBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post), big tech (Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Vice, Vox), big education (most university administrations and Arts and Social Science departments in the Anglo-American world), big entertainment (Disney, Sony, Netflix, Marvel, DC), and big money (investment banks, crowd-funding companies and major manufacturers).

Their ideology — authoritarian identity politics married to globalized digital capitalism. Their pretended constituency — the proles. Their enemies — anyone who rejects their who rejects their ideas, their wealth, their power.

Instead of two-way TVs we have smart phones and the Web, always watching us, always skimming a few kilobytes of personal data off the surface whenever we shop online or go swimming on social media. Enemy of the people Tristan Harris has said quite enough about this already.

Instead of hot wars with Eurasia and Eastasia, we have cold wars with Russia and China. Instead of dropping bombs, they drop hacks and honey pots.

The Spies — who we now call Karens — patrol the streets looking for the unmasked. Instead of the Thought Police, we have campus cultists calling the likes of Lindsay Shepherd in for a bit of reprogramming. And actual police arresting us for sitting in the park or having a drink in a pub.

War is Indeed Peace: The Outer Party Helps to Organize the Proles, 2020

Needless to say, the Doublespeak of the Ministry of Truth is still valid for our own Party: war is still peace (especially if it’s conducted by remote-controlled drones), freedom is still slavery (doubly so during the current pandemic), and ignorance is still strength (especially on questions of human biology). But our Party has added a few more aphorisms: Diversity means group-think, Equity means discriminatory hiring, and Inclusion means excluding those who don’t think like us.

Instead of two-minute hates, we have 280-character tirades on Twitter. There, as O’Brien made clear, 2+2 can indeed make 5, if the Party wills it. After a few jolts of electricity, we can truly see that the Covington Kids are closet fascists, Jussie Smolett was the subject of a hate crime, and there was no fraud in the 2020 American election. If you don’t believe these things, it’s Room 101 for you — cancellation and unemployment. I can hear the rats squeaking in anticipation.

Instead of one Goldstein, we have a small herd. Until he got sick, the leader of the pack was Jordan Peterson. There are public intellectuals like Douglas Murray, whose Madness of Crowds parallels Goldstein’s manifesto, and Brendan O’Neill. There are neo-fascist scalawags on YouTube such as Sargon of Akkad, Lauren Chen and Paul Joseph Watson, with their millions of followers providing clear evidence that a digital Fourth Reich is just around the corner.

There are dissident professors such as Brett Weinstein, ran out of Evergreen State College by a mob of woke students, and Christina Hoff Sommers, whose calm and reasonable manner disguises the fact that she is positively bursting with hate speech. And then there are true monsters such as J.K. Rowling, with her vicious defense of bilious tautologies such as “women are women and men are men”. Big Brother will not tolerate such outbursts of science and logic.

Finally there is the orange demon who inhabits the White House for a while longer, whose name is anathema to all good Party members. We shout his name in anger every day on social media and late-night talk shows. He is the embodiment of evil.

Yet we have a glorious future to look forward to in 2021. Joe Biden’s presidency promises a lockdown, a recession, an outbreak of small wars and the hegemony of big tech, painted over with a thin coat of diversity. Secretary of Transport Pete Buttigieg promises more equitable asphalt on the country’s highways. VP Kamala Harris promises nervous Joker laughs as she waits for Uncle Joe to keel over. Twitter is given a seat at the table to clamp down on the dangerous outbreak of Wrongthink in the American mediasphere.

In Canada, our our PM Justin Trudeau, an errant member of the Inner Party, said the quiet part out loud when he welcomed the Great Reset, where according to the World Economic Forum, billionaires will get even richer while the newly blissful proles own nothing.

So as Christmas approaches, as we await that fateful knock on our doors, let’s all take a swig of Victory Gin and write in our diaries: down with the Party. Down with Big Brother.