ORWELL is back 1984-2025 Big brother & Newspeak
Russia, Ukraine, France, China, United States
ORWELL 1984–2025, Newspeak: User Manual
We just learned that Big Brother had secret brothers in several countries—George ORWELL caught wind of it. Rumor has it he’s back, undercover, to verify whether what he wrote in 1984 is indeed coming true in our time. Back in 1984, he wrote about the power of propaganda. He knew very well the effective machinery of World War I. He opposed both fascism and the German totalitarianism.. of his day. He also fought antisemitism
Here, exclusively, is the report of his journey:
He want to Moscow, where he discovers that a translation of his book is sitting on the nightstand of the Russian president and his government members.
The volume is open to the passage about the Thought Police, the Ministry of Truth, and Newspeak (language cleansing).
The Party’s slogan is:
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
“The present truth remained faithful for all eternity. It was easy. All it required was an unbroken chain of victories over one’s own memory: control of reality. In Newspeak, this was called doublethink. Every document had been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every street renamed…”
“Historical development came to a halt. The Ministry of Truth ensured its execution: War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”
Faced with Russian media broadcasts, he is deeply perplexed. So-called political correctness leads to the erasure of history and its contradictions. Gender issues overlap with political conflicts and prevent the resolution of social struggles by distracting attention from the real problems.
In light of the current conflict, he stopped in Kyiv.
As part of the 2015 decommunization laws, Ukraine distanced itself from symbols tied to its shared past with the USSR and Russia. But in 2016, Kyiv decided to rename Moscow Avenue to Stepan Bandera Avenue.
Stepan Bandera had actively collaborated with Nazi Germany. He dreamed of a territory cleansed of Jews, Poles, and Russians.
Around 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were exterminated by the Nazis and their local auxiliaries—mostly Galician nationalists, violently antisemitic, who still considered Russians and Poles their main enemies. According to their OUN organization, led by Bandera:
“Moscovites, Poles, and Jews are hostile to us and must be exterminated in this struggle, especially those who resist our regime.”
The short-lived OUN head of the Ukrainian state went further:
“I support the destruction of the Jews and the adoption of German extermination methods in Ukraine, rather than trying to assimilate them.”
Thousands of nationalists joined the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), which massacred tens of thousands of people, alongside the SS Galizien Division.
At the time of independence in 1991, these nationalist temptations resurfaced. That same year, Oleg Tyahnybok created the Social National Party of Ukraine in Lviv, adopting the emblem of the SS Das Reich Division. A specialist in Nazi and fascist power takeovers, he founded a Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center. In 2004, to appear more respectable, the party was renamed Svoboda (Freedom)—an entire statement in itself.
Today, his followers venerate the OUN-UPA and produce music videos glorifying the Waffen SS, with support from the Church and authorities. In a 2005 open letter, Svoboda MP Oleg Tyahnybok denounced the “criminal activities of Jewry” in his country. In 2012, he was listed in the Top 10 global antisemites by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for calling to “purge Ukraine of its 400,000 Jews and other minorities,” denouncing the “Judeo-Muscovite mafia.”
Svoboda allied with Yulia Tymoshenko’s right-wing bloc—denounced by Jewish organizations in 2012. That same year, the party won 10% of the national vote—30% in Galicia, only 1% in the East. The World Jewish Congress warned governments in 2013 about this “neo-Nazi” party, and 25 Knesset members wrote to the European Parliament. In vain…
Shocked, Orwell travels to Washington, making a detour through Beijing and a stop in Paris.
There, he finds that the party’s general secretary also keeps a copy of 1984 on his nightstand ahead of the next party congress. Orwell leaves, convinced that Moscow and Beijing are two sides of the same coin.
To his surprise, he finds that the United States is gripped by an intense war frenzy tied to the Ukraine conflict—hatred, severed cultural ties with Russia, erasure of the conflict’s historical roots, a self-righteous certainty of moral superiority, and disdain for comparisons with past wars, all in violation of international law (go figure).
He learns that, in today’s United States, state governors alone decide whether women can have children.
Terrified, Orwell returns to Europe, where Newspeak is spreading among leaders too. In France, he’s baffled that a far-right party with 89 democratically elected MPs is labeled “intolerable,” while the far left—despite its hate-filled, totalitarian, antisemitic and Islamo-leftist rhetoric—is considered perfectly respectable and regularly welcomed on national TV.
He leaves with the impression that what he saw in Moscow inspired some in Paris concerning Israel, antisemitism, and revisionism—where the word genocide has become disturbingly commonplace…
From 1984:
“There was the word blackwhite in Newspeak. It had two contradictory meanings. Used against an opponent, it meant the habit of asserting that black is white, contrary to the facts. But it also meant the ability to believe that black is equal to white.”
In War is Peace, Orwell imagined the world divided into three superstates (Eurasia, Oceania under the U.S., and Eastasia), permanently at war:
“It’s a battle with limited objectives between opponents who have no power to destroy one another, have no material cause for war, and are separated by no real ideological differences.”
Orwell becomes convinced his work was co-opted:
“The problem was to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. In practice, the only way to achieve this was through perpetual war.”
One might think of oil, gas, and grain…
“At the same time, the awareness of being at war—and therefore in danger—makes it seem inevitable to place all power in the hands of a small caste.”
In this terrifying game being played around us, the players push for more war—down to the last man.
The ever-tightening grip on public discourse no longer allows for genuine debate, much less imagining alternatives. Only the party—or parties—determine the correct path.
From 1984:
“The strategy pursued by all three powers is the same. It aims, through a combination of battles and bargaining, to carve out a ring of bases completely encircling one of the rival states. Meanwhile, nuclear missiles can be stored at every strategic point.”
And we seem to be heading straight for it.
Disillusioned, Orwell writes:
“The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions once believed in their own definitions of human rights—but all mainstream political thought has become authoritarian.”
From 1984:
“The Party seeks power for its own sake. The German Nazis and Russian Communists came close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to admit their own motives. Power is not a means, it is an end. Power lies in the ability to inflict pain and humiliation. Ours is based on hatred.”
For a time, calling for a ceasefire or compromise in Ukraine branded one as a “Putin sympathizer”—ignoring the fact that someone with understanding must be part of any compromise.
Since then, advocating a ceasefire makes one a supporter of Ukraine. That’s politics, in all its glorious contradictions.
Deeply disappointed, Orwell leaves. No comment.
The current situation places Germany before a major challenge, the full impact of which for Europe is not yet known—or not yet acknowledged.
Politicians, ours and others, when interviewed, claim that their conviction of having a say in history gives them an exceptional sense of importance. It is both the fantasy of power and the power of fantasy.
Such is the state of the world.