The Gentile Prophets: Orwell and Huxley

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It is one of history’s great ironies that after expending so much blood and treasure fighting and ostensibly winning World War II against fascism and the Cold War against Soviet Communism, the United States of America is now falling under the control of both vile ideologies, namely, corporate fascism as practiced by Big Tech, social media, and many of the Fortune 500, and cultural Marxism in the form of critical race theory, gender identity, and the cancel culture. While the Leftist takeover is the product of the genius of Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, and Saul Alinsky in recognizing that the path to victory lay in seizing control of the popular culture, and in altering the traditional Marxist doctrine of class warfare to include racial and gender identity, in a sense it could have been predicted from two dystopian novels, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In my younger days I regarded these two works of fiction as opposite sides of the same coin, depending on which side, the Communists or the West, respectively, won the Cold War. In reality, they operate in tandem, as we shall see.

Let’s begin with Orwell. For those who haven’t read 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is a thirtyish resident of London who is a member of the “Outer Party,” i.e. the lower ranks, whose job at the “Ministry of Truth” is to continually rewrite history to make the Party, and its titular head Big Brother, right at all times. Thus he is given old newspaper articles to rewrite, and when he has composed the new version, the old one is dropped down a tube to be destroyed. This is a typical practice of Communist and other totalitarian regimes, and is taking place right now in America, with the 1619 Project distorting the history of slavery, and virtually every major figure in our history being labeled a racist and proscribed. Statues are taken down, names of college buildings are changed, etc (In fact, the San Francisco School Board was preparing to remove the names of Lincoln, Jefferson, and other greats when three of its most radical members were recalled, an unprecedented step in one of America’s most “progressive” cities). As Dennis Prager once remarked on air, the Left takes a proctologist’s view of America.

Orwell’s perception is evident when he describes the Two Minutes’ Hate, during which the workers at the ministry gather to revile the filmed image of Emmanuel Goldstein, a onetime Party luminary who turned against the system. Orwell’s choice of an obviously Jewish enemy mirrors Stalin’s show trials of the “Old Bolsheviks” as well as his sending an assassin halfway around the world to Mexico to dispatch the exiled Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronsteyn) by sneaking up behind him and splitting his head open with an axe. It shows up nowadays in the growing Leftist-inspired antisemitism in America, thinly disguised as anti-Zionism, most notably on college campuses. The more elite the university, the more antisemitic are the faculty and students.

As the plot unfolds, Winston has an affair with a co-worker named Julia. They come in contact with an elderly bookseller who lets them use a back room in his store for their trysts and provides them a copy of a banned underground book written by the selfsame Goldstein that exposes the ugly truth behind the Party’s rule. Once they are well into it, the bookseller reveals himself to be a member of the Thought Police and has them arrested and sent to the “Ministry of Love” to be tortured at the direction of O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party (the higher-ups).

One small item of note is that O’Brien has the privilege of turning off the telescreen, a two-way TV installed in everyone’s home and office that allows the government to spy on everyone. Today China is developing such a surveillance society with cameras at every street corner to watch people’s conduct and facial expressions, accompanied by a social credit system that allows or disallows such privileges as travel depending on how well people follow the Communist Party’s dictates. As a vassal of the Chinese Communist Party, the USA is going down the same road; for example, our National Security Agency has the capability of monitoring the telephone conversations of every American, and an upcoming plan to replace physical currency with digital currency will give government the power to monitor every purchase we make and assign us a social credit rating. As a preliminary, the Department of Justice maintains a “society criminal” registry of parents who object to teaching critical race theory and gender identity programs to school children, as well as those who oppose the Federal policy on COVID-19, such as mask mandates and relying on vaccination while discrediting effective prophylactic treatments.

Ultimately, Winston and Julia break under torture and betray each other. The book ends with Winston taking a drink at a café frequented by other thought criminals and thinking that he loves Big Brother. As we know from an earlier aside, once a thought criminal has been thus purified, he is eventually brought back to the Ministry of Love and told to walk down a long corridor while an executioner shoots him in the back of the head. Sic transit Gloria mundi. [So go the glories of this world.]

Before moving on from Orwell to Huxley, we might add that Orwell also wrote a biting satire of Communism, a fable entitled Animal Farm, in which barnyard animals rebel against the farmer and organize a collective led (appropriately) by Napoleon the pig, whose motto is “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” This sounds a lot like the relative standing of various racial, ethnic, and gender identity groups in today’s America.

We turn now to Aldous Huxley, whose novel Brave New World presents a different form of dystopia. Whereas Orwell’s world is the epitome of “hard” tyranny, Huxley’s is predominantly “soft” tyranny. Citizens are seduced and controlled by a licentious lifestyle based on untrammeled sexual libertinism (“orgy porgy”) and a feel-good drug, soma (“a gram is worth a dram”). Sex is totally disconnected from reproduction: contraception is inculcated in everyone by periodic “Malthusian drill by the numbers.” Procreation is done by test tube insemination (called “decanting”), and the resulting embryos are divided into five castes which are given different nutrients in vitro to produce children with five levels of intelligence from Alpha (the intellectual elite) to Epsilon (menial workers). Each caste is issued a different colored uniform and taught a verse to recite expressing pride in their level. Interestingly, when one of the ten Controllers who rule the World State is asked why it isn’t possible to make everyone intelligent, he replies that an experiment was tried sending a group of Alpha-plus intellectuals to an island. The experiment failed because no one wanted to do the physical work.

The actual plot of the novel isn’t essential to our point. It deals with a young man dubbed a Savage being removed from a reservation for “primitive” people who still live the old-fashioned way, including giving live birth, and brought to the new world, which he finds abhorrent.

The parallels to our present society are obvious. Marriage rates have fallen to the point where fewer than half of Americans over the age of 18 are married for the first time in our history. Out-of-wedlock births are skyrocketing; in particular, over 60% of Black youth live in single-parent households, so young males are growing up without a father figure to set an example of how to behave responsibly. The result: anti-social behavior. And every possible form of sexual expression has its backers – look for polygamy and pedophilia to become respectable. Drug use is also rampant, to the point where fentanyl is the leading cause of death among adults 18-45, surpassing suicide, accidents, and COVID-19. Needless to say, our open southern border makes it easy to smuggle in drugs. We could also mention that while we aren’t formally practicing decanting, our educational system is effectively doing it by producing generations of ignoramuses, and especially by failing children of color in the inner city and by lowering academic standards to compensate for ineffectual teaching.

So America is on the road to becoming the world’s largest banana republic, as evidenced by the FBI raid on President Trump’s home, allegedly searching for classified documents. Behind this operation are the voices of members of Congress, opinion makers, and a prominent retired Harvard Law professor clamoring for Trump to be prosecuted for inciting an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, as well as other trumped-up charges (pardon the pun) and imprisoned. This is exactly what every tinpot dictator does upon taking office: stage a show trial of your predecessor on fabricated charges and incarcerate him. (And while they’re at it, they are seeking to discipline, even disbar, every attorney who represented Mr. Trump in any election-related proceeding as a warning to the legal profession not to take the case of anyone who offends the ruling class politically or socially.) What makes this process especially painful is to see a Jewish Attorney General weaponizing the Justice Department and the FBI to punish political opponents, knowing what has happened to Jews under totalitarian regimes. (An article in the Wall Street Journal last October alleges that AG Garland has a registry of “society offenders” that includes parents who object to schools teaching critical theory as well as anyone who deviates from the NIH/CDC party line on COVID-19. Exhibit A: Dr. Simone Gold, the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, who was fired from her job as an emergency room physician on the very day that she and other doctors filmed a video in Washington DC promoting their experience in using hydroxychloroquine to treat patients with early stage COVID, and is now serving a 60-day sentence in a Federal detention center for a misdemeanor trespass in the US Capitol.)

Moreover, a Jewish Secretary of Homeland Security is presiding over opening our southern border and letting in a flood of undocumented migrants, thereby allowing terrorists, drug dealers, human traffickers, robbers, and even murderers to blend in with the stream of ordinary folk just trying to find a better life in America. Apparently no one told them what a horrible, systemically racist, repressive society America is. This illustrates another Orwellian concept: doublethink, the ability to hold two mutually contradictory beliefs at the same time and accept both as true. Blacks are told about systemic racism and how white oppressors are holding them back by the same people who are lowering, even abandoning academic standards, which says in effect that progressives believe Blacks aren’t smart enough to maintain adequate academic performance. So who are the real racists?

Finally, we have a Jewish Secretary of State presiding over a State Department filled with anti-Zionist, antisemitic veterans of the Obama Administration who are dedicated to destroying Israel, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to the PA described as humanitarian aid but in actuality diverted to terrorists producing bombs and rockets and to generous pensions for their families, dubbed the “Pay for Slay” program. As the comic strip Pogo observed, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”

POSTSCRIPT: The two British authors may be joined by a homegrown American writer. Craig W. Stanfill, a former artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, has written a chilling two-volume novel, At Your Service, which describes a future dystopic world, run by the pseudo-religious Unity Community Equality (UCE) cult, where individuality is totally suppressed and every commodity – food, clothing, housing, transportation etc. – is supplied by a corresponding global corporation whose terms of service change frequently and arbitrarily. Children are taken away from their parents no later than their fourth birthday and raised by a State mentor, and all communications are heavily censored. In the sample chapter I read, chapter 2, the protagonist, a female AI trainer, and her AI partner, depicted as a humanoid avatar in the world of virtual reality, are involved in a wide-scale search for a ring of parents, the Anti-Mentorists, who are trying to hide their children. The parents are captured and sentenced to work camps for five years. Sounds like it’s right out of today’s headlines.