Times are strange when the word “Orwellian” is actually getting redefined right before our eyes.
For those who didn’t read (or perhaps suffer through) George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the book describes the travails of Winston Smith, a low-level desk worker in the propaganda ministry of a fictitious totalitarian regime. The work was highly influential, almost single-handedly spawning the “dystopian” subgenre of science fiction where writers compete to see who can come up with fictional worlds with more and more improbable levels of suckiness.
There are many facets of Orwell’s novel which have since been described as “Orwellian.” Probably the best-known aspect is the all-seeing eye of the state. In the novel, Smith is surveilled everywhere by hidden cameras and helicopters fly down streets pointing searchlights into windows. A government organization known as the “Thought Police” use this widespread surveillance to point out seditious actors, or just people who are not so jazzed about being woken up at 5 a.m. to do P90X for the overbearing government official on the television.
There are other themes or features of totalitarian control generally referred to as “Orwellian.” In the novel, the party that runs the dictatorship of Oceania is slowly removing words from the English language under the premise of simplifying the dictionary, thus creating “Newspeak.” When fully implemented, Newspeak will contain no words for “revolution,” “freedom,” “individualism,” “rebellion” and so on. There is also the widespread practice of “doublethink,” where the party requires citizens to hold contradictory beliefs, or to believe things contradictory to their previous beliefs: We are at war with Eastasia; we have always been at war with Eastasia. 2+2=5.
All of this is to say, “Orwellian” can mean a lot of different things, and that means that quibbling over the definition of Orwellian is precisely the sort of thing journalistic pedants would excel at.
Following the harrowing events on Capitol Hill and the subsequent backlash against Trump and his “enablers,” publications as diverse as Slate, The Washington Post, and USA Today had to chime in and tell everyone, “well akshully, you’re using that word wrong.” According to the Post, the people who are having publishers reject their books, being fired, put on blacklists, and threatened with expulsion from the Legislature are the real Orwellians, which is a head-scratcher if I’ve ever seen one.
The acts of censorship by private actors that have most notably prompted the cry of Orwellianism as of late are the cancellation of a book deal by Simon & Schuster which they had made with Sen. Josh Hawley for a book on the First Amendment, and the simultaneous expulsion or lockdown of President Trump’s Twitter, Facebook and YouTube platforms, among other platforms. Other acts in the same vein that garnered less attention were Facebook’s locking Ron Paul out of his page for criticizing Twitter’s ban on Trump (which it maintains was done accidentally), and the deplatforming of Parler, a free-speech alternative to Twitter mostly used by people with right-of-center politics. The political balance in America between the two parties and Big Tech is apparently so tenuous that Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was allegedly poisoned on orders of the Kremlin, decried the situation as “an unacceptable act of censorship.”
While I personally don’t sympathize with people like Sen. Hawley (after all, I would be hard-pressed to get a book deal in the first place), I also think that the level of these various figures’ culpability in what happened on Jan. 6 has been severely overblown. The way news outlets describe it, Hawley stood on the steps of the Capitol and blew “Charge” on a bugle while waving a pistol in the air. Likewise, all the breathless prognosticating about how conservatives are supposedly redefining language with their memery or some other such nonsense is just a lot of pearl-clutching aimed at the very real amount of kookery on the right side of the fence. The only difference, however, between right- and left-wing kooks is that the latter win the National Book Award while the former are frequent callers on Coast to Coast AM.
In other words, when they use the term “Orwellian,” only someone being willfully ignorant would think they weren’t referring to other aspects of totalitarianism than just linguistic control. The repressive state of Orwell’s imagining had many tools to use against liberty, and Newspeak was only one of them. For smug journalists asking, “Have you even read the book, bro?” I would ask, “Have you?”
As a matter of fact, the only thing about this news cycle that seems “Orwellian” to me is multiple publications rushing all at once to tell you how effectively silencing and deplatforming members of the opposition party and their supporters is not Orwellian.
Image Credit / KnowYourMeme.com
