Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel that never stops giving, a novel that is always important to contemplate especially in societies like ours, so given to fascistic and totalitarian impulses, and in a conjuncture like ours that has only sharpened all these annihilatory impulses. Nineteen Eighty-Fouris less an oracle, or a window into the future, than a mirror darkly in which people and societies can know themselves.
Take the novel’s Two Minutes of Hate. A daily state-sponsored ritual where the citizens of Oceania watch a propaganda video that triggers “uncontrollable exclamations of rage” against the Enemy of the People, Emmanuel Goldstein, “the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity.” A conditioned berserker state that the Party channels most magnificently to the detriment of its “citizens.” “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.”
Tellingly, the Hate is delivered to the populace via telescreen. I doubt Orwell (who had a lot of late-life doubts about the ability of liberal democracies to withstand the forces arraigned against it) would have been surprised to witness how the present took his analog screen nightmare to super-dystopian extremes. (Making Nineteen Eighty-Foura perennial bestseller is one thing; keeping the fascists and anti-democrats that Nineteen Eighty-Four warns about out of power is quite another.) Smartphone screens (and the addictive polarizing extremity driven algorithms that power them) produce more around-the-clock hate than even the ambitious sadists in the Ministry of Love could have dreamed of. Owing to our terminal online-ness, Two Minutes of Hate has become Unlimited Minutes of Hate. Freed from the demands of the real world, the Hate can now occur any time, anywhere. Right before you go sleep, right when you wake up, while you’re eating, in the crapper, five seconds before you marry.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four Oceania is one of the three totalitarian superstates. In 2025, Oceania is a state mind available to anyone with an internet connection.
And whereas the original Hate used Goldstein to spark its paroxysms, our All-Hate generates Goldsteins by the tens of thousands. Goldsteins for every occasion and every microslice of the population.
And yet no contemporary Goldstein has proven more useful to our nightmare elites than immigrants. Turning immigrants into the Goldstein Double Plus has proven exceptionally useful for elites who wish to distract people from their endless rapacious misdeeds. That peoples all across the planet continue to fall for this hateful nonsense speaks as much to elite indoctrination as it does to the precarity many communities live under because of their elites.
In the United States, where hegemonic predations exceed even the most dystopian benchmarks, the All-Hate against immigrants has unsurprisingly reached Orwellian heights. The Bigger the Brother the Bigger the Goldstein. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the enemies of the Party are always arrested at night, but in our present the All-Hate is more brazen: immigrants are being arrested in court houses, at school, on the street, at airports, and almost always in front of cameras. The horrid part is not that we have a government whose racist xenophobia seems to have no limits but that the majority of the country seems pretty cool with what happens.
Orwell saw all of this. In the first chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four there is this extraordinary passage:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him. first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water. Audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood, then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i don’t suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never—
Then as now too few are kicking a fuss. Too many are full of applause.
And the rest of us watch the child’s arm going up up up and say nothing.
THE END
