Paris Peace Accords 23 Oct. 1991

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Orwell’s “1984” and Trump’s America






Trump’s lies, and his urge to tell them, are pure Big Brother, however oafish their articulation.

newyorker.com|By Adam Gopnik
[excerpt]


And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.

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