Woke: The danger missed by George Orwell’s “1984”

I just finished re-reading George Orwell’s classic cautionary novel, “1984,” and found a new insight, one that I did not have when I first read it in college, in the 1960s.

Orwell’s invented all-powerful dictator was Big Brother. Back then, during the Cold War, the villain clearly was modeled — with his square head, thick black hair and mustache — after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The party apparatus that controlled Orwell’s country of Oceania was communist in everything but name. 

The book was published in post-war 1948, when the red tide of communism was rising around the world, after the Iron Curtain had bisected Europe.

Orwell switched the 48 in 1948 to the 84 in 1984, setting his work an almost unthinkable 40 years in the future.

His feared communist catastrophe did not occur in the West. It was stopped in Europe by the democracies’ solidarity, expressed most forcefully through NATO. 

Orwell’s predicted atomic war in the 1950’s did not happen, and the Right, not the Left, was dominant in 1984. The powerful democracies of the West were all led by conservatives: Great Britain (Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), the United States (President Ronald Reagan),  Germany (Chancellor Helmut Kohl), and Japan (Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone).

Eight years after 1984, the Soviet Union collapsed after inflicting 75 years of misery on the world.

After a brief moment of reform, an independent Russia fell into the hands of the oligarchs and the autocrats, such as Vladimir Putin, with dreams of recreating the “glory” of the old Soviet Union. The old Soviet Union was built on lies, oppression, and murder, as we have just witnessed with the “death in custody” of heroic reformer Alexei Navalny. 

Russia also engages in illegal expansion, as we have seen with Ukraine.

Putin’s ridiculous alibi for the aggression:  He was rescuing Ukrainians from Nazis. For Putin, lies are truth.

In the Oceania of “1984,” citizens learn three great truths, slogans of the party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Everything in Oceania is controlled by four ministries: Truth, Peace, Love, Plenty. Each name represents the opposite of how it acts.

The most important ministry was Truth, which functioned to suppress truth and spread lies.

“Who controls the past,” went the party dogma, “controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.”

It was called “reality control,” and in the new language of Newspeak,” it was doublethink.

Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs and believe both of them.

Such as WAR IS PEACE.

If Big Brother says that is true, then it is true. If you do not accept it as true, you will run afoul of the jack-booted Thought Police, who may haul you to the Ministry of Love.

In today’s world, the Woke are the Thought Police, and they will haul you onto X, where you will be condemned by the Social Justice Warriors. X is the electronic Inquisition. It is the headwaters of cancel culture.

And when the past conflicts with the present in “1984,” inconvenient facts are abolished by sending them down the memory hole. The past is rewritten or deleted to bring it into line with the wishes of the controlling party.

“Reality control” was achieved, in part, by manipulating the language, which is why English had to be replaced.

Once you control language, you control ideas, and that brings me to my new insight about Orwell’s warning.

He was warning about something that did not yet exist — not in 1948, when he published the book, and not even in 1984, where the novel was set.

He was warning about Woke.

Regular readers know this is one of my favorite topics, because I see it as a threat to democracy and to the American way of life. You can see previous columns here and here.

When it started, under its original meaning, Woke was fine.

Merriam-Webster defines it this way: “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”

Awareness is fine. As is a determination to make things better.

But extreme progressives got hold of it and made it excessive, turning it into the illegitimate offspring of Political Correctness and Victimhood. 

When it is used, as many Woke do, to slur all white people as irredeemably racist, and all People of Color as oppressed, a vein that runs deeply on the Left, it sows irreparable harm among Americans.

When young Black and brown children are told — wrongly — that they can’t get ahead in racist Amerikkka, that can destroy their ambition — and their souls.

Woke regards everyone — except straight white Christian males — as victims of oppression.

If you argue that you, as a white person, are not irredeemably racist, that becomes proof that you are irredeemably racist, and you are demonstrating white fragility.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Woke regards all history as an indictment of Western civilization whiteness, and has succeeded in having that course removed from many colleges, along with other classics, and replacing them with queer feminist poets of the 18th Century, gender studies, and Taylor Swift. 

Wokeism has a compulsive dislike of American history, and American institutions, both of which have offered values that were emulated by other nations for more than 200 years.

The Woke see everything through the prism of race, as communists see everything through the prism of class. 

Communists preach they believe in a classless society, but we all know Party members live better than those outside the party. 

In “1984’”   Orwell had three classes — the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the proles, who were common, coarse, ignorant and crude.

In Orwell’s other cautionary tale, “Animal Farm,” after the revolution, all animals were equal.

Except that some animals — the ruling pigs — were more equal than others.

That is an example of doublethink.

The Woke tell us that race is an artificial construct, yet they make race the defining element of all their thinking. Doublethink.

We are told gender is fluid, flowing like a stream.

Deep in our hearts, we know gender is about as fluid as our blood type. Gender may be a stream, but each of us sits in a place on the riverbank — some more masculine, some more feminine. 

Some may choose to have sex with their own type, some may choose the other type. Some choose both. Some choose none.

Key word — choose. It is a decision.

It does not change daily, or hourly.

The Woke tell us men can give birth.

And it is OK for biological men to compete in physical sports against women.

Anyone with a fourth-grade education knows that the former is scientifically impossible, and the latter violates every rule of fairness.

But “fairness” is not “equity,” which attempts to balance the scales by choosing new winners and losers. It is not for nothing the Woke do not believe in meritocracy. 

The Woke demand equal outcomes rather than equal effort. They have a fetish for worshiping multiplying gender identities and pronouns that leave the average American with a migraine.

 Liberal Bill Maher puts it this way. “Woke, which started out as a good thing — woke to injustice, who could be against that? — but it became sort of an eyeroll because they love diversity, except of ideas . . . They have a trail of very bad ideas.”

He goes on. “Five years ago Lincoln was not a controversial figure among liberals. We liked him. Now they take his name off schools and tear down his statues. Abraham Lincoln is not good enough for you?”

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

To the Woke, there is no objective reality. Everything must pass through the filter of race. Science is rejected if it does not conform to the latest lunatic concept dreamed up in the faculty lounge of Brown University.

Speaking of Brown, and scientific unrealities, the Ivy League student newspaper reports that 38% of its students identify as nonbinary, double the amount of just 10 years ago.

The results are just unbelievable — not that the students didn’t self-identify that way, they did. I find it unbelievable they are actually that way.

It is preposterous, but not completely out of line with other findings, showing that non-binary responses by youth are blowing a hole in the roof. 

Back in April, I reported on Gallup polling that recorded an explosion of LGBT responses from Generation Z, who were born between 1997 and 2012. There are 68 million of them.

Gallup found last year that 15.9%, about 1 in 6 Gen Z people, identify as “nonbinary,” which could mean almost anything. This is an unprecedented high number, and completely unbelievable.

By contrast, only 9.1% of Millennials, the previous cohort, were queer-claiming, but that is gigantic when contrasted to the tiny 3.8% of Generation X that preceded the Millennials, a figure that seems in line with traditional estimates that 4-7 percent of the population is gay.

Is it just coincidence that rates of suicide among Gen Z are climbing along with the self-reported rise in “otherness”?

The Woke insist that anyone can select their gender from the big Wheel of Fortune, get the DMV to reverse their gender on their driver’s license, rewrite their Social Security data, white people can identify as Black, and men can menstruate. 

And if you don’t nod and go along with it, you are branded a “hater.”

To stay in the saddle they have invented concepts unknown before, and attacked traditional values. Their language is dripping with words like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, classism, Islamophobia, male toxicity, cissexism, ableism, heterosexism, marginalized, underserved, misgendered, white fragility, white privilege, microaggressions, colorism, veto group, heteronormative, patriarchal.

It’s tough to keep up with Newspeak the new language they are trying to foist on us, and tomorrow we will take a look at that.