Orwell's Children

American Thinker ^ | November 16, 2008 | Bruce Walker

[neverdem]

It has been sixty years since George Orwell wrote his chilling dystopian classic, 1984, and it has been thirty years since we saw the creepiest example of educated and free people willingly walking into a living dystopia.  November 18, 1978, three decades ago, 918 people drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.  Jim Jones, the communist leader of Jonestown, Guyana, had become "Big Brother." Soviet and Communist Chinese propaganda films and condemnations of capitalist and imperialist America blared continually to the subjects of this island of Leftist Hell.

Jonestown ended in mass suicide, but the real horror was that ordinary people, Americans like you and I, had become so decoupled from reality and morality that they could be led to surrender everything, even their lives, intoxicated only with the venom of modern Leftism.  These were Orwell's Children. 

We are drifting into the sort of horrific future he described.  Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown:  Orwell's children -- a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause.

Orwell did not write his book in a vacuum.  1984 describes the Soviet Union (the book describes Stalinist Russia so well so that subjects of that evil empire wondered when Orwell had lived there, though he had just described what he saw from the outside.)  1984 also describes Nazism and every other odious totalitarianism, which its secret police and propaganda machine and atomized subjects.  But Orwell was very much also writing about the democratic western nations.  His book was a warning of what could happen here.   Oceania, the only totalitarian superstate actually descried in 1984, was largely America and the British Empire.

There were specific elements necessary for nations with a heritage of freedom to slide into the most absolute and abject slavery.  These elements existed in Nazi Germany, they existed in Soviet Russia, and they exist in our free democracies today.  What are the characteristics of the Orwellian state?  

Start with God.  He must go.  The great Russian novelists knew this:   "Without God, everything is permitted."  In Oceania, God simply does not exist.  The Nazis bragged that they would raise a generation  "...without ever having heard of the Sermon on the Mount or the Golden Rule, to say nothing of the Ten Commandments."  The Soviet persecuted anyone who followed the God of Jews and Christians.  God is hounded in our world today.  A generation of Orwell's Children are growing up without thinking about God at all or thinking that God is a silly idea cherished by sillier old fogies. 

Truth must go too.  Nazis embraced the "Big Lie."  Soviets denied that honesty, per se, mattered.  In Orwell's Oceania, the Inner Party members learn to even lie to themselves and to hold utterly contradictory beliefs at the same time.  Truth and honesty have little meaning to Orwell's Children in our world.  All truth is relative, all honesty a sham. 

Language must be brought to heel.  The Nazis did this by inventing meaningless words like "Aryan science."  Marxism foisted upon us words like "capitalism," which means nothing at all but which has so infected our minds that we reflexively use this silly nonsense word instead of freedom. Politically correct language is rampant.  We come to view words like "discriminate" as inherently evil, and other words like "viable fetal mass" have replaced the reality of murdered babies.

Image and symbols replace words.  Hitler, whose disciples seldom recalled what Hitler said, always recalled the raw imagery of their leader.  Stalin's portrait was as inescapable in the Soviet Union as the portrait of Big Brother in Oceania.  We live in a word of symbols and images.  Conservatives succeed in books and talk radio, media that deal in words.  Orwell's Children live in the realm of symbols and images. 

The books of the Nazis and Soviets were unreadable tomes like Mein Kampf, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (the two Nazi "masterpieces") or vast empty volumes of Marxist-Leninism.   Is it an accident that the giant who most resisted this evil, Solzhenitsyn, was a devout Christian who mastered the written word better than any stooge of Hitler or the Politburo ever could? 

Immutable oppressors are the final nasty element in dystopia.  Hitler blamed Jews for everything.  Stalin blamed kulaks and his enemies in the party for everything.   Subjects of Orwell's Oceania saw Emmanuel Goldstein as the eternal, immutable enemy of the party. Today there is a drearily predictable list of oppressors.   Christians, men, white people, the "rich" (whatever that is supposed to mean), America, and Israel are oppressors and nothing can ever change that.

Orwell even told us, by name, the professionals who would lead us into the nightmare of 1984:  "sociologists," "teachers," "bureaucrats," "journalists," "professional politicians," "scientists," "trade union organizers," "publicity experts," and "technicians."  (The term "community organizer" was unknown to him.)  Those who enslave were those who taught students, who created the news, who sat in the halls of government power, and who defined official "truth" (at least truth de jour.)

Orwell's Children live among us now, not in tiny numbers in weird Marxist cults like Jim Jones' People Temple, but as leaders of Congress, as the establishment of academia, as the producers of news and entertainment, as the administrators of public schools, as the "experts" in a thousand myriad and odd fields of putative "expertise."   They infatuate our bored children with the only reality and the only diversion that many can find.  They wait for the rest of us to grow older and to die. 

Will these children inherit the earth?  History, not theology, has shown a single defense against the spreading contagion of Orwell's Children.  Solzhenitsyn found God in the godless Gulag.  Michael Power in early 1939 wrote:  "In the Christianity of the German people, the National Socialist has found the one enemy it could not vanquish" - and Christians in Germany, alone, chose to voluntarily seek death before selling their souls to Nazism.

The Jewish refusniks proved indigestible to the brutal Soviet police state.  When all else failed the Jewish people under the Nazis, devout Jews like my wife's mother clung to the Blessed Creator and survived the Holocaust.  God can touch us all.  God can protect us all from evil (not from harm - we all suffer and we all die - but from the much greater danger of the sort of evil Orwell described.) 

Education, science, technological gadgetry, good medical care - all of this can not stop us from sliding into a massive Jonestown, a realized Oceania, a place marked by Dante's grim caution "Abandon hope, all you who enter here."  We are all anchored in belief, but it is what we believe that matters.  We can believe in the lies of Big Brother, which change each day with the needs of the party or we can believe in the truth of a living God.  We can become the children of Orwell or the special creatures of God.  Everything -- our nation, our world, our families, our communities -- flow from that choice.

Bruce Walker is the author of two books:  Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

[Fichori]

Makes me glad I never had to attend publik skooal.

[SeeSharp]

The press never mentions the fact that the Jonestown cult were committed communists, not christians. Here is a video of them singing the Soviet national anthem.

[GOP Poet]

bookmark

[Nextrush]

Jim Jones called himself “socialist” in the last will and testament tape made as the Kool Aid was passed.

He followed Marx and Lenin and had nothing to with religion in general or Christianity in particular. Her makes it clear on that tape.

He hijacked a Christian church to build a Communist commune.

[snarks_when_bored]

Jim Jones was mostly interested in enhancing his chances of bedding women. The same goes for David Koresh and similar weasels...

[WildcatClan]

http://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/1984.pdf

[neverdem]

Thanks for the link.

[IreneE]

Great article but one thing about Jim Jones’ weird blend of Pentecostalism and Marxism... I saw that documentary on Jonestown tonight and was astounded to hear Jones say “I am God.”

This statement reverberates in Jew and Christian alike as it was the first lie told to deceive in the Garden *Ye shall be as gods”

and it will be the last lie told in the book of revelation when the “man of sin” succeeds in fooling most of the world that “he is God”

And he will be blend the worst of Marxism, Stalinism and Nazism because he will be a religious dictator. Yeah, the antichrist.

[FBD]

ping for read later

[liberateUS]

We are drifting into the sort of horrific future he described. Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown: Orwell's children -- a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause.

Remind you of anyone? I can't help seeing the masses in the US and abroad adoring their Messiah.

[MathDoc]

Remind you of anyone? I can't help seeing the masses in the US and abroad adoring their Messiah.

Welcome to the United States of Obama. On the day after January 19,2009, we will all set our clocks back 25 years ... to January 20, 1984. Obama will not just be a stranger who looks out for us, he will be our Big Brother, and he will be watching.

[ElayneJ]

Very interesting. I’ve never heard of this. The press has always portrayed Jonestown as an example of a “religious” cult.

[mitch5501]

Chilling.

I remember seeing a documentary years ago about Russia and people who were around in Stalin's time were being interviewed.

I don't remember much about it but one statement stood out from someone close to Stalin.It was about Stalin and his brutality being the natural and inescapable end of communism.He (Stalin)was the perfect expression of communism taken to the nth degree,as if communism had been dreamt up with him in mind.

The current state of the world in general (and the systems it employs) looks like having a very similar thing happening to it.I suppose eventually there will be one who is the ultimate expression of the worldly system.

Then we'll see just exactly who's god is God.

[livius]

I was living in San Francisco at the time, and Jim Jones had been known as a radical leftist for years. He was the darling of the left in SF, because he had started off as a Pentecostal-type preacher in a black area and had developed a large congregation, mostly of poor, uneducated blacks, but then began to direct his activities to “social justice” causes. Mostly, that consisted of getting government monies for his various endeavors. He was always being honored by left-wing people and organizations in SF.

He picked up whites of the “seeker” type, similar to those who died a few years later in that mass suicide in LA with quarters in their pockets so that they could make phone calls from space when the aliens carried them off. SF at that time was full of them - older women who were divorced and lonely, young mothers without husbands, etc. He seems to have slept with as many of his female followers as he could, and I recall that people commented on this even while he and his cult were still in SF. But that was pretty common for your average guru and was one of the perks, I guess. He built a truly scary cult of personality.

Jim Jones used to publish a newspaper or newsletter that was given out on the streets and contained his ravings, which were exceedingly left wing and more or less in the Reverend Wright mold when they mentioned God at all. But he was wildly popular with all the “progressivists” in the area because he shared all their objectives and could be counted upon to turn out, with his horde of mindless followers, for their causes.

[livius]

Faith in God is the biggest and in fact only threat to total state control. It gives the human being a separate moral identity and a separate allegiance, and this is why the state - when it’s on a rampage, as it is in Communism or Nazism - does everything possible to destroy religious faith. Faith makes one free.

Interestingly, in my mind, one of the biggest threats of Islam is that it is the only truly theocratic system that has ever existed on a large scale, that is, where government is (ideally) carried out by the clergy and where religious law and state law are identical. In other words, it achieves what everybody from the French revolutionaries to Hitler tried, and essentially neutralizes even faith by making the state into the voice of God. Islam’s gradual merging with Communism and extreme left-wing movements is no accident, because Islam is very collectivist and authoritarian by nature, and at the same time gives these totalitarian systems the final thing they need to exert ultimate control, that is, God (or at any rate, a deceptive claim that they represent God). Essentially, of course, they are all Luciferian.

[NewJerseyJoe]

bump for later

[Elsie]

Jim Jones started right here in Indiana - Indianapolis to be exact.

 

We've produced some doozies!

 

 

Charles Manson: We taught him well!

 A string of burglaries of other stores, from one of which he stole a bicycle, ended when he was caught in the act and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile center.

 Manson was sent, at age 13, to the Indiana School for Boys, where, he would later claim, he was brutalized sexually and otherwise.

 

John Dillinger: Never met a bank he didn't like!

 

[Sherman Logan]

Islam is very collectivist and authoritarian by nature

50% accurate.

Islam is authoritarian. It is not collectivist, as Mohammed explicitly approves the institutions of private property, profit, etc.

In a truly authoritarian state, of course, the individual has no rights as against the state, so private property has no meaning once you incur the wrath of the ruler. Only those who fly below the radar are safe. A major reason why in traditional Muslim societies one hides rather than displays one's wealth.