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[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
On the first Friday in December, a production of 1984 is reserved for black people.
It’s only fair since a few weeks earlier the show about a totalitarian dystopia had been reserved for ‘LGBTQIA+’ attendees at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California.
George Orwell’s masterpiece depiction of Communist totalitarianism is more popular than ever and fewer than ever seem to understand it. A feminist retelling of the book, ‘Julia’ was recently approved by the Orwell Estate (the author had no biological children) which was last seen handing out copyright violations to people printing ‘1984’ on their t-shirts. Like calling someone ‘Hitler’, referencing Orwell and 1984 has become slang for something someone doesn’t like.
And often it’s the totalitarians who accuse their critics of ‘Orwellianism’.
After Nina Jankowicz, the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Disinformation Governance Board’, a real-life Ministry of Truth institution, had to resign, an interview with her was headlined “one woman’s Orwellian experience with disinformation”.
When the 5th Circuit Court banned the government from telling tech companies whom to censor, Matt Schruers, the president of the CCIA, a trade industry group that includes Google, Amazon and Facebook, argued that, “there’s nothing more Orwellian than having the government demand that certain viewpoints are distributed in the name of free expression.”
Censorship had become speech and speech censorship. Preventing the government from censoring the public was actually ‘Orwellian’ while repression was the true freedom.
The black-only and gay-only nights of 1984 on a Berkeley stage show where it all went wrong.
1984 at the Aurora Theatre presumptuously lists George Orwell as a collaborator when his only contribution to the production would have been causing minor earthquakes by rolling in his grave. While the original novel is timeless, the stage production is already badly dated by its origins as a protest against the Iraq War by Michael Gene Sullivan, a director at the African-American Shakespeare Festival and an actor and blogger “committed to developing theatre of social and economic justice.” That sounds like something out of Oceania.
On his Instagram page, Sullivan can be seen posing in a t-shirt with a red star and ‘Revolution’ on it, under a keffiyah draped around his neck, while warning that access to his show requires “proof of vaccination”. If there were an award for fitting the most signifiers of totalitarianism in one short video clip, the writer of the stage version of 1984 would have a lock on it.
The stage production is a torture session. Literally. Sullivan’s big idea was to jettison most of the novel’s focus on life in a totalitarian society and instead takes place while Winston Smith is being tortured on stage with accompanying flashbacks acted out by his torturers.
Appropriately enough, 1984 isn’t actually 1984. Written in 2003, Sullivan was obsessed with the idea of the wrongness of waterboarding Islamic terrorists in Gitmo. The production was taken up by Tim Robbins, then a fixture of the anti-war movement, and became an anti-Bush rallying cry. Like so much of the anti-Bush culture, there’s been much less interest in 1984 since then.
Sullivan, who is currently decorating his Instagram with pro-terrorist and anti-Israel protests, wanted to make 1984 about denouncing the interrogators of Al Qaeda terrorists as “these people who were the torturers were walking amongst us. That might be the person you’re on the bus next to. And they were told that they were good Americans. So I wanted to make ‘1984’ not just about Big Brother, but really about the society that accepts this.”
Winston Smith has been rebooted as Osama bin Laden. And America is Oceania.
In the un-Orwellian version of 1984, the totalitarians who actually torture people are the good guys while the democracy that resists them are the bad guys. That’s why in an age when the entire cast of 1776 have been recast as multi-racial women, including a black Ben Franklin, the cast of 1984 consists of white and Latino actors. The staging goes so far as to try to make the audience complicit in the torture session to deepen the idea that all of America is guilty.
But in a country, state and city run by leftists, who is Big Brother? It’s a question that the distorted staging of 1984 suffers from as much as the attempts to make Google or Nina Jankowicz into the victims of a Big Brother determined to stop them from abusing power.
If ‘BIPOC and all-LGBTQ evenings of a play in defense of Islamic terrorists, and the censorship of political dissent are the new freedom, who is torturing whom exactly?
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men,” George Orwell famously observed. He also wrote in ‘Politics and the English Language’ that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” 1984 and Animal Farm are so effective because they are written in clear and simple language that immerses the reader in its world.
1984 the stage production is insincere for exactly that reason. It breaks up a straightforward narrative into flashbacks and then fragments the whole thing even more by having Winston’s interrogators act out scenes from his past in the style of ‘Man of La Mancha’ that here serves no purpose except to confuse the core message of the dishonesty of living a life under tyranny.
In the novel, totalitarian language is complex, it’s closely regulated by the government and constantly changing because clarity might allow people to figure out what is really going on.
A totalitarian movement that wants to pass off government censorship as freedom and racial segregation as liberation needs to complicate things because otherwise people might figure out what is really going on. Such a movement might appropriate 1984, not to spread its message, but to suppress it by replacing signal with noise until no one understands what’s going on.
Throw up a feminist retelling of 1984 and a stage production which reimagines 1984 as a commentary on the wrongness of fighting modern day fascism, and it becomes easier to describe the head of the Disinformation Governance Board losing her job because the people she wanted to censor fought back as a victim of ‘Orwellianism’.
Totalitarians lie and they make language itself into a lie. Their purpose in confusing meaning is to invert the truth so that slavery becomes freedom and lies become truth.
After taking part in pro-terrorist rallies, Michael Gene Sullivan argued that, “Republicans are hoping that Jewish Americans will forget those deep ties to Nazism, and will instead focus on the fact that some Democrats disagree with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians”.
Supporters of the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust by Hamas, which emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement backed and funded by the Nazis, are just expressing a mere “disagreement” while those who oppose the mass murder of Jews are the real Nazis.
How do you get to the place where slavery is freedom, lies are truth, Osama is Winston and Jews are the Nazis? Inversion goes beyond bias or distortion to reframe the argument so that everything is backward. Racism becomes anti-racism and men are the victims of sexism for not being allowed to be women. Flip the perpetrators and the victims, and government censorship becomes speech. Inversion refuses all arguments by eliminating the original definitions.
Like replacing 1984 with a racially segregated restaging that carries the opposite message.
1984 anticipated a world in which the most fundamental human concepts could not even be articulated because the words for no them no longer existed. The Left is trying to create that world, as it was trying to do in Orwell’s day, no longer by renaming things, but by replacing them. Men are the new women, Muslims are the new Jews and government censors are the new oppressed. Dissenting speech is violence, but leftist violence is speech.
This ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ approach to politics and culture has seen a mass replacement of works, with classic books being reedited, films and TV series being replaced with sequels and prequels that eliminate them from existence, and of people and ideas who are swapped out. Outwardly from a far distance the culture may look similar enough, but peer at it more closely and it’s as if the whole thing had been replaced by aliens or ChatPT.
Things with familiar names have come to carry the opposite meanings that they once did. Every value, belief and piece of art has either been inverted or soon will be. Even 1984.
You can still go see a cautionary warning about totalitarianism on stage, just make sure you have the right skin color and sexuality. Leave your ‘wrongthink’ at home and remember that Big Brother is always watching. But he’s not Big Brother anymore, now he’s Big Victim.
The Orwell estate doesn’t like T-shirts with “1984” printed on them? How do they know the T-shirts aren’t referring to the Paul McCartney and Wings song? Besides, the real tile of Orwell’s masterpiece is “Nineteen Eighty Four.” “1984” is just a way for us to do less typing, although some editions of the book have the numbers instead of letters now.
I liked the shirt that reads “Make Orwell fiction again.”
1984 is a great album by Van Halen….
Panama is my favorite old video from back in my “wasting-time-watching-MTV-days.
David Lee Roth cracked me up
Yeah, I forgot about that! I guess the snobs at the Orwell estate don’t like Van Halen or Paul McCartney and wings.
….”referencing Orwell and 1984 has become slang for something someone doesn’t like.”
That’s basically what Orwell said about the word fascism: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ So you’re in good company.
I began reading this piece with a grin on my face as Dan detailed the mental gymnastics of the left attempting to turn big brother into a victim. But as I read further the smile on my face gave way to deep concern and fear. The oppressor /oppressed narrative has been used by tyrants throughout history to control populations and remove opposition. I’m clearer now on the ability of totalitarians to gin up hatred by deception, fear and confusion. Hitler, Mao, Stalin and now Marxists,Democrats, Islam and dictators everywhere. Hamas supporters and climate fanatics throughout the world should be a wake up call to those still clinging to reality.
So true, so damned true.
I used to wonder how the Germans could “allow” a dude like Hitler into power.
Now it is very clear.
We suffer a tyranny of the ignorant because those who do not learn from history will shortly be facing its repeat. The fools demonstrating are literally the useful idiots of people like Soros, Zuckerberg, Gates, our media, and too many in our Congress.
A stage show of 1984 for blacks only and an “African-American” Shakespeare festival? Boy there must be a LOT of empty seats at those. There might as well be black only science exhibitions, math festivals, poetry readings and job fairs. Just kidding?
“Nineteen Eighty Four” was written as a literary warning but the totalitarian minded lefties use it as a primer. I bet it’s more popular than ever……with all the wrong people, though.
It would seem so Jeff. And Animal Farm will become a training manual. Can you imagine these two books on a shelf alongside Mein Kampf.
Sadly, I can imagine that. And “The Little Red Book” by Chairman Mao Tse Bung, “Rules For Radicals” by Asshole Alinsky, “A People’s History of the United States by Coward Zinn or any of the trash scrawled by Noam Coadsky.
Another brilliant dissection of the deep crevices of the left-wing corrupted mind .they could even twist and turn one of the great novel of the 20th century and make you believe what is not there
Well, leave it to their devices ,we know one thing about their interpretation of Orwell
. They reinforce his statement. That is.,,, “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever
Thank you, Daniel for your deep thinking, and your clear thinking, No one does it better and more often.
Thank you. This is what the Left does with everything from our institutions to our values to our culture even to biology, it hijacks it and inverts it.
You mean I can’t be a pretty, pretty girl?
I heard that Orwell statement rephrased as, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Birkenstock stamping on a human face – forever.”
Big Brother runs the DNC and the Globalists WEF,CFR and the UN as well
Ronna too is a Big Brother.
Yeah, she’s as big a RINO as Spit Romney and Paul Rino. Bigger, because she’s a fat slob.
Under capitalism, man exploits man.
The miracle of communism is its complete reversal of this phenomenon.
Question, sir: How is a system wherein man exploits man is reversed to be man exploits man and still considered to be reversed?
The reversal of communism is that the state exploits man, i.e., the state takes all the work of men (as in men and women), aka, everyone. The individual owns nothing.
Sid is using sarcastic humor, as he usually does 🙂
“ But in a country, state and city run by leftists, who is Big Brother?”
He’s in our pocket and we carry him around everywhere.
Turn off Siri and the Goolag equivalent and you’ll have half a chance.
Big Victim! I love it, that is the perfect phrase for today’s woke junk.
This is how gold is turned into straw.
Douchebagocrats have the Midass touch. Everything they touch turns to shit.
You knew that the inversion of reality we’re living through was nearly complete when the Left excoriated the Federal District Court’s opinion in the Missouri case as a violation the government’s (asserted) First Amendment right to demand of social media that they censor citizen’s posts. I think that was the argument of Lawrence Tribe who apparently doesn’t understand that the Constitution is intended to limit government acts notwithstanding that he is a law professor at Harvard.
Taking a book such as 1984 or The Animal Farm and altering the intent of the author is just another form of rewriting history. I’ve seen it for years. Former, very popular magazines dedicated to learning have turned to indoctrination of leftist causes. There doesn’t seem to be many originals anymore, everything is a rehash of previously great stuff. Generally the results is a poorly done piece of propaganda.
There are exceptions, FPM, Jihad Watch, Geller Report, etc.
Oh yeah! The Point.
Science now means dogma rather than inquiry, tolerance and inclusion means persecuting and excluding people, learning now means indoctrination, etc..
Freedom always means slavery to totalitarians
Yes, I remember when “National Geographic” and “Scientific American” were good magazines instead of left-wing indoctrination rags that have global climate warming change lies in most every article, along with the rest of the usual left-wing propaganda points in EVERY article.
The only magazines I can think of which are still good are “Military History,” “Military Heritage,” “Newsmax” and “Commentary Magazine.”
True, except Newsmax. I gave them up when the owner publicly announced he had donated $1,000,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative Foundation because, he said, he admired Bill Clinton so much. Imv, he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I didn’t know that. I haven’t read any magazine in over 16 years, to be honest. The current editor of the magazine is on the Newsmax TV Network sometimes. He seems cool.
Who’s the Billdo Clinton groupie? Christopher Ruddy or Richard Scaife?
Ah, I just looked it up and both of them are Billdo’s buddies to this day and even praised the Hildebeast. Ruddy also wrote an op Ed in praise of Alzheimer Joe for “”the rollout” of COVID vaccines he “inherited” “from President Donald Trump.”
DERP.
I’m surprised the Newsmax network is so good, seeing as how Billdo’s pal, Ruddy, is the CEO. I guess he doesn’t involve himself in the programming and choice of hosts much, THANK GOD.
Thanks Jeff. My favorite was Nat. Geo. Mag. My Father and Grandfather belonged to the Nat. Geo. Society so I had access to them dating back to 1905. My dad kept all of them and when he died (30 years ago) my Mom tried to donate them to School libraries, but no takers. Finally the City Library took them.
Cool. Those old editions were great. They had them at my little local library when I was a kid.The Arlington Library, built in 1909. I loved that place as a kid and it was mainly used by people in the neighborhood so it was never crowded. I used to look up photos of topless Balinese chicks and African ones. The articles were high quality back then.
The wheels are coming off. Facility operators in charge.
https://youtu.be/BrKPberhTIs?si=GAMsY_1ums3NjqDL&t=272
Whoever down voted that video approves of trannies raping minor girls. You sicko.
INVERSIONISM … the new Marxism -DFK
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[How do you get to the place where slavery is freedom, lies are truth, Osama is Winston and Jews are the Nazis? Inversion goes beyond bias or distortion to reframe the argument so that everything is backward. Racism becomes anti-racism and men are the victims of sexism for not being allowed to be women. Flip the perpetrators and the victims, and government censorship becomes speech. Inversion refuses all arguments by eliminating the original definitions]