George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Is Upon Us

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command"-- George Orwell

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Credit: Junaidrao@flickr.com

On the eve of historical impeachment hearings against Donald Trump, many believe that we are living through times that can be described as the fulfillment of George Orwell’s Dystopia.

We seem to be living Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in a bizarre Orwellian Trumpian Oceania, where up is down, down is up, untruth is truth, life imitates satire and alternative facts replace real facts.

Terms such as “Big Brother” (Guess who that might be ), “Ministry of Truth” (a ministry of 13,000+ false or misleading claims), “Memory Hole” (a Trump era “codeword level” computer system), “Newspeak” and “Doublethink” (as practiced and brought to perfection at Fox News and by Big Brother, respectively) and “Room 101” (the Cabinet Room where Cabinet members are tortured until they agree that “2 + 2 = 5”) are taking center stage.

And let us not forget the increasing popularity (and applicability, during the next few days) of Orwell quotes such as:

• “In a time of universal deceit-telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

• “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

• “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

• “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

• “Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

• “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

Eric Arthur Blair (“George Orwell”) also penned poetry in his early years, most of the poems expressing social concerns. While this author likes his poems, especially “Sometimes in The Middle Autumn Days,” some experts claim, “… compared with Orwell, the essayist, journalist and novelist, Orwell the poet is an unremarkable figure.”

It would have been interesting had Orwell committed some of his later thoughts and concerns to poetry.

Alas, Orwell is no longer with us, but we do have people who fight the Trumpian Doublethink in rhyme form with facts that have been prevented from falling into that infamous Memory Hole.

Here’s a friend’s “Did Trump Have a ‘Perfect Call’?” — a theme that will be central to the upcoming impeachment hearings.

Let’s look back just a little before that “perfect call”
Trump denies any Ukraine inappropriate contacts or actions at all
But wasn’t Manafort his campaign manager back in time?
He and his partner Rick Gates are in prison for Ukraine related crime!

Now Giuliani is Trump’s private attorney and loyal to his line
He has two Ukrainian-connected colleagues currently indicted for crimes
The two: Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were arrested while trying to flee
And what do we see? : An Oval Office photo of them with Rudy and Donald T.

Then there is Dmytro Firtash of Chicago money laundering fame to see
He’s held under bail in Austria, where Parnas and Fruman tried to flee
Enter Viktor Shokin, former Ukrainian Prosecutor, who was fired in 2016
Declared corrupt by the IMF: he and friend Firtash were clearly not clean

It gets interesting with “Trump-supporting” lawyers who now represent Firtash
Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing: this Trump connection won’t be the last
Now John Dowd, former Trump attorney, represents Parnas
And who else? why our own Rudy Giuliani: who picked him quick as a flash

Now if the above sounds like an example of bizarre intermarriage
It certainly could and also one of likely justice miscarriage
What can be more ironic than Trump claiming: “I’m just fighting corruption”
With his tainted history and associates with shady Ukrainian connections

While Trump supporters fall over themselves to come up with explanations
Some so absurd that they are simply laughing stocks in our nation
Truth is never simple nor pure: certainly not determined by a partisan vote
With Trump’s slippery history: there’s no mystery: it’s guilty, I’ll note

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