Has 1984 finally arrived?

Dan Sernoffsky

It's been nearly a quarter of a century since the world reached, then passed, that watershed year, the year that, in the quarter century preceding it, had carried with it a chilling sense of foreboding as it grew ever closer.

The year was 1984, and the foreboding came from the book that had used that year as its title.

The book “1984” was George Orwell’s look into a bleak future in which the government, Big Brother, controlled everything. Orwell patterned that future after the totalitarianism he saw in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union when he wrote the book in 1948.

When the year 1984 arrived, there was a sigh of relief. There was no Big Brother, at least in the sense of a Hitler or a Stalin. Their ruthless barbarity had been exposed and defeated. But if the grim reality of Orwell’s Oceania had not come to pass, the signs are all too present to deny the grim society he envisioned has become increasingly close to reality.

The New Jersey legislature has unanimously passed a measure to remove the state mandate requiring public schools to teach about Veterans Day, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving Day, a mandate originally designed to foster the “development of a higher spirit of patriotism.”

Patriotism, it appears, is passe, at least as far as the Democrat-controlled New Jersey legislature is concerned, and teaching the real historic roots of our history is something to be avoided. History is politically incorrect.
George Orwell knew that. “He who controls the present,” Orwell said, “controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”

Like Winston Smith, the protagonist in “1984,” we are allowing ourselves to become fellow employees of the Ministry of Truth, where Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Truth. The spirit of political correctness that has become increasingly pervasive throughout society, and especially in academia, has become the controller.

About 200 years ago, a man named Thomas Bowdler decided to undertake the editing of Shakespeare and Edward Gibbons’ “Decline of the Roman Empire.” His intention was, given the time, wholly honorable. In his introduction to his version of Shakespeare’s plays, he wrote “... words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read ...”

Basically, Bowdler took out, or changed, anything he felt was blasphemous or lewd. His efforts were not appreciated, and his name became synonymous with prudish censorship. “Bowdlerizing” became a term of derision.

Today’s Ministry of Truth, however, is engaged in its own bowdlerizing. The use of certain words has become so unacceptable that those words are either being edited out of books, or the books themselves are banned. Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” generally considered one of the greatest American novels, and Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” one of the classics of 20th century American literature, face an uncertain future in high school English classes. “Gone With The Wind,” one of the best movies ever made, has been surreptitiously edited to remove some phraseology, although the phrase which most stunned the country when the movie was released, Clark Gable’s parting retort when he walked out on Vivian Leigh (”Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”), remains intact and now seems positively quaint.

But it is more than just words and phrases. The politically correct have insisted upon viewing history through the prism of their own intolerant, and totalitarian, agenda. Columbus? He was nothing but a rapacious villain who despoiled an Edenic paradise. The Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving? They were nothing but evil conquerors who held a feast to thank the Indians for helping them get through their first year, then turned on them, and killed them. Veterans? They are just part of a war machine that routinely kills civilians and tortures captives.

Somehow, in the rush to establish the doctrine of politically correct Newspeak, what once existed as a distinct American culture has been so denigrated that the history and tradition behind that culture have been perverted into something that can no longer be recognized for what it really was. Like Winston Smith and his Ministry of Truth, today’s politically correct controllers are controlling the future by controlling the past, creating a sense of shame for what was in attempting to shape an acceptance for their agenda.

Big Brother is not a single-entity dictator, he is the chilling embodiment of a what the politically correct, Orwell’s Inner Party, is establishing.

###

Dan Sernoffsky is an award-winning sportswriter and political columnist for The Lebanon Daily News in Lebanon, Pa. A career journalist, he is a graduate of Ottawa University, Ottawa, Ks., and attended graduate school at Central Michigan University. The father of four grown children, he and his wife reside in Lebanon.

dsernoffsky@yahoo.com