2084? Is Trump the one who Takes us into the Age of Big Brother? TOM ENGELHARDT
I, Winston Smith… I
mean, Tom Engelhardt… have not just been reading a dystopian novel, but, it
seems, living one - and I suspect I’ve been living one all my life.
Yes, I recently reread
George Orwell’s classic 1949 novel, 1984. In it, Winston Smith, a secret opponent of the
totalitarian world of Oceania, one of three great imperial superpowers left on
planet Earth, goes down for the count at the hands of Big Brother. It was
perhaps my third time reading it in my 75 years on this planet.
Since I was a kid,
I’ve always had a certain fascination for dystopian fiction. It started, I
think, with War of the Worlds, that ur-alien-invasion-from-outer-space
novel in which Martians land in southern England and begin tearing London
apart. Its author, H.G. Wells, wrote it at the end of the nineteenth century,
evidently to give his English readers a sense of what it might have felt like to be living in Tasmania, the island off the
coast of Australia, and have the equivalent of Martians — the British, as it
happened — appear in your world and begin to destroy it (and your culture with
it).
I can remember, at
perhaps age 13, reading that book under the covers by flashlight when I was
supposed to be asleep; I can remember, that is, being all alone, chilled (and
thrilled) to the bone by Wells’ grim vision of civilizational destruction. To
put this in context: in 1957, I would already have known that I was living in a
world of potential civilizational destruction and that the Martians were here.
They were then called the Russians, the Ruskies, the Commies, the Reds. I would
only later grasp that we (or we, too) were Martians on this planet.
The world I inhabited was, of course, a post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki one. I was born on July 20, 1944, just a year and a few days before my country dropped atomic bombs on those two Japanese cities, devastating them in blasts of a kind never before experienced and killing more than 200,000people. .. read more:
https://www.juancole.com/2019/08/trump-takes-brother.html
