Has Orwell's 1984 Become Reality?
Has Orwell's 1984 Become Reality?
Brownstone Institute
Has Orwell’s 1984 Become Reality? ⋆ Brownstone Institute
It may seem like a rhetorical question to ask whether the narrative of Nineteen Eighty-Four, has left its pages and settled over reality.
To some readers it may seem like a rhetorical question to ask whether the narrative of George Orwell’s dystopian novel,
📄.pdf
(or 1984), first published in Britain in 1949, has somehow left its pages and settled, like an ominous miasma, over the contours of social reality. Yet, closer inspection – which means avoiding compromised mainstream news outlets – discloses a disquieting state of affairs.
Everywhere we look in Western countries, from the United Kingdom, through Europe to America (and even
The People's Voice
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, whose ‘Orwellian digital ID system’ was lavishly praised by British prime minister Keir Starmer recently), what meets the eye is a set of social conditions exhibiting varying stages of precisely the no-longer-fictional totalitarian state depicted by Orwell in 1984. Needless to stress, this constitutes a warning against totalitarianism with its unapologetic manipulation of information and mass surveillance.
I am by no means the first person to perceive the ominous contours of Orwell’s nightmarish vision taking shape before our very eyes. Back in 2023 Jack Watson did, too, when he
The Daily Sceptic
Orwell's Dystopian Vision is Coming True – The Daily Sceptic
14 year-old Jack Watson writes that sometimes he wishes Orwell did not write 1984, as it seems to have become a manual and not just a novel.
(among other things):
Thoughtcrime is another of Orwell’s conjectures that has come true. When I first read 1984, I would never have thought that this made up word would be taken seriously; nobody should have the right to ask what you are thinking. Obviously, nobody can read your mind and surely you could not be arrested simply for thinking? However, I was dead wrong.
The New Conservative
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce: the ‘crime’ of silent prayer - The New Conservative
In December 2022, a charity worker, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested and charged on four counts after she told the police that she ‘might’ be...
recently for silently praying in her head and, extraordinarily, prosecutors were asked to provide evidence of her ‘thoughtcrime.’ Needless to say, they did not have any. But knowing that we can now be accused of, essentially, thinking the wrong thoughts is a worrying development. Freedom of speech is already under threat, but this goes beyond free speech. This is about free thought. Everybody should have a right to think what they want, and they should not feel obliged or forced to express certain beliefs or only think certain thoughts.
Most people would know that totalitarianism is not a desirable social or political set of circumstances. Even the word sounds ominous, but that is probably only to those who already know what it denotes. I have written on it
Brownstone Institute
Why Totalitarianism Can Never Be Total ⋆ Brownstone Institute
We are able to resist these would-be dictators in so far as we instantiate new, beginnings by rupturing fascist, totalitarian practices.
, but it is now more relevant than ever. We should remind ourselves what Orwell wrote in that uncannily premonitory novel.
Considering the rapidly expanding and intensifying, electronically mediated strategies of surveillance being implemented globally – no doubt aimed at inculcating in citizens a subliminal awareness that privacy is fast becoming but a distant memory – the following excerpt from Orwell’s text strikes one as disturbingly prophetic, considering the time it was written (1984, Free Planet e-book, p.5):
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Before adducing compelling instances of the contemporary, real-world surveillance equivalents of 1984’s ‘telescreen,’ which have become sufficiently ‘normal’ to be accepted without much in the form of protest, and to refresh your memory further, here’s Hannah Arendt, in
Internet Archive
Hannah Arendt The Origins Of Totalitarianism : Hannah Arendt : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
PART ONE: ANTISEMITISM Chapter ONE: Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense 3 TWO: The Jews, the Nation-State, and the Birth ofAntisemitism 11 I...
(New edition, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich 1979, p. 438):
Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other. The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only ‘freedom’ would consist in ‘preserving the species.’
As Italian thinker Giorgio
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363166551_Beyond_Agamben's_'Homo_Sacer'_The_'pandemic'_as_final_reduction_of_humanity_to_'bare_life
would say: totalitarianism reduces every singular human being to ‘bare life;’ nothing more, and after having been subjected to its mind-numbing techniques for a certain time, people start acting accordingly, as if they lack the capacity to manifest their natality (unique, singular birth) and plurality (the fact that all people are singular and irreplaceable). The final blow to our humanity comes when totalitarian rule’s coup de grȃce is delivered (Arendt 1979, quoting David Rousseton conditions in Nazi concentration camps,m p. 451):
The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man. This is done in the main by making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible: ‘How many people here still believe that a protest has even historic importance? This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no longer be postponed is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond one’s own death. In order to be successful, a gesture must have social meaning…’
Surveying the present social scene globally against this backdrop yields interesting, albeit disturbing results. For example, Niamh Harris
The People's Voice
Globalists Are Desperate To 'Erect Totalitarian Surveillance State' Before Too Many People Wake Up
German MEP Christine Anderson and British politician Nigel Farage are both warning that there is now a desperate push to roll out 15 minute cities,...
that German MEP Christine Anderson and British politician Nigel Farage have both warned that globalists are frantically trying to establish a fully fledged surveillance state ‘before too many people wake up’ to this state of affairs. Anderson – whose caution is echoed by Farage – points to the irony that people are waking up precisely because globalist efforts to hasten the installation of a totalitarian surveillance state are accelerating and becoming conspicuous. Hence, the more the process is ramped up, the louder critical voices become (and protests are likely to occur), and correlatively, the more anxious the neo-fascists become, to close the net around citizens of the world. She warns that:
‘Digital identity [is] not so your life is easier. It’s so government has total control over you.’
‘Digital currency [is] the crème de la crème of all control mechanisms…What do you think is going to happen the next time you refuse to take an mRNA shot? With the flip of a switch, they just cancel your account. You cannot buy food anymore. You cannot do anything anymore.’
Given these warnings, a case in point concerns well-known globalist Tony
The People's Voice
Tony Blair Praises 'Amazing Benefits' Of Merging Digital ID With Facial Recognition & AI
Tony Blair has been praising the “amazing benefits” of merging digital IDs, facial recognition, and Artificial intelligence (AI) claiming it wi...
(quoted from Wide Awake Media on X):
‘Facial recognition can now spot suspects in real time from live video…[It] helps identify suspects quickly in busy places like train stations and events.’ ‘AI will go even further—spotting crime patterns, guiding patrols and streamlining decisions…This is where technology, like digital ID, becomes critical.’
Wide Awake Media’s laconic comment on Blair’s words (alluding to the already dystopian surveillance practices in the United Kingdom) says it all: ‘Imagine this kind of system in the hands of a government that imprisons people for memes and jokes.’
It requires no genius to grasp that these examples of attempts at furthering the totalitarian agenda of complete surveillance, coupled with inescapable control mechanisms such as CBDCs, are rooted in the structural dynamics of the (no-longer-fictional) society of Big Brother, as evocatively depicted by Orwell more than 75 years ago. Except that – given the advent of the network society of electronically mediated actions and behaviour – such surveillance and control are at a level of efficiency and pervasiveness that Big Brother could only dream of. This is unmistakable when one peruses reports such as
The Daily Sceptic
How the Race Relations Act Turned Britain into a Totalitarian Anti-Fascist Nineteen Eighty-Four – The Daily Sceptic
Speech crimes, thoughtcrime, two-tier justice. If the activities of the UK state today are like a Socialist Workers Party boot stamping on a human ...
one, which alerts one to the fact that, in Britain today, surveillance technology enables the neo-fascist authorities to identify, arrest, and imprison individuals for so-called ‘crimes’ which echo the thoughtcrimes of Orwell’s 1984, except that, by comparison, they seem trivial to the nth degree. As the article in question states,
Following a number of high-profile arrests for speech-related crimes, Britain is seen as far as the White House as a realm of tinpot, two-tier woke tyranny, where authors of errant tweets can expect to spend more time in prison than sex pests and paedophiles and which commentators and comedians should avoid — lest they be whisked straight from arrivals to a holding cell having offended Left-wing orthodoxies.
Lucy Connolly, a mother and childminder who received a 31-month prison sentence for ‘inciting racial hatred’ over a single (quickly deleted) tweet posted in the wake of the
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30 arrests per day for online speech offences, with many of these treated far more seriously than violent, sexual, or acquisitive crimes. Connolly’s was one of 44 convictions for ‘stirring up racial hatred’ last year…
Those, like Tony Blair, who are trying their best to justify surveillance as being ‘beneficial,’ even go as far as employing Orwell’s terminology to assuage the fears of the public who would be at the receiving end of such vaunted ‘protection.’ In this vein, in 2022 outgoing mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, was
The People's Voice
NYC Mayor Says You Will Learn To Love the Surveillance State: 'Big Brother is Protecting You'
Learn to love your surveillance overlords, says Adams
as claiming that:
Americans will learn to love the Chinese-style surveillance state, according to New York City Democrat Mayor Eric Adams who responded to criticism over increasing the use of facial recognition technology by declaring, ‘Big Brother is protecting you!’
Adams made the disturbing comments in response to elected officials who expressed concerns that using such technology is turning society into an authoritarian surveillance state.
Not everyone was enamoured of the mayor’s reassurance, however:
Albert Fox Cahn, the head of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, responded by warning that facial recognition technology would be weaponized to crack down on ‘every aspect of dissent’ in the city.
‘These are technologies that would be chilling in anyone’s hands. But to give an agency with such a horrifying record of surveillance abuse even more power, at a time when they face dwindling oversight, is a recipe for disaster,’ he said.
Part of the problem faced by freedom-loving citizens everywhere is the uncritical acceptance by many – although by no means all – people, that constantly changing technology is somehow self-justifying. It is not, as a simple thought-experiment confirms. If someone tells you that, compared to its 18th-century French Revolution precursor, today there is a much more efficient, ‘electronic guillotine’ available, which terminates a person’s life quickly, humanely, and painlessly, and could solve the overpopulation problem by euthanising people over 60 years of age, should you agree?
Of course not. For one thing, older people have the same right to life as anyone else, and many of one’s most productive, and enjoyable years come after 60. Hence, there is absolutely no ground for accepting or justifying new technology as ‘beneficial,’ simply because it is supposedly ‘more efficient.’
Yet, everyone of globalist persuasion seems to believe that, to persuade the ‘sheeple’ to enter the corral of digital imprisonment, all they need to do is to glorify the technology involved – lying through their teeth, of course. But lest I forget, according to the 1984 playbook, which all and sundry among the globalist neo-fascists seem to have adopted (stupidly believing that no one would notice), everything we have been taught in the world that preceded the attempt to establish their vaunted New World Order, has been turned on its head, so that ‘falsehood’ (lying) has now become ‘truth.’ If this sounds far-fetched, take a look at the globalists’ disingenuous pronouncements through the lens of 1984 (p. 6):
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The ‘Newspeak’ of today does exactly the
The Daily Sceptic
Trudeau's Dystopian Online Harms Act Makes Margaret Atwood and George Orwell Look Like Amateurs – The Daily Sceptic
Amidst some stiff competition, perhaps the most ill-conceived piece of anti-free speech legislation currently being pushed through in the Western w...
, as anyone who frequents the alternative media easily discovers.
Hence, if those among us who cherish our freedoms wish to preserve them, we had better be wide awake to any and all the continuing attempts to impose terminal limitations, or should I say, permanent termination, on them, all in the name of putative ‘benefits, safety, and convenience.’
If we don’t, we shall have only ourselves to blame if legislators of various stripes succeed in imposing them on us by stealth.
Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge
Zero Hedge
Thu, 12/18/2025 - 16:20
Has Orwell's 1984 Become Reality? | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
NBC reports 
, "Israeli officials have grown increasingly concerned that Iran is expanding production of its ballistic missile program, which was damaged by Israeli military strikes earlier this year, and are preparing to brief President Donald Trump about options for attacking it again, according to a person with direct knowledge of the plans and four former U.S. officials briefed on the plans."
"Israeli officials also are concerned that Iran is reconstituting nuclear enrichment sites the U.S. bombed in June, the sources said," the report continues. "But, they added, the officials view Iran’s efforts to rebuild facilities where they produce the ballistic missiles and to repair its crippled air defense systems as more immediate concerns."
But the timing of potential new Pentagon action against Iran couldn't be worse, given the concentration of American military assets currently in the southern Caribbean at a moment the US is threating regime change actions against Venezuela's President Maduro and cartels in Latin America.
The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group was even recently moved from the Mediterranean, where it was closer to the Middle East and CENTCOM region, to join operations threatening Venezuela in the Caribbean.
However, the Pentagon has just this week engaged in new 'counter ISIS' strikes in Syria, and so presumably would have enough or limited support assets in the region if it chose to assist with some new Israeli anti-Iran operation.
Still, all of these unprovoked attacks on foreign powers and adventurism abroad could grow increasingly unpopular with the American people, and certainly there's a large chunk of the MAGA base which is dead set against the US entering new wars and conflicts, also at a time the Ukraine proxy war shows no signs of slowing.
The Trump administration is still standing by its assessment that Iran's nuclear capabilities have been destroyed. "The International Atomic Energy Agency and Iranian government corroborated the United States government’s assessment that Operation Midnight Hammer totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear capabilities," White House spokesperson Anna Kelly has said in a statement.
There's widespread acknowledgement that Iran's ballistic missile capability is among the most advanced in the broader region, and that it did real damage against Israel in the June war:
Iran has not just developed one of the most advanced ICBMs in the world
(New video on the Qaem ICBM has just been released on the DDD YT-Channel)
➡️ Israeli sources now claim that Iran was close to mastering what no other country has ever masted:
Purse-Fusion nuclear weapons… 
— Patarames (@Pataramesh) 
She further warned: "As President Trump has said, if Iran pursued a nuclear weapon, that site would be attacked and would be wiped out before they even got close." So while Trump might be open to mulling new action, the official US stance is that there's no need to at this point.
Sat, 12/20/2025 - 13:25
The Wall Street Journal reports that a U.S. military official said Friday that dozens of targets were being struck by U.S. F-15 and A-10 warplanes, Apache attack helicopters and Himars rockets.
The operation is being dubbed “Hawkeye Strike” in honor of the Iowa National Guard soldiers who were killed and wounded in an ambush the Trump administration has blamed on ISIS.
The gunman that ambushed the Americans was killed in the attack.
But President Trump on Sunday vowed to take military action against the group.
“There will be a lot of damage done to the people that did it. They got the person, the individual person, but there will be big damage done,” Trump said at the time.
Syrian authorities last week blamed the ambush on a member of Syria’s security forces who they said was set to be fired for holding extremist views.
* * *
Syria is celebrating after President Trump 
Sanctions have been on Syria going all the way back to the 1970s, with more piled on over the decades, especially after 2011, and then the most far-reaching, the Caesar sanctions, took effect in 2019 at a time that Assad was winning the war.
Coupled with the sanctions was a long-running CIA and Gulf-spearheaded proxy war, which flooded jihadist groups with weapons and cash - all for the sake of eventually installing a more pliant client ruler.
Now, one year after Washington accomplished its regime change, and with Bashar al-Assad in Moscow, has Washington chosen to remove the sanctions.
As Beirut-based 
Shellenberger pointed out that Musk’s fine came while European governments are demanding backdoor access to all private text messages (under the pretense of combatting the transmission of child pornography) and creating a so-called “Democracy Shield” of government-funded “fact-checkers” that enables “censorship by proxy.” He also noted that the European Commission announced the fine to coincide with the rollout of the Trump administration’s new 
