By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
The trailer for ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ begins
with a heavy voiceover declaring, “when I sit down to write a book, I
write it because there is some lie that I want to expose”.
Two minutes later there is a photo of a BLM activist holding up an “I can’t breathe” sign.
Such
unintentional irony pervades a documentary which claims that what
George Orwell really wanted to warn about in ‘1984’ were the dangers of
free speech and political dissent.
Not Communism.
An
Orwell documentary that treats ‘misinformation’ as the sort of threat
that Orwell was warning about, rather than an Orwellian term for
demonizing speech and providing a pretext for government propaganda and
censorship of the kind that we see in ‘1984’, has lost the plot.
But ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ has an entirely different plot aimed at turning Orwell into Big Brother.
‘ORWELL
2+2=5′ was written and directed by Raoul Peck: a Haitian radical
activist who made a movie celebrating Communist mass murderer Patrice
Lumumba. George Orwell struggled against Soviet Communism. Peck made a
hero out of the mass murderer whose name was on the Patrice Lumumba
Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow: the Soviet Union’s training
ground for third world dictators and terrorists including Sandinista
dictator Daniel Ortega, PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas and Iran’s Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Peck’s previous movie ‘The Young
Karl Marx’ was hailed as a “Communist bromance”. Orwell became famous
because he was willing to criticise his own side. Peck only knows how to
prop up his side and attack the other side. That makes him the worst
possible candidate for the job.
Even though George Orwell had
been writing about a leftist tyranny, the documentary executes its own
version of adding 2 + 2 and coming up with 5 by focusing on
democratically-elected leaders on the ‘right’, including Trump, India’s
Modi, Hungary’s Orban or Israel’s Netanyahu, as his examples of
“Orwellianism”. What would Orwell have made of the Labour Party’s mass
censorship and arrests for political dissent across the UK? Don’t ask
‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ which contends that the real threat isn’t Keir Starmer’s
mass arrests but milquetoast Nigel Farage.
In a world where the
British government arrests people for ‘misinformation’ and has passed
laws forcing its propaganda to have a place of pride on smart TVs, Peck
can’t find any other parallel.
Are there no dictators on the
Left? Even Xi and Putin are only there because as Peck had complained
during his ‘Young Marx’ press tour “Russia, China, are totally
capitalist.” CEOs can be “dictators” practicing slavery, but not
Communist Cuba or kingdoms in the Muslim world.
This isn’t Orwell. It’s Orwellian.
Unintentionally true to its name, ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ keeps adding up 2+2 to get 5.
In
‘ORWELL 2+2=5’, mass censorship of social media isn’t the problem (it’s
the solution), but the excessive freedom of speech on social media is
what truly poses a threat to freedom. The documentary implicitly treats
the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct 7 as something other than war
(presumably it was peace) while Israel fighting back is war. Peck, who
claimed that “I want people to look closer at the ugly side of Israel”
wants to use “War is Peace” to attack Israel. Instead he only ends up
affirming the cynical double standards behind Orwell’s anti-slogan.
Similarly
mass surveillance of political opponents on the right by the left in
America and Europe is freedom. By the time Peck starts warning about
“misinformation” from conservative media and the dangers of online free
speech, ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ has become Big Brother.
But ORWELL
2+2=5’s malignant genius is turning George Orwell into Big Brother, a
big black and white head on a screen, reciting ominous phrases (actually
being played by the actor who played Nick Brody on ‘Homeland’) and
urging us to fight against and hate various groups like Republicans and
Jews as the enemies of all that Mr. Peck believes in. Rather than an
expose of lies, Orwell’s anti-slogans like “Slavery is Freedom” and “War
is Peace” become propaganda that could just as easily have been recited
by Big Brother accusing everyone else of his crimes.
It’s the
ultimate tone deaf Orwellian reading of Orwell being falsely billed as
the “ultimate and comprehensive documentary film about the exceptional
writer George Orwell.”
‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ is not here to expose lies,
but to push them, hijacking George Orwell’s legacy in the most
Orwellian manner imaginable. That begins with the bowdlerized opening
quote about exposing lies which alters what Orwell said and removes the
context of why he said it.
George Orwell was explaining that he
wrote ‘Animal Farm’ and why he was going to write ‘1984’ to expose what
could not be said about Soviet Communism using the medium of fiction
while being impelled by a need to denounce Soviet lies. ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’
strips away the context and uses the long dead writer as a club to
attack President Trump, Bush, police officers and Israel.
Removing
the specific political context from terms like “lie”, “war” and
“freedom” and then aiming them at political enemies while pretending
that nothing has changed isn’t Orwell, it’s Orwellian. Universalizing
and updating Orwell was the usual approach of leftists who were
uncomfortable with what George Orwell, an English writer named Eric
Blair, was really saying about their complicity with a radical leftist
totalitarian state and their schemes to censor his writing.
The
“lie” that Orwell was referring to was the lie that pro-Soviet leftists
were telling about Communism. And the lies that they were telling about
him to silence him and end his career.
“Orwell has been put in a
little box as an anti-Stalinist or an anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian
regime,” Peck complained, while arguing that his documentary
‘universalizes’ him. More aptly it puts Orwell in a box and turns him
into a shill for every establishment leftist cause.
‘ORWELL
2+2=5’ isn’t really about the writer, it’s about weaponizing him under
the guise of ‘updating’ him. George Orwell was a perpetual rebel who
spent much of his life rebelling against leftist dogma because he tried
to do his best to follow first principles. The concept is foreign to
Raoul Peck who can only churn out militant agitprop to radicalize his
fellow bourgeois.
What would Orwell’s positions be on some of the issues he’s employed against in the doc?
Take
J6, a major feature of ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’, which depicts the protests and
riots, rather than the mass surveillance, relentless crackdown and
militarization of D.C. under the guise of “protecting democracy” that
followed in its wake, as the true Orwellian offense. But George Orwell
was writing about the dangers of totalitarianism, not the danger of
political protests.
That’s why Orwell could deplore Oswald
Mosley, a British fascist, and support locking him up when a Nazi
invasion appeared imminent, but also argue that detaining him when the
danger had passed “was an infringement of every principle we are
supposedly fighting for.”
Orwell might well have been no fan of
Trump, but also would have warned about the rather obvious threat of
totalitarianism from sending in the troops to occupy the nation’s
capital, mass censorship of skepticism about the election and hefty
prison terms for the same behavior that was hailed when it was being
conducted by people on the left side of the spectrum.
Anyone claiming to speak in Orwell’s name ought to be able to do at least as much.
The
mature Orwell was capable of both outrage and principled nuance. He was
constantly engaged in self-examination that is entirely foreign to the
heavy-handed propaganda of ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’. Take Orwell’s confession
that, “I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed
are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory,
but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself.”
This
“simple theory”, which Orwell whacks away in one casual sentence, is
the heart and soul of not only ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’, but Raoul Peck’s entire
great obsession with ‘colonialism’.
‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ is cheap
propaganda of the kind that the real George Orwell always hated the way
that he hated the simplistic sloganeering and distorted reality produced
by Marxism.
The opening quote about Orwell writing books to
counter lies is used to imply that the writer believed in the supremacy
of politics over art because all art is political. This tenet of Social
Realism has been at the center of modern woke culture wars (in
opposition to ‘ars gratia artis’ that art should exist for art’s sake).
When you hear the insistence that all books, movies and music is
inherently political, you are hearing this argument being applied to
modern pop culture.
But did Orwell really believe? Of course he didn’t.
“The
Marxist critic, by reducing everything to economic causation, destroys
the meaning of literature, which is not just a reflection of class but
of human experience,” Orwell warned.
George Orwell, or rather
Eric Blair, was a man, not a set of political slogans. Raoul Peck boasts
of exclusive access to Orwell’s letters, but all he does with that is
use Orwell’s literary pseudonym to go after political opponents on the
grounds of their favored economic theory.
Writers and directors
are supposed to create art rooted in the human experience. Peck is
capable only of distilling political theories into on-screen tirades. He
isn’t fighting Big Brother.
‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ is Big Brother.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
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Their moral foundation on the left is the same as Islam’s. Hate, envy, greed, lust and violence, ergo, they have no bottom to their depth of degradation. They will do whatever it takes to get power to dominate and control everyone’s life. That’s the history of leftism since the French revolution, and nothing has changed. The curtain is rising, the actors are in place, the script is written, and the consequences will be disastrous, and as predictable as night follows day.
Well, schadenfreude! "The people have spoken and now must be punished" - Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch.
In this week's edition I have four offerings of my own, and twelve by others, and the weather stinks, it's cold and wet, so stay in and take some time to cover the articles.
Best wishes,
Rich