Trump owes Orwell: Big Brother is his role model
In George Orwell’s prophetically dystopian novel 1984, Big Brother’s regime uses a “memory hole” to destroy any facts or documents that become inconvenient to the regime’s preferred narrative. Citizens are then taught alternative facts — and they must forget what they previously knew. In the end, only “facts” that show Big Brother in a positive light are allowed to exist.
President Trump has brought the memory hole to the U.S.
Last week, Trump called on the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate news media outlets. Their crime? Producing well-sourced, credible reporting that paints him in a negative light and is therefore “fake news.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency last Thursday purged two statistics from its website: that 95% of Puerto Rico still lacked electricity and nearly half the island lacked clean drinking water. They undercut Trump’s preferred narrative that he was getting “great marks” from Puerto Ricans. (The statistics are now back, after pressure-shaming from the media.)
A week earlier, Trump deleted all the tweets in which he unequivocally endorsed incumbent Sen. “Big Luther” Strange in the Alabama Republican primary. Strange lost, and Trump The Winner never backs a loser.
Since taking office, Trump has scrubbed climate change from government websites as though it never existed and was always, as he previously claimed, a hoax “created by and for the Chinese.” The Environmental Protection Agency took down its page dedicated to climate change in April.
Authoritarian governments use memory holes to great effect. In Zambia, I investigated a failed 1997 coup d’état. The government told the public the soldier behind it was a drunken fool who got carried away on a night out. It was more convenient for the government to have people believe it was a fool and a drunk than a disgruntled member of a splintered military. But when I interviewed the person held at gunpoint during the coup attempt, she told me the officer was lucid and sober.
There are rumblings of these tactics in Trump’s America. It started with Sean Spicer and the side-by-side inauguration crowd photos. It continued with the emails that prove the Donald Trump Jr. meeting at Trump Tower was not about adoption policy. Don’t believe your lying eyes. Period.
The administration doesn’t go so far as to airbrush undesirables out of photos as the Soviet Union did. But key Trump surrogate Michael Flynn, who later became Trump’s disgraced national security adviser, has now been referred to by the Trump camp as a former campaign volunteer. Paul Manafort, who managed Trump’s campaign for longer than Steve Bannon, has now been referred to as someone who played a “very limited role for a very limited amount of time.”
Orwell nailed Trump. Big Brother got away with it because citizens accepted alternative facts and allowed themselves to be manipulated by false or selective information. We must not make the same mistake. Truth still matters, even if our government behaves as if it is disposable.