What do George Washington, George Orwell and a fictional sex slave have in common?
They all speak eloquently about the evils of tyranny.
In September 1796, toward the end of his presidency, George Washington made a farewell address to the American people. Among many other thoughts he shared with them the importance of loyalty to the government:
"The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government."
He goes on to warn of the dangers of extreme partisanship:
"However combinations or associations of the above description [divisive and partisan policies] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."¹
Sound familiar? Today's Republicans are that "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled" rabble who are openly "subvert[ing] the power of the people and . . . usurp[ing] for themselves the reins of government." Whether they will destroy it remains to be seen, but their actions so far suggest that to be their goal.
I'm not suggesting Washington or any of the Founders was prescient. It's simply that they and their families had lived under tyrants for generations, and they were well aware of the processes by which autocrats rise. The greed and lust for power that are hallmarks of the contemporary Republican Party looked the same in the 18th century as they do in the 21st.
In his dystopian novel 1984 ² George Orwell introduced most of us in the free world to the fearsome reality of totalitarianism.
Published in 1949, 1984 explores the nature of a dictatorship as seen through the eyes of Winston Smith, whose job is rewriting history for the Ministry of Truth. The government is founded on a Big Lie focused on three self-contradictory statements:
- War is peace
- Freedom is slavery
- Ignorance is strength
Those statements are the core of doublethink, a tool used by The Party to indoctrinate citizens, who are expected simultaneously to accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to their own memories or sense of reality.
That idea is at the heart of Trumpism. Infected Republicans claim to be protecting the Constitution and looking out for their constituents when they are in fact doing the exact opposite. Some of them probably believe it. Others are simply lying, trying to gain Trump's favor, which means absolutely nothing. He has neither loyalty nor fidelity toward his followers; they are nothing to him.
The goal of the Party, the governing authority in 1984, is to attain power--not to reach a goal, but for the sake of power itself. That is the same lust that drives Republican politicians to do anything, no matter how immoral, corrupt or nefarious, to win elections and to stay in office.
The year 1984 did not bring constitutional Armageddon, but if Trump and his followers are not stopped and stripped of power we may well see it forty years on, in 2024.
The Hulu series "The Handmaid's Tale"³ takes place in another dystopian society in which most women have become sterile. Fertile women are captured, called "handmaids," and held as sex slaves for child bearing by the ruling class men. Any children they bear are taken away to be raised by their masters' wives.
Gilead, as the society is called, has come about after a religious civil war in the United States won by ultra-conservative religious forces. It is a totalitarian theocratic state based on a twisted notion of Old Testament society in which men are men and women are chattel.
In Gilead women have no rights, female children are rounded up to be used as needed, and LGBT citizens are hanged as "gender traitors."
This plot may seem farfetched, but keep in mind the struggle American women had in gaining reproductive freedom and how bitterly that right is still contested. At this moment the cornerstone of that right, Roe v. Wade, is at risk of being struck down by a conservative Supreme Court.
This nation is nowhere close to gender equality. As long as women are paid less than men, as long as any police officer anywhere turns a blind eye to spousal abuse, as long as there are areas where men with names like Billy Bob refer to women as "little gals" we are not equal.
Throughout our lives we have enjoyed freedom, and we tend to believe it will last forever. But study just a bit of history, listen to the warnings. and consider the outrages of 2020. Freedom is not free; it takes work and sacrifice.
If we don't cherish our freedom and our rights and work hard to protect them we will wake up one morning and find them gone.
--- Diogenes, 24 October 2021
¹ https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=15&page=transcript
² Everyone should read this book and be familiar with it. If you haven't thought about it since high school, find it online or in your local library, read it and pay attention.
³ Based on the novel of the same title by Margaret Atwood.