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Oct. 19, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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ORWELL’S DARK VISION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep689
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Coming up, a special episode on George Orwell.
I want to provide some insight into police states around the world, including the emerging American police state, through an introduction to Orwell's work.
I'll give you some background on Orwell's politics and writing, and focus on his two dystopian masterpieces.
Thank you.
brilliantly foresaw how police states could emerge even in liberal democratic societies like our own.
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On the eve of the release of our new film, Police State, I thought it might be interesting to do a special episode on somebody who foresaw a lot about police states. Well, someone who had experience of police states in the sense that George Orwell, writing in the late 1930s, the 1940s, could obviously see police states in the Soviet Union. Stalin had a police state. Of
Stalin had a police state.
course, in Germany, Hitler had a police state. There were, at that time, other police in the late 1930s, the 1940s, could obviously see police states in the Soviet Union.
Of course, in Germany, Hitler had a police state.
There were, at that time, other police states in the world.
But the genius of Orwell was to be able to see that the police state phenomenon was not confined to tyrannical societies or even communist societies.
He saw that there was a connection between socialism, communism, and police states, but he thought it's possible that the West, the so-called free world, Britain, the United States, would also move in that direction, and that has now happened.
It didn't happen then, but it's happened now, well, I guess, 70 years later, and Orwell is the great diagnostician, the great prophet of this development.
So I thought that by looking at Orwell and his kind of marvelous foresight, because who would have thought, in the middle of the last century, that you could anticipate these developments with such kind of eerie precision when we think of a lot of the famous Orwell phrases, double-think, newspeak, the inversions of war is peace, freedom is slavery.
Orwell gave us all that, and that's a kind of intellectual apparatus or furniture, a sort of lens through which we can now see things that are happening in our own society at a time when the distinction between free societies and unfree societies is getting a lot more blurred.
Now, Orwell was a very interesting fellow because for most of his life he was a man of the left.
And in some ways, this is an oddity because you have Orwell who praises socialism, at least in his early career.
Now later in his career, he never fully gives up on socialism, but it becomes very clear that he spends more of his time as a critic of socialism than as a champion of it.
But nevertheless, it is important to realize that he hung on to that left identity.
And I think it's because he thought that that was an identity that aligned with the ordinary fellow, with the working man.
And this is really something that Orwell sympathized with all his life.
Very interesting for us today because we are living at a time where the same working class, which traditionally was democratic in this country.
It was the heart of the FDR coalition.
Basically, the white working class kept FDR in office for four terms.
But the same working class is now moving toward the Republican Party.
And not just the white working class.
We see it also with the black working class and the Hispanic and Latino working class as well.
Now, Orwell's concept of a police state is something that is different than what we have now.
But Orwell was very insightful in being able to see that there were two developments that were pushing toward police states all over the world.
And the first development is ideology, and the second is technology.
So let me say a kind of introductory word about each.
Ideology is a kind of framework, a doctrine, a system of ideas that justifies or can be used to justify tyranny.
Ideology can also be used to justify cruelty because you define people and put them into certain categories.
If you put somebody, for example, into a category of oppressor, well, he's an oppressor.
You don't have to really care about him.
And even if he is in a hard way, even if he is suffering, you're like, well, that's okay.
That's actually a good thing because that's a really bad guy.
And the other aspect is technology.
And Orwell was able to see the ways in which technology could establish systems of surveillance.
He understood, for example, the power of the media in generating propaganda.
He understood that the television would be the precursor.
I know he obviously didn't foresee the internet, the World Wide Web, but nevertheless, he understood that there were advancing forms of media that would now allow governments and also centralized states to maintain tighter controls over human beings than had ever been possible before.
In the old days, they could come after you, but you could run away, and it wasn't all that easy to even find you.
But Orwell understood that in the future, running away in a sense would become impossible.
One of the themes, of course, of 1984 is that Winston, who is the rebel, the guy who won't go along with the police state is hunted down.
He tries to get away.
He thinks that he is alone.
He thinks that he is undetected.
But no, they know exactly where he is.
They're able to get him.
And ultimately, they're able to subjugate not just his body, and this is the chilling part of Orwell, but also his soul.
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We are living at a very remarkable time in which the classic features of police states are now all evident and apparent here in America.
So think about police states around the world, North Korea, China, I guess to some degree, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela.
Think of the old Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire, so places like East Germany and Romania.
Well, what were the common characteristics and what are the common characteristics of these police states?
Well, if we had to enumerate, we would say they had mass surveillance of citizens.
They had systematic...
Censorship of opinions and so effectively no freedom of speech.
They tended for the most part to be anti-religion.
Sometimes they would use the vocabulary of religion but they sought to undermine the church, imprison priests and so on.
They also had forms of heavy indoctrination in the schools and in the universities, mind-numbing propaganda through the media.
Some of these states actually had propaganda ministers like Goebbels in Nazi Germany.
Police states tend to be one-party states.
And by one-party states, I mean that they don't allow effective opposition.
I'm not saying they don't allow opposition at all.
And I'm not even saying that they don't allow elections, because there are elections in China today.
There are elections in Iran.
But there are elections from a pre-screened group of candidates, and any opposition that is permitted is subordinate to and deferent to, ultimately an extension of, the regime itself.
Police states criminalize dissent.
They have political prisoners.
And wow, go down the list I just mentioned.
We have all of that now in the United States.
And so Orwell is our man.
Orwell is our man because he got there first.
Orwell predicted this, or at least maybe prediction is wrong.
Orwell wasn't writing a...
unlike Marx. Marx was sort of like, I'm predicting that there will be a working class revolution and it's going to happen first in Germany and then in England and then elsewhere in Europe.
And so this was... Marx thought he was some sort of a modern version of the Old Testament prophets, but not Orwell.
Orwell is... Issuing a kind of warning.
He is creating an imaginary dystopia.
And he's saying, look, we could get from here to there if we don't watch out.
In that sense, the purpose of Orwell's work is very similar to the purpose of our film.
It is to issue a kind of warning.
I say on the website in a quotation that I came up with for the film that I feel a little bit like the animal that sees a predator's movement in the trees, and I'm trying to alert the rest of the herd.
And at a time when the rest of the herd, most other people are indifferent.
They're just grazing like the antelope or the wildebeest.
They're like, I don't know, it's probably just the wind.
Or even, well, maybe there's a predator, but he's not going to land on my back.
He'll probably get somebody else.
So, there is this unwillingness to really believe that these things are possible.
And you can imagine, if we go back 70 years or so, how unwilling people would be when encountering Orwell.
I mean, think about it. The United States...
allied with Britain and of course the fighters of the Free French led by Charles de Gaulle.
And these people thought of themselves as champions of freedom against tyranny.
So in a way they could read Orwell and go, oh Orwell, yeah, we know, you're actually writing about our enemies, you're writing about the bad guys, you're writing about the Nazis.
Now the issue of the Soviet Union was a little awkward because of course the Soviet Union was allied with the United States.
The Soviet Union was part of the anti-Nazi coalition.
So that was a little bit of a tricky one.
But nevertheless, you can see that for people looking at Orwell's writings in the 30s and 40s...
Now, Orwell began some of these works.
His early works, of course, go back to the 1930s.
And I've got a bunch of them in front of me.
And I'm going to say a little bit about each of them, but his two perhaps most famous, his most mature works, which is Animal Farm, and then 1984, were begun, well, one of them, Animal Farm, was begun in the late 30s, published, I think, around 1944.
And the work in 1944 and then 1984, perhaps Orwell's most famous work, was published in 1949, after the war.
But think of it, 1949, everybody is enjoying the kind of flush of freedom, of the abundance of American opportunity and the expansion of the American economy.
At that time, the American GDP, the gross national domestic product, It was something like one third of the entire world.
So the United States was just riding high.
There was an atmosphere of optimism and of progress.
And then right in the middle of that, here comes Orwell with this sort of dark dystopian vision.
And I think a lot of people probably said, wait, Didn't we just defeat all that?
Didn't the good guys beat the bad guys?
Didn't the party of freedom triumph over the party of slavery?
And Orwell's warning says, well, what happens if the party of freedom becomes the party of slavery?
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I want to talk a little bit about Orwell and his early work.
Now, George Orwell's name was not George Orwell.
It was Eric Blair.
And George Orwell was his pseudonym.
It was his writer's name.
And, of course, that's the name by which he is now known and famous.
And if you look at his face, it's like, that's George Orwell.
Just worth knowing that there was an Eric Blair behind George Orwell.
And this is always interesting when writers do this because, in a sense, what they've done is they've created a separate narrative identity.
And you can ask a question if you're just studying Orwell's work, like, is there a difference between George Orwell and Eric Blair?
Not a topic I'm going to go into now, but just a question I want to raise.
Now, In Orwell's early work, and I've got here three of his early books, Down and Out in Paris and London, Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
What's an aspidistra?
It's a kind of a plant, and I'll get to that in a moment.
And then George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, which is an account of Orwell's personal involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
There are several other Orwell works, The Road to Wigan Pier and others.
I don't own them, so I didn't bring them today.
But the point is that Orwell did quite a bit of writing as a journalist, as an observer, before he got to his major police state themes.
And so let's start a little bit with...
Let's start with Down Out in Paris and London.
This is where Orwell gets the idea...
To essentially become a really poor guy in order to discover what it's like to live under poverty.
Now Orwell was in fact kind of poor, but not really.
He once described himself as a...
He's a member of the upper-lower middle class.
Think about that. So what he's saying is that he was not middle class.
His family was below middle class.
But even though he was below middle class, he wasn't really destitute.
He wasn't really poor.
Of the lower middle class group, he was kind of at the upper end.
And he's giving you here, of course, a hint of the very highly stratified English class society in which people fall into very definite...
goes to, first of all, he dresses like a homeless guy.
And there's a very funny scene somewhat toward the middle of Down and Out in Paris and London, where he's walking around and he's looking in these windows of restaurants and shops.
And at one point he's really shocked because he looks in the window and he sees this scary homeless guy and he recoils as if to say, is there somebody?
And then he realizes that it's him.
In other words, he's allowed himself to sort of run down so much that he doesn't even recognize himself.
He's got, of course, a thick beard and mustache at that point, and he's wearing rags.
And so this is a kind of moment of self-recognition for Orwell that, not that that's who he is, because of course there is a very curious intellectual George Orwell, but he's saying, that's kind of how I've presented myself to society, to the world.
That's how I appear to other people.
That's what they think when they see me.
What I got out of this book, down out in Paris and London, is that Orwell really sympathizes with ordinary people.
And also, he doesn't romanticize them.
This is really important because there are a lot of people who will romanticize the proletariat, and they romanticize the black criminal, and they romanticize the looter, and they romanticize the terrorist.
And they romanticize these people because they don't see them as people.
They don't see them as people who are making bad choices or doing really bad things.
They see them as sort of products of forces of history.
Oh yeah, that's the liberation of the oppressed.
Oh no, this is the guy, he's a victim of systematic racism and that's really why he went out and killed those people.
No, this is not Orwell.
Orwell says that poor people are unimpressive as a group.
They are petty.
They will do bad things that other people wouldn't do.
I mean, think about it. A poor guy will stab another guy for like $100.
Would you do it? No.
Would I do it? No.
Why? Well, in part because $100 doesn't mean enough to us.
You might find someone else who'd say, well, I'll do it for a million dollars.
But for the poor guy, $100 is worth it.
And Debbie and I sometimes watch these crime shows.
We've seen people who have been murdered for like $250.
So that's Orwell.
He's telling you, do not romanticize anyone.
Human beings are human beings, whatever kind of place they occupy on the spectrum.
And then in the other Orwell work, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, is also about the struggling middle class.
In this case, it's not the poor.
And the middle class guy we're talking about...
His name is Gordon Comstock, and he's a guy who's struggling, but he's not struggling because he can't get a job.
He can't get a job, but he doesn't like working because he's against sort of bourgeois culture.
And so he goes, no, no, no, I'm not going to join the rat race.
I'm not going to do the same kind of conformist types of ministries.
You know, mechanical tasks where I do the same thing every single day.
He goes, no, I refuse to be a member of that class.
And so he goes, that's the money world.
I want to have no part of it.
And in the end, he discovers, you know what?
Working for a living is not so bad.
And it's not selfish.
And you are looking after your family.
And you are making a...
You are helping to keep...
You are part of the glue. The middle class is the glue that holds together a society.
So, the Aspidistra is a kind of measly plant that you have in your kitchen that can sometimes wilt and fall down.
But for Orwell, it's a symbol.
Keeping the Aspidistra flying is another way of saying keeping the flag flying.
And what his point is that it's the middle class that keeps a society moving.
That keeps a society holding itself up.
That upholds the dignity of a society.
So that's the message of Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
It is two cheers.
Perhaps not three cheers, but two cheers for the middle class.
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I want to talk in this segment about Animal Farm, but before I do, just a short...
Orwell's work, Homage to Catalonia.
Orwell joined the resistance to Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
And Orwell describes this as him fighting fascism.
Now, when I first read Homage to Catalonia, I thought, well, this is really ridiculous because Franco was not a fascist.
Fascists are on the left.
Fascists are anti-church.
Fascists are ideological.
Franco was a traditional dictator.
He came out of the military. He didn't like the fact that Spain was going communist.
And so he established a kind of dictatorial regime after he won the Civil War.
Franco was a devout Catholic.
He had a sort of traditional Catholic order, if you will, in which the church was preferred.
The enemies of the church were hunted down.
So nothing could be...
Franco was in no way a fascist.
And yet, in this book, Orwell calls him a fascist.
Orwell thought of himself as fighting fascism.
And I can only imagine that this was the young George Orwell.
This is Orwell as a journalist, and he was caught up in the spirit of, yo, we're fighting the fascists.
And... And we're fighting for Republican values.
Now, part of the discovery of this work is that Orwell sees soon enough that the people fighting, quote, on his own side are far from lovers of freedom.
They have a tyrannical streak themselves.
They also tend to try to...
Smash down other factions that are also on the left and accuse them of being fascist.
So this is the fratricidal tendency of the left in which everybody is competing to be the most far left.
Orwell himself is fighting in a faction called the POUM, the P-O-U-M, that's just an acronym, but it refers to a sort of Trotskyite faction that wants a mild form of socialism, but is not Stalinist, doesn't really want the hardcore Stalinism that ultimately became consolidated, but then there's another faction that represents that.
So basically what Orwell realizes fighting for the left in the Spanish Civil War is that there's a lot of bad stuff going on on both sides.
The left is hardly the party of virtue.
There are tyrants on the left that would not hesitate to themselves establish a Franco-style tyranny, which would differ in some respects, but in a way be no less crushing to the spirit of the Spaniards.
And this is Orwell, in a sense, recognizing that a lot of the tyranny that he wants to write about is going to be the tyranny of It's not the tyranny of a Christian order or some kind of inquisitorial medieval order.
No, it's the tyranny of socialism and it's the tyranny of communism.
And that sets up The theme of Animal Farm.
And Animal Farm discusses many of the same themes as 1984.
In a way, it is not less of a dark work than 1984, but it has a playful tone to it that is, at least initially...
Misleading, because you think, oh wow, this is just an animal story.
Obviously, there's a kind of analogy here between animals and human beings, but there's a charming aspect to the story.
And then the story just continues to get gloomier and darker and more insidious.
Really, what's happening is that human villainy is creeping into these animals, and the really bad guys here are the pigs.
Because the animals conduct a revolution, they overthrow man who is their great oppressor.
And this is Orwell kind of having fun.
The animals, you know, the work starts off with this big speech in which an old horse basically says that man is the great exploiter.
He says, look at the life of an animal.
We are horrible. We don't have enough to eat.
We can't go wherever we want.
And he goes, is that because there's a scarcity of food on the earth?
No. He goes, it's because of man.
Man takes all the food.
Man rules us with an iron fist.
And so man is the problem.
Nearly the whole of the produce of our labor is stolen from us by human beings.
And then he goes... And even the miserable lives we lead are not allowed to reach their natural span because so many animals, of course, are killed and then eaten by humans.
So, the tyranny of human beings is the opening.
So, here's Orwell basically going, okay, we've got this working class revolt, but in this case, it's a revolt against man.
And sure enough, man is overthrown and the animals take over.
But that's when the plot thickens because that is when Orwell begins to show how some animals use the same rhetoric of revolution and putting down the bad guys and fighting for the oppressed to establish their own tyranny. In this case it's the tyranny of the pigs and the pigs are become no less cruel than the old, you know, human oppressor. And at the very end of the book
Orwell says that the creatures looked from pig to man and from man to pig and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.
In other words, the leaders of the revolution who claimed to be doing good, overthrowing the bad guy, they become the bad guy.
They become the oppressor that they themselves used to warn against.
And this is the message of Animal Farm.
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By the way, in our movie, Police State, we have, after the opening section, which raises questions like, is the United States becoming a police state?
And is the police state coming from the left or from the right?
We have a section on the origins of the police state.
How did it get started?
And that is, by the way, not something that Orwell covers in 1984.
If you know 1984, it begins with this guy Winston, and it begins with announcements for something called Hate Week.
And Winston is somebody who is sort of Beginning to realize that this is not something he wants to be part of.
He is fomenting in his own mind, and this time he thinks he's alone, a rebellion against hate week.
But my point is, the police state is already there.
Big Brother is already in full control.
In fact, the extent of the control we'll discover later.
But in Animal Farm, you don't start off with that.
In Animal Farm, as I mentioned, you start off with this passionate speech by the horse, the old horse Boxer.
Boxer goes, my life is coming to an end.
I'm going to be signing out soon.
I'm 12 years old. I don't have much longer to live.
Let me give you an important message that you need to kind of keep with you.
And that is, let's...
We need to realize who our enemy is.
It's man. We may not succeed in overthrowing him, but we got to remember that's the guy we would overthrow if we could.
And then interestingly, the animals are able to pull it off.
And the pigs are part of that coalition.
So, in stage one of the rebellion, there's a unified resistance by, and I think Orwell here is thinking of the working class.
So, for Orwell, the man is the bourgeois, is the capitalist class, and the animals are the working class.
So you can see here that Orwell is still hanging on to his kind of youthful socialist framework in which there is a revolution and you get no sense from Orwell that the original revolution is bad.
In fact, he thinks it's very good.
And the revolution is done in the name of the oppressed now seeking to have not only freedom for themselves, but also equality for themselves.
Because remember, equality is a very important socialist value.
And so the idea is that they are now going to take over and they're going to rule in the interest of all of them.
They're going to sort of share the benefits of freedom and of their newfound prosperity.
And then as we come to...
There's a slow usurpation of power by the pigs.
The pigs are not only able to...
Because think about it. The pigs aren't that strong by themselves.
They could probably be defeated by the other animals.
But they're able to recruit animals to do work for them.
For example, they're able to hire these big dogs who become their security guards.
And so the pigs are able to...
I don't know if weasel is the right way because that's a different animal, but weasel their way into power.
And then they begin to rewrite history.
They begin to produce mind-numbing propaganda.
So you can see here the techniques of the police state are coming right into play, even in Orwell's parable.
Animal Farm. And then, of course, the great slogan toward the end, which the animals look, because they all say, well, wait a minute.
We thought we were equal.
What happened to equality? And then they encounter the slogan devised by the pigs.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
And here we have Orwell brilliantly stating...
The paradox of socialist equality.
There's always a ruling class.
And think about police states.
Many of these police states are established in the name of equality.
Say, the police state in Venezuela, or in Cuba, or even in Soviet Russia.
And yet there was always, and there is always, a kind of ruling class in Russia.
It was called the nomenklatura.
There are names for it in other places as well.
These are the people who live high on the hog.
They are the chavistas in Venezuela.
They are above the law.
They can do whatever they want because they know that the police state is not gonna come after them.
Why?
Because they're running the police state.
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You Before I made a police date and was framing some of the questions to think about with regard to this movie,
And I wanted the movie not to be a mere assembly of things that are going on in society, which many people already know about.
Not merely a cinematic depiction of those things, but a way of thinking this through, kind of taking a page out of Orwell here, and raising questions and answering questions which haven't even been raised at all.
So here's an example of that kind of a question that we deal with in police state.
And that is, how do you get good people to do really bad things?
Think, for example, of an FBI agent.
By and large, typical guy is not a bad guy.
Might have a military background, somebody who has a wife and a couple of kids, lives in a three-bedroom house.
Has the normal struggles of life as everyone else.
And yet, what would make a guy like that go into, smash into some old lady's apartment at like 5.30 in the morning and grab her by the hair and pull her to the ground?
And then twist her arms behind her back and handcuff her.
And if she tries to put up resistance, pull her down the stairs and then yank her into the street where her neighbors come out and gawk at her and humiliate her.
What would cause an ordinary person to do something so barbaric and so monstrous?
You have to answer a question like that because when our institutions get corrupted as they are now, they're not made up from the top to bottom of hideous, horrible people.
They're made up of some hideous, horrible, malevolent people who set bad things in motion.
But there are also ordinary people and sometimes good people who are recruited into those schemes and made part of the evil machinations of the police.
And that needs to be explained.
So Orwell... In 1984, thinks through what a full-blown police state would be like and what the fate would be of an individual.
In this case, it's a couple of individuals.
It's mainly the protagonist, a guy named Winston.
But he also meets this girl named Julia, and they strike up a relationship.
And so the two of them are jointly rebels.
But as the story goes on, you begin to see that they are turned even against each other.
They are forced to give witness against each other.
And here Orwell is getting to the way, the absolutely dehumanizing way in which police state's So, pull family members apart, turn children into witnesses against their parents, make husbands betray their wives and vice versa.
Not betray in the sexual sense, but betray in the sense of giving evidence against him.
Yeah, I heard him say that one time.
Oh yeah, okay, 10 years for him for saying that.
So, Orwell sees the police state as a complete wrecking ball.
Not just of society, but of human relationships, of the kind of natural ties that normally hold a society and a community together.
There's so much in this book, 1984, so many ideas and terms that are not only familiar, but they're so applicable to us that we have to be very grateful to Orwell for giving us this idea.
Kind of ready-made way.
Because otherwise, we'd have to be grateful for people who invented stuff that makes our lives possible.
If they didn't do that, we'd have to figure out other ways.
We don't have air conditioning. You have to figure out another way to stay cool in the summer.
And if you don't have the wheel, you don't have the wheel to attach to your suitcase.
You've got to Lift your own luggage and stagger behind it to the airport.
So with Orwell, we get these terms.
I mean, even hate week. Think about a lot of this sort of diversity propaganda that university students, when they show up at the beginning of college...
I had a freshman orientation for a full week at Dartmouth.
Think about that. We now have, well, not one, but we have ministries of truth, but they're all linked to each other, so it's not wrong to think of them as a single ministry of truth, because they're all protecting the same ideas.
They're promoting the same lies.
They are, quote, fighting misinformation, but not really.
What they're actually fighting is accurate information to be replaced with their misinformation.
Orwell is on to all this, and that's why he gives us terms like doublespeak.
And newspeak.
So newspeak is essentially when media reporting, which, by the way, is a very valuable feature of a democratic and a free society, turns into propaganda.
And propaganda is, Orwell understands, Orwell would have, I think, really smiled if he had heard Goebbels say that propaganda is something that cannot be measured by the standards of truth and falsehood.
It can only be measured by one standard.
Does it work?
Does it convince the population to go along with it, even if it's a lie?
And basically Goebbels goes, that's good propaganda.
If it works, it's good propaganda.
And all other propaganda is bad.
And Orwell got there.
And Orwell understood that propaganda is so mind-numbing that at the end, a state could even say, here we go, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and get people, if not to believe it, then to go along with it.
Ultimately, of course, the question raised by 1984 is, We're good to go.
It's the one thing they can't do.
They can make you say anything, anything, but they can't make you believe it.
They can't get inside you.
And ultimately Orwell, in this dystopia in any case, says, well...
Actually, they can.
Actually, they can. And this, I admit, is a matter of some debate, because I remember Solzhenitsyn saying in the Gulag that there was a part of him that always remained free.
Even though he's in a prison camp, even though he's there for eight years, even though he's fully under their surveillance, their control...
And everything he owns is provided by them.
He relies on them for food.
Nevertheless, he says that in his mind and in his spirit, he remains free.
And that freedom, Solzhenitsyn insists, cannot be fully taken away.
Orwell, in a sense, disagrees.
And by that I mean Orwell shows at the end of 1984 that Winston does succumb.
He gives in in the sense that he...
He comes to believe it.
And in the chilling closing line of 1984...
He loves Big Brother.
The very force that has been oppressing him, he comes to terms with.
And this is the closing of the book, that they're able to get him to not only say that 2 plus 2 is 5, but to believe it.
So, the full collapse of Winston, not only externally, but also internally, is part of the terrifying message of 1984.
As I mentioned at the very beginning, we are on the eve of releasing Police State, Monday, October 23rd, and Wednesday, October 25th in theaters.
There are still tickets available, but you've got to get them, and I would get them right away.
Go to the website, policestatefilm.net, put in your zip code, or you can do it by state.
It pulls up all the theaters.
You can pick out the one nearest you and go see the film with a gang.
Go see it with your family.
Go see it with friends or with your church or with members of your group or your book club.
We make these films for the theater, so there's a uniqueness to the theatrical experience.
But if you can't go in the theater, the virtual premiere, Friday, October 27th.
It's going to be amazing.
It's out of the War A Studio in Las Vegas.
By the way, the same venue where we did the virtual premiere for 2,000 Mules.
And we'll have some live music.
We'll have the full screening of the film.
In fact, you'll be the first person online to be seeing the film, apart from the ones who saw it in the theater.
And then after the film, there's going to be a Q&A with me and Dan Bongino.
And all of this is for the price of a movie ticket.
So... So this is the way to go.
And I think you're going to see that this is a riveting film that's going to give you far more insight and brings the police state home.
Because it's one thing to talk about it.
And I talk about it regularly on the podcast, but to experience it, to kind of feel the hot breath of the police state on your face, to use an Orwellian term, to feel the, well, the boot stamping on the human face.
That's Orwell's singular image for tyranny.
And... In that sense, Police State is an Orwellian movie, except Orwell's work was a work of imagination.
It came out of Orwell thinking through developments that he saw, not just, by the way, in the Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany, but developments that he could see emerging even in So-called free societies, Western society, liberal democracies, England as well as the United States.
And so Orwell is saying, let's not go there.
And I'm saying, alas, we have gone there.
We have followed exactly the forbidden path that Orwell told us not to go down.
And Orwell was right that the threat to the police state is coming from the left.
The left says no.
They go, it's coming from Trump.
Trump is the real villain and so on.
No. I think I have this line somewhere in the movie where I say Trump is not running the police agencies of the government.
In fact, he wasn't even running the police agencies of the government in the Trump administration.
And right now he is running away from the police agencies of government.
So right there is a very important clue to who's running the police state.
The police state is the apparatus, the guys that are controlling and running the police mechanisms of the regime.
I mean, think about that.
That's true in China.
It's true in Russia.
Putin's running that quasi police state.
And similarly in America, the threat to the citizens is right now a threat to the right.
It's a threat to Republicans and conservatives and patriots and Christians.
It's not a threat to everybody. It's a threat to people who pose a danger to the emerging police state.
Those are its deadly enemies.
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