Editor’s Note: John Avlon is a CNN senior political analyst and anchor. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
For a guy who’s been dead for nearly 70 years, George Orwell has never been hotter.
Sales of his dystopian novel, “1984,” surged to the top of Amazon charts after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
And with every administration appeal to “alternative facts,” or claims that “truth isn’t truth,” or attempts to call uncomfortable facts “fake news,” Orwell raises his head again, as in this quote from “1984”: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
It doesn’t help that Trump instinctively – but unintentionally – echoed that exact line from a rally stage back in July. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Yes, Orwell seems to be a man for all seasons right now.
As we confront a rise in nationalism at home and abroad, Orwell helpfully reminds us that “nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.”
Pointing to the overlap between extremes, Orwell warned that “a communist and a fascist are somewhat nearer to one another than either is to a democrat.”
And journalists’ insistence on a fact-based debate is entirely consistent with Orwell’s admonition that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four” while the leader insists the opposite.
But for all the war on facts and dumbing down of debate we see in the West right now, we should recognize that our concerns are almost quaint compared with much of the world.
Tuesday is June 4. And this column will almost certainly be censored in China.
That’s because it’s the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre when hundreds, maybe thousands, of students at a pro-democracy rally were slain by the Chinese government.
CNN cameras and reporters were there sending an important message about the power of the press to stop countries from killing their citizens with impunity.
This footage of the person known only to history as “Tank Man” became an instant international symbol of the power of the powerless. His photo hangs here in the halls of CNN and my own office as well.
In a 1990 Playboy interview, Trump discussed China’s treatment of the protesters:
“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”
Asked about his remarks during the 2016 GOP primary, Trump said his comments didn’t mean he was “endorsing” what China did, and wrongly referred to the student protest as a “riot”: “I said that was a strong, powerful government. They kept down the riot, it was a horrible thing.”
In the intervening 30 years the Chinese government has effectively disappeared Tank Man and the Tiananmen massacre from the national memory.
The government censors the internet, which allows it to remove any videos of the massacre. Books are censored as well. And mention of it on social media is deemed subversive.
When a BBC crew recently went to China and showed folks the video of Tank Man, by its estimation some 80% said they’d never seen the image.
There’s no better example of Orwell’s warning from “1984” than “who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
And this is happening in our time, often excused by companies that see profit in the promise of wealth regardless of liberty.
There are brave activists who try to keep the memory of their murdered sons and daughters alive, particularly the 127 Tiananmen mothers who are increasingly speaking out at great personal risk to honor their loved ones.
We can’t cower from the facts of history. And we should all be steadfast in calling out crackdowns on civil liberties and human rights abuses.
Consider the “social credit scores” that are using surveillance technology to monitor every aspect of Chinese lives and administer punishment to those who run afoul of the state.
And with history’s eyes on us, we cannot ignore what one Pentagon official described as “concentration camps” full of at least 800,000, and possibly more than 2 million Muslim-minority Uyghurs in remote western provinces, which a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof described as part of “China’s Orwellian war on religion.” China says the camps are “voluntary vocational training centers.”
Orwell’s greatest enemy was totalitarianism – and its handmaidens of ignorance and intolerance. All this corresponds with his warning that the totalitarian state “creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison.”
This is the danger expressed by the three slogans of Orwell’s fictitious Ministry of Truth: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
It’s up to all of us who count ourselves as free to keep George Orwell fiction in the 21st century.