Our ThoughtGuilt

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. These phrases from Orwell are often quoted to criticise duplicity in the speech of your opponent now. Obviously, the one who uses them pretends to possess the true meanings of peace, freedom, and strength. The opponent is accused of propaganda, totalitarian inclinations, cruelty. 'Orwell' is always writing about your opponent, not about you,

What if 'Orwell' is about all of us? And indeed, the author of ‘1984’ described a world that was totalitarian, but it was not the world of his supposed enemy, it was his own world - Britain. He was not primarily satirising a geopolitical opponent of the day (USSR, communism, fascism), he was satirising his own society. The apparent paradoxes of 'war is peace,' 'freedom is slavery,' and 'ignorance is strength' are not malicious influences of the enemy, they are our own language. It is simply recoding the language of power into the language of consent.

The use of state-organised military force can be coded as war, slavery, ignorance, but it also can be coded as peace, freedom, and power. The military power, however, is always totalitarian, it is primarily the power to discipline, control, endanger 'our boys' - this is the necessary precondition for threatening the enemy as the secondary goal. The phrase 'peace through strength,' which is one of Trump's electoral slogans, gained hegemony to talk about conflicts. It is obviously an Orwellian phrase, a variation on 'war is peace.' As an example, many Ukrainian and European politicians praised this slogan hoping that it meant use of force against Russia until the Trump administration applied 'strength' to them in the name of 'peace.' The word 'peace' itself now has only exclusively the meaning of coercion and war-fighting, nothing else. I haven't heard anyone using the word peace in a sense of 'organisation of relations that don't rely on the use of organised state violence' recently.

Peace is the code in which we speak about how to wage a war. Our opponent or enemy, of course, is wrong in saying 'peace' when s/he means 'war.' We are, of course, right when we say 'peace' to describe state-organised violence. Thus, nobody can understand the meaning of the old Soviet joke: 'There will be such a fight for peace that not one stone will be left untouched.' Everyone literally accepts as evident that there must be a fight for peace so that not one stone should be left untouched.

There doesn't seem to be a way around it. We immersed ourselves in the discourse of 'war=peace' to the extent that even those who don't experience war can't but speak as if they do. Thus, two other slogans 'freedom is slavery' and 'ignorance is strength' automatically become true for all of us. The example that struck me: Valeriy Zaluzhnyi's recent speech at Chatham House where he said that hunting for men to send them to the frontline is tyranny. Obviously, he was referring to Russia. The fact is, however, that the Russian government - as tyrannical as it proudly is - doesn't practice this, they rely on money, while it is the Ukrainian government that facilitates men hunt in violation of the laws they themselves pass. We take such contradiction for granted - because doubting the words from 'our side' makes us weaker. Freedom is indeed slavery - both soldiers and civilians who have not yet been caught describe the service in the Ukrainian army as slavery. But for us it is freedom - the only word we use to describe this situation. We try not to talk about this at all, because this may harm our interests - ignorance is indeed power.

Then as now, '1984' is about us. Moreover, there doesn't seem to be a way to avoid the 'Orwellian,' - like air pollution, it penetrates your room through sealed windows, you can't avoid breathing this air. Once, like a strike of lightening, the awareness of this overwhelms us, we practice CrimeStop to avoid committing the ThoughtCrime.