Fortress America: Is 2025 the New 1984?

Source: TomDispatch
by Alfred McCoy

“Most of us can remember at least a few troubling scenes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party’s memorably grim slogans, ‘War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.’ But for me, the most disturbing image of all — and I first read the book in high school — was the ‘Two Minutes Hate,’ aroused among the public by threatening images on giant video screens. Within just 30 seconds, Orwell wrote, ‘a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.'” (04/14/25)

https://tomdispatch.com/fortress-america/