by Andy Nowicki
At the end of George Orwell’s 1984, hero and would-be revolutionary Winston Smith is tortured brutally by ghoulish government goons at the Ministry of Love. Following this ordeal, his will is utterly broken; he betrays his closest allies as well as himself; moreover, he learns to “love” Big Brother, the awful totalitarian entity who has made his life unbearably miserable. Winston himself gets absolutely nothing out of this bargain except a certain warped peace of mind and a perverse sense that he has in some way “done the right thing”:
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn self-willed exile from the loving breast!... It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
As prescient as Orwell was, I’m not sure if he wouldn’t have been somewhat astonished at the extent to which such savagely cruel methods have proven to be generally unnecessary mere decades later. A man of his time, Orwell saw sadistic boot-in-the-face uber-Stalinism as the ever-cresting wave of the future. But today, with the Soviet Union long dead and anti-white multicultural heterodoxy ascendant in the degenerate West, economic Marxism rejected for favor of cultural Marxism, Big Brother’s methodology has evolved. We now live in an age of polite totalitarianism, where only a bit of minor arm-twisting is needed to convince slightly reticent individuals to give way to the dictates of the prevalent ideology.
Such a circumstance would hardly be possible if there didn’t exist in man an intense drive to conform, and to seek the approval of those with authority over him. The ardent childhood yearning to be patted on the head and called “good boy” never really leaves us, and this desire can be expertly exploited by those in control. Strange to say, man can indeed be shamed into violating his conscience and abandoning his principles; thus are dissidents brought effectively to heel.
I have examined this phenomenon before as a symptom of “cool crowd conformism.” Following the classic Dr. Pepper jingle (“I’m a Pepper, he’s a Pepper, she’s a Pepper… wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper too?”), Big Brother appeals to us not primarily as a figure of menace, but as a jovial, kind, and deeply righteous chap. He’s having fun, and doing well, and we can have fun and do well too, if we just prove to be his obedient servants. If we refuse this request, however—well, that would really be a shame, a most unfortunate thing… Just think of how we’ll be missing out, of the price we’ll have to pay!
It is through the application of just such an approach that supposedly stalwart thought criminal-types are coerced into loving Big Brother, thus rendered gentle as lambs patiently awaiting a slaughter. We have recently seen various high-profile outfits do an about-face after an extensive engagement with the Zeitgeist-guardians. The evangelical Christian company Chick-Fil-A has cried “Mercy!” and agreed to accept the greasy embrace of Big Bro in exchange for not funding groups that oppose gay marriage. (Now they’re claiming that it’s all a misunderstanding, but the cow doth protest too much, methinks). Augusta National, the golf club of the Master’s tournament, has meanwhile consented to a mandated estrogen injection, having invited no less a luminary than former secretary of state Condeleeza Rice to join their former all-boy’s club. Hell, even Southern rock gods Lynyrd Skynyrd have turned on their beloved Confederate flag! Who will be the next to fall, the latest to forsake his heritage, his traditions, his values, his manhood?
What we see before us is a ghastly spectacle of endless surrender and retreat. And against the backdrop of such a conspicuous slide into craven cowardice, hearty resistance and refusal to backtrack, back down, or in any way apologize is in itself a revolutionary act.
We here at Affirmative Right—contributors and readers alike—have our significant ideological differences. But I think I speak for everyone when I say that we will never stop hating, despising, jeering and flouting at Big Brother, no matter which form he may choose to take. We are the few, we happy few, the band of brothers, who—whether due to conviction or principle or out-of-fashion dogma or sheer pissy stubbornness—opt to stand firm against the relentless tide.
Stay strong, comrades! Stick to your guns, and refuse to bend, much less break, to please anyone. Resolutely decline to love Big Brother, and great will be your reward.
