America as Animal Farm

The socialist essayist and novelist George Orwell by 1944 grew depressed that as a cost for the defeat of the Axis Powers the Allies had empowered an equally nightmarish monster in the Soviet Union.

Since his days fighting for the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, the left-wing Orwell had become an increasingly outspoken enemy of Communism. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, when Stalin renounced all his wartime assurances and steamrolled Eastern Europe, Orwell came to see state socialism under authoritarian auspices as the greatest threat to human freedom. It was not as if right-wing dictators were not equally lethal, but the inclusion of the words “socialist” and “republic” in a left-wing tyrant’s official lexicon tended to fool millions.

"Terrorist killing was reinvented as vague “man-caused disasters” and “workplace violence” that occasionally called for American “overseas contingency operations.” If we did not have the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” then there would be no radical Islamic terrorism — apparently on the theory that if we ban “gravity” from our vocabulary, we will all instantly float upwards.

More recently, “fake news” did not mean promulgating the lie “Hands up, don’t shoot,” doctoring George Zimmerman’s 911 call, or insisting on national TV that the Benghazi attacks were spontaneous riots sparked by a right-wing American-based video maker, who, for his provocations, was perp-walked and jailed on trumped-up charges of parole violations. RELATED: Which Fake News? Fake news certainly does not denote the decades-long myth that the hard-Communist and pro-Castro presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was emblematic of the right-wing haters of Texas, or the fantasy mythography of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father passed off as an autobiographical memoir.

Instead, a supposed epidemic of “fake news” became a means to explain how Donald Trump, the supposedly incompetent buffoon, defeated the polished sure winner Hillary Clinton — who at one time in 2008 presented herself as a heroic stateswoman who had flown into Bosnia while under sniper fire."

Wonderful.

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