On January 22, 2017,
two days after the inauguration of Donald Trump, counselor to the president
Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” as a way of describing
lies. She was referring to the White House press secretary’s providing false estimates
for the crowd that attended the inauguration.
This idea of
“alternative facts” is actually not unique to the Trump administration.
Although that term is new, the dictatorships that dominated Europe in the
mid-twentieth century, the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler and the Soviet
government of Josef Stalin, were no strangers to “alternative facts.” Those two
authoritarian states regularly issued pronouncements and provided information
that they knew were not true.
One of the
greatest literary champions of truth in the face of these threats was George
Orwell, who died all too soon at age 46 in 1950.
 |
| George Orwell |
Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, spent the final years of his life revealing in those
two novels how dictatorships contort the truth to achieve their ends. In his
book England Your England, composed
largely after the end of World War II and the fall of Hitler, Orwell analyzed
the effects of how Nazism and Russian communism constantly used “alternative
facts” to promote their ends:
“Indifference to
objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from
another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually
happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events.
For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens
of millions, the number of deaths caused by the war. [World War II] The
calamities that were constantly being reported—battles, massacres, famines,
revolutions—tended to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One
had no way of verifying the facts, one was not even fully certain they had
happened, and one was always presented with totally different interpretations
from different sources….Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will
be so dishonestly set forth…that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for
swallowing lies or for failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as
to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since
nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be
impudently denied.” (p. 54)
This
analysis describes all-too accurately the state of truth in the current era of
“alternative facts.” The Trump administration in Washington baldly denies even the most
obvious facts—the existence of global warming and climate change, the size of a
crowd on the Mall in DC, the effects of a bill that deprives millions of people
of their health insurance, the absence of widespread voter fraud in the United States, etc.. It’s frightening that the other examples of
governments that use these tactics are two of the worst dictatorships in
history.
What does
Orwell recommend that writers do in response to governments denying obvious
truths? He advocates political action, but interestingly, he cautions that
opposition to regimes that embrace falsehoods can also lead to fanaticism and dogmatic
ideas if we embrace activism without reflection:
“To suggest
that a creative writer, in a time of conflict, must split his life into two
compartments, may seem defeatist or frivolous: yet in practice I do not see
what else he can do. To lock yourself up in the ivory tower is impossible and
undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to
a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to
be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also
seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a
lingering belief that every
choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also
right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the
nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is
the less, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by
acting like a devil or a lunatic. War, for example, may be necessary, but it is
certainly not right or sane. Even a general election is not exactly a pleasant
or edifying spectacle. If you have to take part in such things—and I think you
do have to, unless you are armoured by old age or stupidity or hypocrisy—then
you also have to keep part of yourself inviolate.” (p. 25)
In other
words, writers have to curb the temptation to oppose fanatics with an equally
fanatical ideology. We must act, and not be paralyzed by ethical dilemmas. But
we must never let go of our critical and moral judgments, even if we have to
bracket them in order to undo a terrible evil.
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe
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Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
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Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry
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