Has there ever been a better time than this to revisit George Orwell’s 1984? Last week, I returned to my battered copy to discover how closely our society resembles Orwell’s dystopian world. It’s not just the surveillance aspect. Orwell’s most urgent mission from the past is to prevent us from sleepwalking into thought control.

1984 deals with the danger of totalitarianism, but says a great deal about today’s Culture Wars. The protagonist of 1984, Winston Smith, undergoes a daily Two Minutes Hate against Big Brother’s enemies while, nowadays, many of us bizarrely volunteer for our own diurnal dose of political hatred.

Like Winston, we live in an endless echo chamber of propaganda, fed on a single diet of ideology – in our case through algorithms. Twitter has politically divided people into two camps – the ‘Wokes’, the socially aware, and the ‘Frees’, the free speech devotees. Frees are usually perceived as right wing, but have notable lefties in their ranks like J.K. Rowling who was excommunicated from the left for her ‘heresies’, as Big Brother would term it. Wokes and Frees are as locked into their stances as Big Brother is against the Brotherhood. The leader of the Brotherhood’s ‘theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed…in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less’. On Twitter, it is equally futile to ridicule the opposing creed.

Just as the Cold War engendered a paranoia of reds under the beds, the Culture Wars have ignited a paranoic fear of bigots in the bushes. Phobia indoctrination is rife on Twitter. Wokes and Frees hysterically denounce each other as Nazis and fascists, attempting to ban one another. Doxxing is a form of spying that Big Brother’s Thought Police would have been proud of. Winston recalls how his ex-wife was ‘goodthinkful’ to such an extreme she’d have betrayed him to the Party. Funnily enough, our society also produces a raft of performative virtue signallers.

  More similarities abound between 1984 and 2023. Winston’s lover Julia wears ‘a narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League’. Likewise, the Twitterati sport their own political credentials with animes, emojis, flag emblems and pronouns next to their handles.

Whilst facecrime – ‘to wear an improper expression on your face’ – is treasonable in Oceania, one of the most perilous acts in today’s West might well be termed tweetcrime. Michael Vaughan was dropped last year from the BBC’s cricket commentary for alleged racism in tandem with inappropriate historical tweets. The world keeps updating the rules as to what constitutes thinkcrime. People’s obsession with ‘being on the right side of history’ suggests that there is a real fear of being proved wrong and outed for one’s former online views.

The parallels go even further than thinkcrime and paranoia. In 1984, Oceania is at permanent war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. If we fast forward to our 2023 reality, Oceania (roughly speaking, the West) is at war with Eurasia (Russia) and has an increasingly tense relationship with Eastasia (China). War in 1984 means ‘a continuous shortage of consumption goods’ which reflects our world. Due to the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen a hike in food prices and, even more so, in energy costs.

One of the main takeaways from 1984 is that slogans are a potent means of thought control. Winston Smith’s telescreen repeats that ‘War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength’. Look at our own government employing the slogan, ‘Stop the Boats’. Twitter’s brevity in particular makes it an ideal platform for sloganeering. Recently, ‘Trans Women are Women’ has been countered by ‘Woman – Adult Human Female’.

Twitter users also coined the ‘#BeKind’ slogan, although, paradoxically, Twitter is known for its brutal takedowns. The problem for Wokes is that they keep engaging in Big Brotheresque doublethink – ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously’. How else can Wokes, who profess to be against the victimisation of minorities, victimise individuals for espousing different views? How else can they stand up for the bullied, and yet relentlessly bully their opponents? Frees, meanwhile, have their own problem in that few people believe free speech should be absolute.

The football commentator, Gary Lineker, was photographed a few months ago standing beside George Orwell’s famous quote at the BBC headquarters: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.’ In my opinion, Lineker was entitled to speak out against the government’s ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign or any other policy without being suspended by the BBC. Nevertheless, if he’d read 1984 he’d realise that the proles are rendered docile through a diet of ‘films, football, beer’. Isn’t it somewhat hypocritical of Lineker to advocate political change when he’s responsible for quelling it with panem et circenses?

Language in 1984 is the ultimate means of ensuring orthodoxy of thought. In the case of Newspeak, which is the new totalitarian language of Oceania, old words are either replaced by new ones or eliminated. Winston’s work colleague, Syme, explains that ‘the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it’.

Compare this to 2023. A language revolution is already underway. Activists are persuading government departments to make language more inclusive. Whilst Orwell’s Newspeak abbreviates phrases, inclusive language (Incspeak, as Orwell might have termed it) tends towards verbiage. ‘Women’ has in some cases been replaced by ‘people with a cervix’. ‘Female/male’ has been replaced by the phrase ‘assigned female/male at birth’. These changes in language enable sex to be superseded by gender.

Acronyms like TERFs and TRAs, however, are much closer to Newspeak. Twenty-first-century neologisms like ‘mansplain’, ‘manspread’ and ‘no-platform’ resemble Newspeak’s compound contractions like ‘minitrue’ for ‘Ministry of Truth’. ‘Unfollowing’ someone on Twitter has linguistic echoes of the ‘unpersoning’ of people who are imprisoned in Oceania.

Meanwhile, there are ongoing virulent battles over use of language. One highly publicised incident was the sacking of a Dublin teacher, Enoch Burke, for refusing to use a student’s gender-neutral pronouns. What Frees call cancel culture has been renamed consequence culture or accountability culture by Wokes (unless, of course, it applies to Lineker). It’s natural for language to have a degree of evolution whereby some phrases are updated, but it appears that a large portion of our lexicon has become contentious.

To me, the most mind-blowingly prescient passage in 1984 is when Orwell satirises what we now term sensitivity readers. Winston’s co-worker ‘was engaged in producing garbled versions – definitive texts they were called – of poems which had become ideologically offensive’. This immediately evokes the recent controversy over Roald Dahl’s books. Matilda was forced to undergo its own ‘garbled’ revision at Penguin to appease ideological sensibilities.

Why can’t we heed Orwell’s warnings against language control? 1984 features Winston’s rape fantasy about Julia. In this sensitive climate, it’s conceivable that some activists might find Orwell’s rape images offensive to women and try to expunge them. But to do so would fail to understand the value of his searing honesty. The genius of 1984 is that it’s the ultimate clarion call for free speech. If we care about Orwell’s message at all, it’s time to recognise how language is becoming ever more linked to political belief. Above all, it’s time to value self-expression over censorship.