“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
-George Orwell, 1984.
By: Mark Glennon*
Beyond tagging statues for possible removal, the Chicago Monuments Project advisory committee is taking suggestions for new monuments. The goal should be to find subjects that are not divisive and would promote learning and debate.
George Orwell is ideal and should be an uncontroversial choice.
Moreover, selecting Orwell as the topic for a new monument would be a fitting correction of the city’s and committee’s folly to date on statues.
Orwell would be inclusive because of what probably is little known to the general public about him. He was a socialist. A very devout socialist.
Give socialists their due. Give them a monument. Six members of Chicago’s city council self-describe as socialists and many more are socialist in all but name, there and in many levels of government. Frightening as it is to many of us, socialism is the most rapidly ascending philosophy in the nation.
Yet Chicago has no monument to any socialist. Put one up to provoke critical thinking about what socialism means and its historical performance. That’s long overdue. Almost half of Americans say they would vote for a socialist and it is particularly popular among young people. Polls also show there is little agreement about what socialism even means. Young Americans seem attracted to it merely as some notion of free-stuff-for-everybody.
But above all else, Orwell was a democratic socialist, and it’s his devotion to the sanctity of democracy and freedom that rightly made him famous, timeless and popular with the rest of us.
His astonishingly prescient warnings of the horrors that have overtaken America made him a modern meme. “Orwellian” is now rightfully among the most common terms seen in political commentary.
It’s all there in Orwell’s fiction – all of what has democracy hanging by a thread in America: force-fed dogma, the surveillance state, propaganda disguised as news, authoritarianism, statist overreach and cancellation of history. Much of the language we use today is from Orwell, including “thought police,” “newsspeak,” “doublethink” and “Big Brother.”
A column in the New York Times commemorating Orwell said that in a large part of our world, Big Brother succeeded “through the management of the news and the censorship of the written and spoken word, in severely impairing man’s ability to think freely.”
But that was written in 1984. Now, the New York Times and much of our media do exactly that, brazenly. It’s still worse in higher education. Princeton Professor Sergiu Klainerman, who escaped communist Romania, recently wrote that, in education, today’s “woke ideology is even more harmful than old-fashioned communism.”
That’s why, today, Orwell’s face, quotes and other takes on his work are easy to find on shirts, hats, coffee mugs and the like.
The best of them is “Make Orwell fiction again.” That’s the proposition over which an Orwell monument should be designed to incite debate. Should socialism be confined to fiction? Should his depiction of tyranny be confined to fiction?
Bring that debate on. The city should want nothing less. It should see it as an opportunity to make amends after its conduct so far about Chicago’s monuments, which was pure Orwell. National headlines ridiculed its advisory committee’s selection of statues of Lincoln, Washington, Grant and others for possible removal. Its meetings were held in violation of the Illinois Open Meetings Act. “What’s said here, stays here,” city officials said in a message to committee members. A step toward setting that right would be a monument saluting Orwell’s warnings about cancelling history and dogmatic government.
A monument to Orwell needn’t be grandiose or expensive. He wouldn’t have wanted that. Maybe a statue of Napoleon the pig, the tyrannical leader in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Or maybe his propagandist, Squealer, would be best because it would serve as a reminder that culling statues shouldn’t be a means to propagandize.
Above all else, the city should honor that quote from Orwell at the top from 1984. Do not attempt to control the past by controlling the future or to control the future by controlling the past. Socialism is real. Orwell’s warnings are real. Neither should be cancelled. Put them both up for scrutiny with a monument to his work.
*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints
Hopefully, all media will get the message, in Illinois, too.
Ted joined Tom Miller of WJPF to talk about Illinois’ highest-in-the-nation property taxes, why lawmakers don’t want to touch the tax’s cost drivers, just how much Illinoisans’ tax burden has grown over the decades, why Gov. Pritzker failed to meet his promise to reform property taxes, and more.
Ted joined Dan and Amy to talk about the free speech controversy brewing in Wilmette due to the city’s refusal to fly a religious freedom flag, the city’s left-wing excesses and the growing culture war, the latest money spent on the illegal immigrant crisis, and more.
Weekly crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department: Report through 4/14/2024.
Sorry guys but “RED FOR ED” is the future…
Students should be shown the movie “Dr. Zhivago” but they may not have a clue what it’s about since they only study the civil rights era in their history classes. There’s a nifty Jack Webb film on you-tube “Red Nightmare” that is actually a believable warning now. “Pork Chop Hill” is also on you-tube in high definition. Hey kids, is the army on the hill diverse enough for you? Gregory Peck says at the end–there are no monuments on Pork Chop like there are at Bunker Hill but holding that useless hill was just as important for our freedoms. If… Read more »
Mark, what a brilliant idea, and YES there absolutely should be debates about socialism and govt over-reach and power-grabs. They’re doing it, so let’s give it hearings — the media should open their eyes and think about it for a change! For some reason, Orwell only got it half right, so YES let’s have the discussions, and HEAR their reasons — Mayors and City Councils — WHY do they want chaos and socialism?! BTW that’s true in many big-cities, being ruined by lunatics who seem to want to copy Cloward-Piven and Saul Alinsky. Those 3 chaotic “thinkers” have done tremendous… Read more »
Socialism is a cool word for wokesters and BIPOC. Screaming socialism doesn’t mean anything to them.
The Chicago Monument Committee was stacked with largely like minded people.
For example, it was not a diverse committee in terms of political or cultural ideology.
Cancellation not education is a rotten way to run a city.
Eric Arthur Blair had a mustache more similar to Hitler’s mustache than the Amazon logo.
How Orwellian that Amazon felt compelled to change their logo due to a Hitler comparison.
What or who will be the next Hitler mustache inspired target or change.
Orwell was spot on in 1984, but failed to understand that socialism is giving government more power, which evolves to the very society he wrote about.
You nailed it Doug. I doubt if Orwell understood how damaging it was in England for the govt to create so much power to itself after WWII. The citizens there have suffered monetarily ever since, not enough economic freedom, choking taxes, choking govt, and NOW, completely irresponsible govt permitting flow of foreigners that have ruined London. I’ve been to England ten times and the January 2020 trip to London was an eye-opener, the city is a shit-hole.
As a life-long Chicagoan, I don’t consider any of the so called Chicago’s city council self-describe socialists truly socialist, they are instead fake-socialist posers & opportunists who preach the new lib buzz word “EQUITY” while in reality are anything but equitable when it comes to themselves. They’re for the same old “rules for me but not for thee” state guaranteed upper income jobs & benefits for them and their family members at the expense of the rest of us at best, and shear opportunist like the are ctu hero’s at worst. All supposedly made possible, at this point, by some… Read more »
sharkeys one of the greediest scumbags in chicago,and there are MANY greedy scumbags!!
They’re socialist in that they don’t create anything and could not exist outside the public sector.
Socialism happens when people begin to believe that liberty is something that needs to be endowed upon them by the state, instead of something they need to simply take because its god given. We find ourselves much like a Stockholm syndrome of belief, waiting for government permission. Needless mask mandates are the first step over that line. Its time to take back our liberty, a small exercise, don’t wear a mask at Wal Mart, but that takes courage, and Americans are losing their courage. When the courage to be a free individual is lost, then the country of America becomes… Read more »
Back when they had the gorilla at the door, I’d wear it in them take it off as soon as I was inside. The problem is, modern man is entirely too social for his own good. About 20 years ago, I made a conscious decision to remain as far outside modern “society” as possible. So when this plandemic started, none of it came as a surprise. Nor did the great November screwjob of 2020. Everyone around me couldn’t understand how I knew what was happening as it was happening. Gotta stay outside to see it. The most insidious part is… Read more »
So easy for politicians to embrace media-agitation about “political incorrectness”, old statues, “white privilege”, and “need for reparations”. Our SJW politicians who promote such agenda are conveniently able to dodge the difficult business of true governance: striving for fiscal budgets that balance, tax-rates that don’t strip middle-class homeowners of their equity-interest in their homes, pensions that don’t bankrupt state and local entities, effective policing to combat sky-rocketing crime-rates, educators that actually address chronic underachievement in public schools, etc. Nope, instead our SJW Illinois politicians slyly use silly stuff, like “harm caused by Lincoln statues”, as cudgel to silence the majority… Read more »
All true,yet the dummies keep voting for the same tax and spend democrats!- SO glad i dont reside in chicago or Cook county