[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
The trailer for ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ begins with a heavy voiceover declaring, “when I sit down to write a book, I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose”.
Two minutes later there is a photo of a BLM activist holding up an “I can’t breathe” sign.
Such unintentional irony pervades a documentary which claims that what George Orwell really wanted to warn about in ‘1984’ were the dangers of free speech and political dissent.
Not Communism.
An Orwell documentary that treats ‘misinformation’ as the sort of threat that Orwell was warning about, rather than an Orwellian term for demonizing speech and providing a pretext for government propaganda and censorship of the kind that we see in ‘1984’, has lost the plot.
But ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ has an entirely different plot aimed at turning Orwell into Big Brother.
‘ORWELL 2+2=5′ was written and directed by Raoul Peck: a Haitian radical activist who made a movie celebrating Communist mass murderer Patrice Lumumba. George Orwell struggled against Soviet Communism. Peck made a hero out of the mass murderer whose name was on the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow: the Soviet Union’s training ground for third world dictators and terrorists including Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega, PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Peck’s previous movie ‘The Young Karl Marx’ was hailed as a “Communist bromance”. Orwell became famous because he was willing to criticise his own side. Peck only knows how to prop up his side and attack the other side. That makes him the worst possible candidate for the job.
Even though George Orwell had been writing about a leftist tyranny, the documentary executes its own version of adding 2 + 2 and coming up with 5 by focusing on democratically leaders on the ‘right’, including Trump, India’s Modi, Hungary’s Orban or Israel’s Netanyahu, as his examples of ‘Orwellianism’. What would Orwell have made of the Labour Party’s mass censorship and arrests for political dissent across the UK? Don’t ask ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ which contends that the real threat isn’t Keir Starmer’s mass arrests but milquetoast Nigel Farage.
In a world where the British government arrests people for ‘misinformation’ and has passed laws forcing its propaganda to have a place of pride on smart TVs, Peck can’t find any other parallel.
Are there no dictators on the Left? Even Xi and Putin are only there because as Peck had complained during his ‘Young Marx’ press tour “Russia, China, are totally capitalist.” CEOs can be “dictators” practicing slavery, but not Communist Cuba or kingdoms in the Muslim world.
This isn’t Orwell. It’s Orwellian.
Unintentionally true to its name, ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ keeps adding up 2+2 to get 5.
In ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’, mass censorship of social media isn’t the problem (it’s the solution), but the excessive freedom of speech on social media is what truly poses a threat to freedom. The documentary implicitly treats the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct 7 as something other than war (presumably it was peace) while Israel fighting back is war. Peck, who claimed that “I want people to look closer at the ugly side of Israel” wants to use “War is Peace” to attack Israel. Instead he only ends up affirming the cynical double standards behind Orwell’s anti-slogan.
Similarly mass surveillance of political opponents on the right by the left in America and Europe is freedom. By the time Peck starts warning about “misinformation” from conservative media and the dangers of online free speech, ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ has become Big Brother.
But ORWELL 2+2=5’s malignant genius is turning George Orwell into Big Brother, a big black and white head on a screen, reciting ominous phrases (actually being played by the actor who played Nick Brody on ‘Homeland’) and urging us to fight against and hate various groups like Republicans and Jews as the enemies of all that Mr. Peck believes in. Rather than an expose of lies, Orwell’s anti-slogans like “Slavery is Freedom” and “War is Peace” become propaganda that could just as easily have been recited by Big Brother accusing everyone else of his crimes.
It’s the ultimate tone deaf Orwellian reading of Orwell being falsely billed as the “ultimate and comprehensive documentary film about the exceptional writer George Orwell.”
‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ is not here to expose lies, but to push them, hijacking George Orwell’s legacy in the most Orwellian manner imaginable. That begins with the bowdlerized opening quote about exposing lies which alters what Orwell said and removes the context of why he said it.
George Orwell was explaining that he wrote ‘Animal Farm’ and why he was going to write ‘1984’ to expose what could not be said about Soviet Communism using the medium of fiction while being impelled by a need to denounce Soviet lies. ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ strips away the context and uses the long dead writer as a club to attack President Trump, Bush, police officers and Israel.
Removing the specific political context from terms like “lie”, “war” and “freedom” and then aiming them at political enemies while pretending that nothing has changed isn’t Orwell, it’s Orwellian. Universalizing and updating Orwell was the usual approach of leftists who were uncomfortable with what George Orwell, an English writer named Eric Blair, was really saying about their complicity with a radical leftist totalitarian state and their schemes to censor his writing.
The “lie” that Orwell was referring to was the lie that pro-Soviet leftists were telling about Communism. And the lies that they were telling about him to silence him and end his career.
“Orwell has been put in a little box as an anti-Stalinist or an anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian regime,” Peck complained, while arguing that his documentary ‘universalizes’ him. More aptly it puts Orwell in a box and turns him into a shill for every establishment leftist cause.
‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ isn’t really about the writer, it’s about weaponizing him under the guise of ‘updating’ him. George Orwell was a perpetual rebel who spent much of his life rebelling against leftist dogma because he tried to do his best to follow first principles. The concept is foreign to Raoul Peck who can only churn out militant agitprop to radicalize his fellow bourgeois.
What would Orwell’s positions be on some of the issues he’s employed against in the doc?
Take J6, a major feature of ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’, which depicts the protests and riots, rather than the mass surveillance, relentless crackdown and militarization of D.C. under the guise of “protecting democracy” that followed in its wake, as the true Orwellian offense. But George Orwell was writing about the dangers of totalitarianism, not the danger of political protests.
That’s why Orwell could deplore Oswald Mosley, a British fascist, and support locking him up when a Nazi invasion appeared imminent, but also argue that detaining him when the danger had passed “was an infringement of every principle we are supposedly fighting for.”
Orwell might well have been no fan of Trump, but also would have warned about the rather obvious threat of totalitarianism from sending in the troops to occupy the nation’s capital, mass censorship of skepticism about the election and hefty prison terms for the same behavior that was hailed when it was being conducted by people on the left side of the spectrum.
Anyone claiming to speak in Orwell’s name ought to be able to do at least as much.
The mature Orwell was capable of both outrage and principled nuance. He was constantly engaged in self-examination that is entirely foreign to the heavy-handed propaganda of ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’. Take Orwell’s confession that, “I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself.”
This “simple theory”, which Orwell whacks away in one casual sentence, is the heart and soul of not only ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’, but Raoul Peck’s entire great obsession with ‘colonialism’.
‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ is cheap propaganda of the kind that the real George Orwell always hated the way that he hated the simplistic sloganeering and distorted reality produced by Marxism.
The opening quote about Orwell writing books to counter lies is used to imply that the writer believed in the supremacy of politics over art because all art is political. This tenet of Social Realism has been at the center of modern woke culture wars (in opposition to ‘ars gratia artis’ that art should exist for art’s sake.) When you hear the insistence that all books, movies and music is inherently political, you are hearing this argument being applied to modern pop culture.
But did Orwell really believe? Of course he didn’t.
“The Marxist critic, by reducing everything to economic causation, destroys the meaning of literature, which is not just a reflection of class but of human experience,” Orwell warned.
George Orwell, or rather Eric Blair, was a man, not a set of political slogans. Raoul Peck boasts of exclusive access to Orwell’s letters, but all he does with that is use Orwell’s literary pseudonym to go after political opponents on the grounds of their favored economic theory.
Writers and directors are supposed to create art rooted in the human experience. Peck is capable only of distilling political theories into on-screen tirades. He isn’t fighting Big Brother.
‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ is Big Brother.