The information leaked by Snowden should cause alarm as should the loose legal oversight governing the NSA’s massive data-mining campaign. Nevertheless, the invocations of Orwell are not unlike Bush-era claims of an emerging strain of American fascism, or the Tea Party’s frequent panting that Obama is indistinguishable from Fidel Castro. A few points of similarity, like the monitoring of huge amounts of data without sufficient congressional or legal oversight, do not establish the literary analogy. The rule here is simple: If you are invoking 1984 in a country in which 1984 is available for purchase and can be freely deployed as a rhetorical device, you likely don’t understand the point of 1984.
Which is why The Nation magazine’s declaration that America has become a “modern-day Stasi state,” an idea negated by the not-insignificant fact that such a criticism wouldn’t have been legally allowed in East Germany, is so absurd. As is the heavy breathing of historian (and Oliver Stone co-author) Peter Kuznick, who recently told an audience that we were living in the “United Stasi of America.” (In East Germany, a close approximation of Orwell’s nightmare surveillance state, the country’s culture minister claimed 1984 was an acid commentary on “the [West’s] multinational firms and their bloodhounds,” though possession of the book was a crime.)
Join the conversation as a VIP Member