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    Authoritarianism is putting everything we value in danger

    Authoritarianism is putting everything we value in danger

    The future of all that we cherish is on the line and we—all of us—have to fight like hell to protect democracy, human decency, and a livable planet. Our reporters are working overtime to cover the onslaught of horrors as well as the resistance movements rising up to fight back. We must be prepared to do battle over the long haul. Will you donate to our Mid-Year Campaign to keep the progressive, nonprofit journalism of Common Dreams alive?

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    Authoritarianism is putting everything we value in danger

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    george orwell

    President Trump Signs Executive Orders At The White House

    Is Trump Taking Foreign Policy Advice From 1984?

    Trump’s vision resembles Orwell’s ultimate horror: a world divided into three great continental blocs, with humanity held in thrall to omnipotent leaders like Big Brother through endless wars against an ever-changing enemy.

    Alfred W. Mccoy
    Apr 14, 2025

    Most of us can remember at least a few troubling scenes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party’s memorably grim slogans, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.” But for me, the most disturbing image of all—and I first read the book in high school—was the “Two Minutes Hate,” aroused among the public by threatening images on giant video screens.

    Within just 30 seconds, Orwell wrote, “A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” As those moments of hate continued, what appeared was “the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched out of their seats.”

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    Opinion
    donald trump
    Gulf of Mexico shown on map in 2025

    Defending the Gulf of Mexico From Trump's Totalitarianism

    How serious is Trump’s Orwellian effort? Can it really succeed in reshaping public discourse? We can hope not. But can we be sure?

    Jeffrey C. Isaac
    Feb 17, 2025

    “If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America. I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is. The Secretary of the Interior has made that designation . . . and Apple has recognized that, Google has recognized that, pretty much every other outlet in this room has recognized that body of water as the Gulf of America, and its very important to this administration that we get that right.” —White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking at her February 12 daily press briefing.

    Back in 1997, in the dim pre-history of American Greatness, David King published a book entitled The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. In almost two hundred pages of photos, it demonstrated the ways that Stalin’s Soviet regime literally erased historical events and persons no longer considered to be consistent with the dictat of The Leader.

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    gulf of mexico
    Woman walks through Flood debris in Spain

    2084: Creating a Dystopian Hell on Earth That Even Orwell Could Not Imagine

    Honestly, who would have guessed that we humans might prove capable of making1984 seem like an upbeat fantasy?

    Tom Engelhardt
    Nov 12, 2024

    Honestly, what would George Orwell have written about this planet of ours, four decades after that ominous year 1984 passed from his fiction into history?

    And yes, in case you think that, as in his novel 1984, published in 1949, a year before his death and just as the Cold War (a term he was the first to use in an essay in October 1945) was getting underway, our world, too, seems to be heading for a nightmarish future, I suspect that — were he capable of returning to this planet of ours — he wouldn’t disagree with you for a moment. Phew! Sorry for such a long, complicated sentence, but little wonder given the way our world is now tying itself in knots. Yes, just last week, with the election of climate-change denier and (to steal from Orwell) our very own Big Brother Donald Trump as president of the United States (again!), we just paved the way for an instant all-American nightmare. Still, even without him, the world was anything but peachy keen.

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    war & peace

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