ILLUSIONS, HALF-TRUTHS AND MASKS. Keywords: Orwellian, George Orwell, Karl Marx, Marx-Engels, Marxism, Fabian Society, Keynes, Fascism, Extreme Right, American Communism

ILLUSIONS, HALF-TRUTHS AND MASKS

A meditation about the new rise of communism in America

By Xuan Quen Santos

PART  I

“An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.”

“The Lion and the Unicorn”, 1940

Very few people know or recognize the name of Eric Arthur Blair. He hid behind a mask that is recognized around the globe.

Blair was born in Bengal, India in1903, to an English colonial government agent in the opium trade and a mother of French origin. With his two sisters, his mother moved him to England for education. His academic achievement led to scholarships to Eton, and later to Wellington College, both prestigious aristocratic institutions. At the age of 23, without a clear goal in life, he joined the Imperial Police in Burma. After five years and a lackluster career, he was discharged in poor health, a condition that marked the rest of his life. He returned to England and lived under financial pressures as a writer.  He was burdened by the deteriorating European political climate, disenchanted with the colonial system and frustrated by the rigid class divisions that still exist today in England. He briefly worked as a teacher, then travelled to Paris and Spain contributing to newspapers and magazines, and did some radio for the BBC. After World War II, he became a recluse and lived until he died in the harsh climate of northern Scotland. He claimed to have devoted his life to “make political writing into an art”. He died in 1950 at the age of 46 of advanced tuberculosis, still living in relative poverty. Why would anybody make any effort to remember his name?

Eric Arthur Blair, English journalist

Blair lived during the first half of the XX century. This is the period of European history when the forecasted death of capitalism was declared after the horrors of WW I that was followed by the world financial crisis. The Spanish Influenza pandemic further ravaged the population with the returning soldiers. Hyperinflations and the calamity of the Great Depression bruised deeply the spirit of the West. International socialism (Soviet communism) was on the rise competing with national socialism (Hitler and Mussolini). The Fabian socialists in England and the Social Democrats of Germany had become infatuated with the idea of a peaceful “mixed economy” adopting the ideas of Lord Maynard Keynes.  World War II was the inevitable consequence. During this period, war changed from swords and horses to airplanes and the atomic bomb.

“Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Have you heard the phrase “Big Brother is watching you”? It became an alert since the mid twenty century of how totalitarian governments surveille, spy and monitor their subjects. It used to refer to violating mail, phone tapping, hidden microphones and cameras, and even neighbors, lovers, and family members serving as spies. The XXI century has seen the methods of surveillance evolve with the aid of technology into countless ways of seemingly innocent information-gathering by the authorities. Your own personal devices may be activated to spy on you. Your electronic files and communications are harvested and mined. Your profile is created from multiple government and private sources: ID numbers, your purchases, credit records, health records, tax records, banking operations, utility bills, travelling… The security cameras, even doorbells, (domestic, commercial, and on streets and roads) can be tapped to search for you. Even your trash can be examined.

I am not referring only to what totalitarian regimes do. Under the guise of needing information to protect the homeland from acts of terrorism, or even from people who did not want to be vaccinated against the Wuhan Covid 19 virus, the governments best known for respecting the rights of the citizens have been tempted and corrupted by “the need to know”. It is a policy to be expected from governments that have no limits to their power, but it was not expected from the Federal Government of the United States of America. The abuses of the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris administrations are just beginning to be discovered and investigated. Speaking of the rights to privacy, whether established in the Constitution or not, has become a form of meaningless political noise when we confront the reality in which we now live. Most of us have given away our privacy rights knowingly but not really caring.

Can you identify what “double-think” or “double-speak” mean? These phrases illustrate the manipulation of perceptions and thoughts, the alteration of reality by changing the meaning of words used in common language. You are familiar with these recent manipulations: a) Peaceful demonstration for violent riot, b) Gender preference for natural sex, c) Fighting disinformation for censorship, d) The border is secure for open border, e) DEI- diversity, equity and inclusion for DEI- divisiveness, exclusion and injustice, f) Threat to democracy for the democratic party is losing, g) Withdrawing from Afghanistan was a military success for the defeat in Afghanistan was shameful…  Americans have another word for this play of words. It is well known in Madison Avenue, Wall Street and the dark halls of Washington DC. It is the specialty of political consultants. It is called spin, a word that to me is naively benign when the full implications of these governmental policies are understood.

“Big Brother” and “double-speak” entered the cultural scene thru the pen of George Orwell. He was a British writer and prominent member of the Fabian Society that promoted socialism through cultural revolution since the late XIX century. He published “Animal Farm” in 1945. It is a satirical novella critical of the soviet regime of Stalin. By then, it had become obvious to all socialists the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state that used terror and control of all property to stay in power, and not the announced “workers’ paradise”. Orwell introduced his iconic clever phrases in 1949 in the futuristic dystopian novel “1984”. His vision was a world controlled by three gigantic totalitarian states permanently at war. Oceania included the Americas, Ireland, Great Britain, Australia, and South Africa. Eurasia covered most of continental Europe and Russia. Eastasia unified China, Japan, Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia. Orwell sets his main character and events in Oceania, a country ruled by Big Brother, leader of the party of The Brotherhood. The story illustrates the use of double-speak with official slogans such as “War is Peace”, "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strength”, "Ministry of Truth", and “Thought-crime". The main character of the novel is Winston Smith. He is employed in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, and his assignment is to rewrite historical documents and past news, so they match the official spin needed to justify Big Brother’s current decisions.

Your own smart phone, your PC, your baby-monitor,
your camera doorbell, your smart TV, Alexa, Siri,
your car...they are all watching you!

Since Orwell’s disappearance in 1950, it is estimated that his two books critical of totalitarian governments have sold in excess of 41 million copies from just his two famous novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Both books have been produced as movies. There is now a cult of followers around the world and a Foundation with his name has continued to maintain these books and some of his other writings in print. “Orwellian” has become an adjective. George Orwell is known worldwide, and his two famous novels are required reading for anybody interested in the oppressive excesses of the power of government, regardless of its label and ideology.

Roman god Janus (Ianus) a classic metaphor
with many interpretations. In the end, it
is a two-faced character

D. J. Taylor (2003), one of many Orwell’s admirers and biographers, describes him as a Janus character, with two personalities and two histories. He wrote, “there were two Orwells in evidence… One was an intrepid voyager among the subterraneans, to whom scraps of social detail attached themselves like insects to flypaper. The other was an upper-middle-class man with a conscience”.

The Roman god Ianus is always represented with two faces looking in opposite directions, one is usually old and the other young. It is the representation of the transition from the past to the future; it may be interpreted as foresight and prophetic. I do not share Taylor’s admiration, but in a different way, the duality fits. His most life-changing experience was the period he pretended to be a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. In fact, he was a communist that volunteered to fight in 1936. The Republican side had been taken over by different communist factions. He enlisted in the militia of an anti-Stalinist socialist party, the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). The pro-Soviet republicans accused them of “fascists” and fought them. The struggles for power turned out to be the same even among comrades hiding under the mask of republicanism.

The famous Orwell had two names. In real life, he was Eric Arthur Blair, the frustrated quiet bureaucrat that fixed the news for the censors of the BBC and London newspapers during the war. He spent most of his life as a writer-for-hire earning about $ 15.00 a week. In 1946, at the time of the first edition of “Animal Farm”, he estimated his best possible income could reach $ 4,000 per year. Blair-Orwell, once dead, became a best-seller and his widow, heirs and subsequent copyright owners became very rich.

Orwell, the half-truth, the mask, has become an icon of the counter-culture
critical of totalitarian regimes but with faith in socialism.
Like sheep led by the wolf in sheep's clothing

Blair is dead and few people remember him. Orwell, his mask, is an icon in world literature. Revered by socialists as a prophet against the totalitarian state his novels describe as extreme and also admired by freedom seekers who know that all forms of socialist schemes will inevitably end as totalitarian. The more the state plans (the bureaucrats in control of power), the less the individual persons can plan. Socialism is but a half truth, a mask that conceals its true nature.

“An illusion can become a half-truth; a mask can alter the expression of a face.”

This quote from his essay "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" illustrates better the duality of Blair-Orwell. It is also a prequel to double-speak. The 1941 essay expressed his critical opinions on the situation in Britain during the World War II era. He describes it as almost ready for the socialist revolution.  The title alludes to the symbols of the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom, meaning the illusion and the mask: a monarchy at the top of a socialist government; a socialist-monarchy, an oxymoron of contradictory half-truths; a mask. It was the English socialist (labor) party following the policy of “appeasement” that opened the borders of Europe to the rolling armies of Hitler, to the expansion of other totalitarian regimes and to World War II.

I see Blair-Orwell’s quote under a different lens. He shared the Fabian socialist vision shaped by the conditions and conclusions that I described earlier for the European first half of the XX century. They declared capitalism dead (the open and free market economy), and the options in their model were international socialism (Soviet controlled world communism) they labeled extreme left, and the national socialisms (Hitler’s NAZI party, literally meaning national socialism, and Mussolini’s Fascism, from the ancient Roman Fasces patriotic tradition) they labeled extreme right. The supremacy of the control of the state, whether extreme left or extreme right in their model, comes from a former communist that refused to accept the idea that the future of world socialism had to be controlled from Moscow. Thus, the petty difference between international socialism and national socialism began. "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state", is the essential idea of socialism. It was made famous by Mussolini who thought the Roman heritage was a better option to the Bolshevik vodka. For his opposition to Stalin, he was expelled from the Communist Party. NAZI and Fascism are just other masks for the same idea. Socialism is the mask that conceals total control by the state apparatus, the origin of the adjective totalitarian. Mussolini was just being honest. The popular political model and labels of extreme left, extreme right and the middle-way are a half-truth that leaves all other possibilities of political organization out.

L to R: Lord Bertrand Russell, Lord John Maynard Keynes, H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw
Communist, socialist, racist and eugenist, all atheists. Celebrities contemporaneous of Blair-Orwell

Many naive and romantic literati like Blair-Orwell had become militants in the Fabian Society, sharing their world vision. Their goal was to use culture, not a violent revolution, to spread the socialist ideas. Blair-Orwell committed to make socialist political literature “an art”. He lived obscured by the long shadows cast by famous Fabians like G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Potter), and Eleanor Marx (Daughter of Karl Marx). At that time, the Fabian celebrities were Lord, Viscount Bertrand Russell and Lord, Baron John Maynard Keynes. Russell, a mathematician, atheist champion, and philosopher is better known as a communist political activist, a fact illustrated by the topics of the literary works the Swedish Academy listed for awarding him in 1950 the Nobel Prize in Literature. Keynes, the idolized economics wizard that American thurifers had labeled “the savior of capitalism” was credited for the policies adopted to fight The Great Depression. He gave respectability to middle-way socialism with the mask of macroeconomics, national accounts, and the idea that the purchasing power of money drives the economy, regardless of how the money came about. One contemporaneous disdainful German free market economist correctly labelled it “inflationary collectivism”.

The Fabian Society was clubbish, snob and full of have-been rich lords and barons. They had founded the Labor party, a name used to disguise their real socialist inclination. They also founded the London School of Economics, initially a hotbed of socialist activists. Mob mega-funder George Soros, GA Dem U. S. Senator Jon Ossoff, and even the ultra-Dem representative at FOX News Jessica Tarlov are more recent celebrity alumni. Always conscious of his “middle-class” status, Blair- Orwell did not fit. He was neither an academic snob nor a street agitator, an anarchist or a laborer. His political sympathies were, nevertheless, with what was called “democratic socialism” by some and “social-democracy” by others; the middle way that seems to result from a peaceful and reasonable compromise. These nebulous and imprecise terms are nothing but “double-speak”, a perfect mask for a half-truth. It may seem surprising to find these radicals out in the open without concealing their intentions. The Fabian Society has existed since 1884. Since then, its logo has been “a wolf in sheep’s skin”. A mask that is not a mask is the perfect disguise.

The emblem of the Fabian Society
A wolf disguised in sheep's skin

The mixed economy, the middle-way socialism, the peaceful way to communism, is nothing else but admitting the failure of the Marxist-Engels model with some lipstick.

You probably know the idiom of putting lipstick on a pig. The big mask was crafted by Lord Keynes who wrote a catalog of macroeconomic definitions and mathematical formulas in the new language of double-speak. You hear this non-sense spewing from the 1,000 professional Ph. D.s in economics and researchers of the Federal Reserve. Their Klingon-like verbiage is nothing but a disguise. Just like their linear analytical model of political systems is in obvious logical error as all three options are just versions of the same fundamental idea, and it leaves no room for other political-economic systems, so is their Keynesian economic model a fraud and contrary to the original intent for monetary policy clearly declared in the Federal Constitution of the United States. Nevertheless, these models are used today by academics, by the press and new media, and even by the most unsuspecting opponents of socialism and the defenders of the ideas of liberty and personal responsibility that find no room for their voices. The continued use of these models only reinforces the arguments of the enemies of the free and open society.

 The biggest error of Blair-Orwell, or perhaps a clever strategy, was using these models for his dystopian prophecy. For contrast, he imagined and painted for us a future world of mega-totalitarian, very similar states that reinforce each other by being permanently at war. This scary Bogeyman is the mask of the half-truth. The implicit option to the naive reasonable reader, back in the mind of Blair-Orwell, was to support the middle-way to prevent the emergence of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The alternative induced into the reader’s mind is the perfect double-speak concept of the “socialist market economy” of democratic socialists/social-democrats. It does not sound extremist. By the way, that is the official name given to their system by the present-day rulers of the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, that control The People’s Republic of China, PRC.

No one has claimed that Blair-Orwell was a serious theorist of political systems or an expert economist. He never did. He was a craftsman writer that made word-art. Nevertheless, his essay “The Lion and The Unicorn” has brief expositions of what he believed on these topics. On capitalism: “What this war (WW II) has demonstrated is that private capitalism – that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit- does not work. It cannot deliver the goods.” “At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always wasted surplus, and always unemployment.”  On socialism: “On a socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the amount of labor and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the moment.” On the coming change: “The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily a difference of technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the other as one might install a piece of machinery in a factory, and then carry on as before, with the same people in positions of control. Obviously, there is also needed a complete shift of power. New blood, new men, new ideas- in the true sense of the word, a revolution.”

These lines are obviously the type of spin that is repeated over and over by mobs until it is believed by those that want to believe it by faith. It becomes a religious cult. They are the illusions that become half-truths that eventually become the masks that hide reality. Blair-Orwell was a political activist, not a theorist. In the essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946) he describes of others what perfectly fits his work: “Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

To some, Blair-Orwell’s dystopia seems prophetic in 2025, much like it did in 1948 after the horrors of WW II, when it first appeared. It did not seem so in 1984, in the middle of the Reagan-Thatcher-Wojtyla revolution of liberty and free markets that cracked the Berlin Wall and brought down the Soviet Empire of terror. But it again seems so now, in 2025.  Today, most countries of Europe are either controlled by socialist parties, or by coalitions of socialists, communists and greens. England, a hundred years later, is ruled by the same socialist party government with the mask of a parasitic puppet king. Canada and Australia are controlled by liberal or labor parties, which are masks for the socialist mixed economy they inherited from their mother country. Russia remains a totalitarian regime, but without the mask of Marxist ideology. China and North Korea are still in the ideological repressive fog of Stalin-Maoism. Most countries in Africa are still trapped by all forms of socialist and communist anachronisms leftover after decolonization. Either they adopted the socialist schemes of their European masters (India and Pakistan) or they are ruled by the violent revolutionaries that filled the vacuum of power created by the empires’ departures after WW II (Ghana, Guinea, Tanzania, and Senegal, South Africa…); or outright communist regimes (Ethiopia, Somalia, Benin, Uganda, Congo, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe…). In Latin America, the former banana republics are now Kung Pao client-states or are ruled by formerly Marxist guerrillas that were inserted into the political system as a way to bring a mask of peace to the region after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Remnants of that era’s intrusion are Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.  The odd models are a nebulous association of some countries where their socialist politics are supported by the underworld of illicit drugs, such as Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.  

What is most worrisome is the present condition of the United States of America. The barbarians flooded the gates opened by President Biden, the self-proclaimed “most-liberal President in U. S.” history. The tag “liberal” has been grotesquely used as the mask of socialism, particularly in the United States, with no relation to the idea of liberty. The official policies of Keynesian tools of self-destruction were abused and accelerated under the half-truth of the Wuhan Covid 19 pandemic. The most prestigious academic centers have incubated for three generations the enemies within. The mobs have now been released under any political excuse to undermine the American system. New York City will soon have its second clearly communist mayor. Di Blasio was first. If that happens, the mask created by the American socialists will finally fall. They label their disguised policies as “Democracy”.

 
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves"

The phrase originates in the Sermon on The Mountain by Jesus recorded in Mathew 7:15

Fabians adopted their logo in honor of the Roman General Fabius Maximus, 

known for a military strategy where pitched battles and frontal assaults are avoided 

in favor of wearing down an opponent through a war of attrition and deceit

Maybe Blair-Orwell’s vision and the Fabian method of concealment are about to succeed. Or maybe not.

The apparent success of the Fabian Society’s goal is not the result of any of Blair-Orwell’s writing. It is clearly the result that Keynes’ ideas were promoted by the socialist government of President Franklin Roosevelt in the post WW II period. They shaped the reformed Federal Reserve, the Marshall plan, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. At the same time, Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s wife, promoted the adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is another magnum opus of socialist double-speak welfarism that expands into the world the agenda FDR imposed on the USA during the Great Depression. The UN as an international organization and its many appendices are controlled by socialist have-been politicians from all around the world. A survey of the heads of all the UN and related international agencies would be very revealing. Keynes ideas are now the “scientific” support of the central banks in most countries. We are in the age of inflationary government expansion as the masked road to socialism.

Communist propaganda, literature and manuals are easily accessible
in college campuses

The Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Mao-Fidel's methods of very visible violence have been substituted by the soft-violence implicit in a masked bureaucracy that controls economic policy, information and all money matters. Destructive high taxes and inflation have replaced the Molotov cocktails and bullets. But there is hope.

Masked socialists that double-speak in Keynesian language know they can’t claim victory.

They know their idea is fundamentally flawed, but they are caught in a trap of their own making. If a logical construct is based on erroneous foundations, the whole edifice will soon fall. This is the parable of the house built on sand. Without solid foundations, when it floods, the house will soon fall. The flood has come in many waves, and it is rising.