Is Democracy Lost?

[donquixote99]

From Facebook:

You know the quote from George Orwell's 1984: "...imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever." It is spoken by 'O'Brien,' a power-mad torturer, and exists as one of the most terrifying images in literature. It terrifies us because this fiction refers directly to awful reality. We have seen such torture, in the old USSR, and in Nazi Germany, and in many places since, where the powerful practice official sadistic oppression. We have recently seen a knee on a human throat.

However, the sentences preceding the 'boot' are less well known, though no less powerful. The torturer elaborates a manifesto, before reaching that climax, almost any line of which can be taken as a text on the regime that is still, at this writing (Nov 22 2020), trying to cling to power in Washington. In the following passage Orwell's gloating O'Brien states clearly what is implied by a Trump government that builds physical walls to make racist fear and hate permanent reality, by a government that seeks to give life-saving equipment and vaccine to 'red' states while denying 'blue' states, by a government that excites its followers to chants of hate with mock and threat, by a government that made the separation of mother and child deliberate policy:

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred."

O'Brien also states "There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party." Do not imagine the current GOP ever being a 'loyal opposition.' They are not loyal to the Constitution, or to America at all. Their current plots to overturn the election, and therefore constitutional government, are in fact treason.

O'Brien is a sociopath who renounces all human values except sadistic pleasure. The struggle now is to see if any other values--if decency, generosity, loving kindness--can long survive.