Our unpredictable past

“What is the Future of America’s Past” is the ironic title, the ironic question of M. Gessen’s op-ed piece in the Aug. 8 issue of the New York Times. The very first sentence of Gessen’s column is a combination of irony and bitter political humor: “We live in a country with an unpredictable past.” As the author goes on to explain, “This was a saying of the Soviet Union when I was growing up. We never knew which part of our history would be obliterated next.”

The remainder of Gessen’s essay exposes the numerous ways in which our current White House is trying to obliterate our nation’s past: “an executive order titled Reforming Truth and Sanity to American History, in which (the President) directed officials to remove improper ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, to cut funding to ‘programs that degrade shared American values…’”

A paragraph further on Gessen writes, “Trump wants Americans to unlearn what they have come to learn about the history and legacy of enslavement. What his executive orders really promise is to restore is a sense of comfort contained in the most reductive and sanitized stories about the United States — the bliss of ignorance.”

The world that Gessen describes, the now of 2026, is the world of George Orwell’s “1984,” one of the most prophetic books of the twentieth century. Though he wrote it almost 80 years ago, Orwell’s worries in the late 1940s continue to be our worries in 2026: the continuing rule of tyranny in its many forms — political, economic, social — throughout much of our world. Like Orwell, we need to concern ourselves with nothing less than the survival of free, open, democratic societies.

Just three pages into his novel, Orwell informs us that the political party which governs his negative utopia manages to foist three inane slogans upon the mentally numbed populace: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

To a large degree, the struggle of Winston Smith, the hero of “1984,” is the struggle to preserve the English language in the face of the Party’s effort to destroy it. If the Party can succeed in robbing English of its capacity to express a broad range of intellectual and emotional nuance, then its domination of the masses will be total; for a population that lacks the vocabulary to express its political dissatisfaction is a population that can never rebel.

I should point out that Orwell’s concern with the deterioration of the English language is not limited to his novels, “1984” and “Animal Farm.” In a brief but trenchant essay written in 1946 entitled “Politics and the English Language,” he argues that English “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

The aim of all literate individuals is to expand the possibilities of language, to push the written and the spoken word to the furthest reaches of nuance and subtlety, to insist that language be as fully expressive of our humanity as possible. By way of contrast, all too often the intent of today’s politicians is to subvert the very purpose of language – to use language to conceal rather than to reveal, to obfuscate rather than to clarify, to feed us lies rather than to tell us the truth. Far too many of today’s politicians treat our language with contempt.

More than four decades have passed since the year 1984; yet the perversion of our political discourse would seem to be as persistent as the common cold, though far more dangerous. Given the oppressive verbal dreariness or at times the lunatic ravings emanating from Washington, we Americans who care about the survival of our democracy as well as the survival of an honest history of our democracy have a task to perform: to rescue our language from all those who seek to pervert it, to proclaim with every fiber of our beings, that war is never peace, that freedom is never slavery, that ignorance is never strength.

To echo the words of M. Gessen, let us labor to make sure that our United States never becomes a nation with an unpredictable past.

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org.