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In this age where everything is a protest against Trump, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that about 200 theaters across the country and in other nations plan to show the film version of George Orwell’s 1984 as – you guessed it – a global protest against the Trump presidency.
The “Global Screening Day” protest involved cinemas not only here in the States, but in Canada, Croatia, Sweden, and the UK, according to The Hill – who, interestingly enough sourced Al Jazeera for their report. Dylan Skolnick, co-director of the Cinema Arts Centre on Long Island, and Adam Birnbaum, director of film programing at Connecticut’s Avon Theatre Film Centre are the organizers of this brave protest.
“In particular, this undermining of the concept of facts and the demonization of foreign enemies [by the Trump administration] really resonate in ‘1984,’” Skolnick said.
The event is scheduled for April 4 as a nod to the date Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s novel, begins resisting the Inner Party and Big Brother.
“No one is suggesting that we’re living in Orwell’s world. But the road to that world is people just becoming disengaged and allowing their government to do whatever it wants,” Skolnick said.
Skolnick’s assertion is in contrast to the Obama years, when Leftists…you know…allowed the government to do whatever it wanted.
Oddly enough, the only parallel between the Orwell novel and the Trump administration that The Hill could come up with was the “doublethink” concept echoing Kellyanne Conway’s idiotic “alternative facts” statement.
The Left apparently doesn’t realize that the Orwellian notions that point to their side of the aisle. The idea of “thoughtcrimes” in the book mirror political correctness, which is an obvious tool of the Left. The concept of “2 + 2 = 5” rears its head in ongoing debates on gender and climate – not to mention Leftists’ dismissal of objective truth. Orwell’s “unperson” concept comes straight out of the Communists’ removal of subversive persons from photographs and historical accounts.
“Big Brother” has its parallels in both political parties; look at both the Patriot Act birthed during the George W. Bush years along with the current controversy surrounding Obama administration officials seeking to unmask American names in foreign surveillance records. But the whole idea of the government looking over everybody’s shoulders goes back to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at the height of the Progressive era.
Here’s the thing: 1984 does have some eerie parallels in the 21st century, but the Left doesn’t realize how badly it is engaging in projection when it tries to pin all of the novel-turned-film’s concepts on the Trump White House. If they engaged in a little self-examination, they just might decide to put Orwell back on the bookshelf for a while.