IN George Orwell’s 1984 the main character, Citizen Smith, is a functionary of a left-wing totalitarian regime in the Britain that has become Airstrip One.
The warnings from Orwell’s dystopia have of course become clichés of political discourse, but it is nevertheless a work worth returning to, best read in conjunction with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World since together they offer a comprehensive survey of totalitarian possibilities that neither wholly captures alone.
Complacency, wilful blindness, the distractions of mere sensation as doom advances characterise some of the conditions of the inter-war period in which Huxley was writing. Orwell’s masterpiece was written in the warm embers of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War.
The division between the two texts is on the nature of the tyranny to come. Orwell’s tyranny is shaped by the war, a prediction of a ‘boot stamping on a human face – for ever’. This is a tyranny of force, both bureaucratic and militaristic.
The kind described by Huxley is more subtle. It is a pharmaceutical tyranny of free love, where drugs dull the senses and distract the mind and base drives are gratified outside any human context.
Orwell’s future beats people into submission and makes those who do not comply disappear. Huxley’s future tempts people to self-erase in a welter of sensation and pleasure.
Both visions are relevant. A hedonistic flight from personal responsibility has invited a Big Government new world order, yet there is still a suggestion that somehow violence may still be deployed against those whom technology and social conditioning hasn’t pacified.
Orwell isn’t so simplistic as to say that force alone maintains the dystopia he presents. The daily ‘Two Minutes of Hate’ shows how people must be psychologically conditioned to desire an object of loathing. It is utterly fundamental to Big Brother’s control. It cultivates the conditions for people to be seized at night and sent to some prison or marched off to be murdered. It is Citizen Smith’s job to make them disappear from the record. Everything such people said and did is erased. This memory holing concept is a prescient, powerful and relevant part of 1984. The revision and editing of history, or of events as they happen, are the prerequisites for the violence.
Control of language is as much the topic of 1984 as the use of violence, because the first leads to the second. Cancel culture, selective reporting and deliberate omission, partisan and political redefinitions of common meanings, emerged in the Soviet Union and were brilliantly explored by Orwell in his essays on political language as well as in this book. The memory hole is seen in the Soviet photograph with purged leaders excised, in the covering up of scandals today, and in the refusal to be honest about crime, terrorism, and demographic replacement and its fruits.
One might say that the whole of Western civilisation is memory-holed in our university lecture halls and in routine mainstream media avoidances of truth in the most pressing issues of the day.
The19-page internal BBC document exposing the reality of such fundamental dishonesty on a range of topics should be seen in this context.
It accused the BBC of editing a Donald Trump speech for a Panorama programme to falsely suggest he incited violence on January 6, 2021, by splicing together two remarks made 54 minutes apart and omitting his call for a peaceful march.
It also alleges systemic anti-Israel bias in BBC Arabic’s coverage of the Gaza conflict, including the omission of stories about Israeli hostages and the repeated airing of pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic commentators. It exposes the censorship of critical viewpoints on transgender ideology.
Yet former and current BBC staff and their political and media allies are scrambling to downplay the fact that the BBC lied and that it had severely breached its own supposed standards of basic integrity, professionalism and ethics.
First, these aren’t just allegations. The evidence is incontestable. The footage spliced together different comments to present an entirely different meaning. You cannot do that accidentally, but must choose where to clip the film and where to reconnect it. The BBC did it in a way that presented the opposite of what Trump said, the opposite of the reality they had filmed.
The grounds on which they defend this are truly pathetic, like this:
Are we to really believe that this is not a scandal because nobody at the time noticed the BBC was lying? Are we being told that lying was perfectly OK because it was a really successful lie?
Ever wonder why so many people in the UK hate Donald Trump? Perhaps this is why. Because BBC lies about Donald Trump are very successful lies. Nobody complained because almost everyone assumed that the BBC didn’t dare edit footage to invert the truth so shamefully. Only a few knew enough to distrust such presentations.
And that leads us to the source of these revelations. Michael Prescott is not a Trump supporter. He’s not an alternative media podcaster. He’s not an outsider with a grudge, a Trump official or appointee, a follower or ally of MAGA. He’s not a right-wing influencer, a ‘far right extremist’ or any of the usual labels applied to silence independent voices who expose mainstream media dishonesty.
He’s a respectable, fully credentialled person from within the same system, the same class and the same profession as the rest of the BBC media staff and from which BBC defenders are drawn too.
Prescott spent 17 years as a mainstream media professional, including as chief political correspondent and political editor at the Sunday Times. He’s Oxbridge-educated and followed an almost textbook route from university to journalism to high level corporate PR.
The situation is very clear: the BBC committed the grossest imaginable ethical offences as a news provider, doctoring evidence to support an effort to impeach and imprison an American president.
All of the people in this campaign, politicians and journalists alike, have lied by omission, lied by distortion, and lied by using propaganda techniques described in 1984. That is what has been exposed, and that is what Orwell told us is the classic behaviour of totalitarian regimes of the left. And he was right.
The BBC and its friends are in denial. Trying to present the exposure of their indefensible behaviour as a ‘right-wing assault on the BBC’ adds even more bias to that which has gone before, more distortions and lies to an institution steeped in and stinking of both.
When the leader of a British political party rushes to change the narrative on the BBC’s exposed actions to a story about defending ‘our BBC’ from Trump, or when the BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness insists that her ‘hard-working’ journalists have done nothing wrong even as she departs in disgrace, we see a refusal to face what the BBC’s actions really mean.
Our Citizen Smiths don’t struggle with stirrings of conscience, human feelings of disgust at what they are doing or what the regime demands of them. They don’t feel dirty when the Two Minutes of Hate inflames their most bestial desires and don’t feel shame about the clipping and editing of history and events to exclude facts and present fictions.
They feel that they are put-upon hard-working professionals, treated unfairly because their friends and political allies have every right to lie about their enemies and political rivals and call that ‘news’.
Of course, if they had presented what they were doing as opinion, it might have been different. A person can select for emphasis, and must do so in any written text. Everyone will have a point to make with any political piece. Satire and Philippics aren’t bound by literal truth, though the facts upon which opinion rests must be true.
That’s because the facts are sacred. This is especially the case with news. As soon as you say a report is objective, that this is to the best of my knowledge a presentation of the facts, this is not my view of the world but what actually definitely happened . . . millions receive the report on that basis.
Combine that with editing and splicing the thing to portray the exact opposite of what it originally said, or hand it over to terrorists to produce, and you are doing something vile and poisonous. Defending and deflecting only compounds and deepens your dishonesty and the lack of public trust.
Our progressive leftist leaders, politicians, journalists and news organisations do what Citizen Smith did for a living, but they do not do it as victims. They aren’t caught in the system, feeling trapped, fearful, as Orwell’s character was. For them, the presentation of lies, the enjoyment of a status connected to those lies, the virtue of discarding old virtues, all these are, in a far more Huxleyan sense, the soma of their existence.
They are addicted to the lies they find pleasurable, and exposure of truth about their actions is like depriving an addict of his drug. They intend to distract and confuse us, but they are users of their own supply.
A longer version of this article appeared in Jupplandia on November 11, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
