Front Burner - How Orwell’s words became our reality

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Writer George Orwell has had a major impact on the way we talk about and view the world. His book 1984 introduced us to words and phrases like “thoughtcrime,” “doublespeak” and “Big Brother,” which have become common parts of our vocabulary. Seventy five years after his death, his ideas around mass surveillance and propaganda continue to resonate in a world of Big Tech, challenges to democracy, and distrust of institutions.The new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 by filmmaker Raoul Peck explores the origin of Orwell’s ideas, and how they connect to political events like the January 6th insurrection, the persecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and the invasion of Ukraine.Raoul Peck joins guest host Daemon Fairless to talk about Orwell’s life, his words, and the ideological battle over his ideas.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Hi, I'm Damon Fairless, in for Jamie Pusson. I think it's fair to say that there's no author who gets more attention in our public and political conversation than George Orwell. It's very Orwellian. I've used that term before in the context of this administration's approach to science. I think I'm going to go back and reread George Orwell. I mean, this kind of double speak makes no sense at all. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the president controls the past.

That's from George Orwell's 1984. This president wants to control the present by having people change the past. You're telling me you're going to get Sissa out of the business of policing, narrative control. I mean, narrative control, good Lord. I mean, what could be more Orwellian? that that. Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point... I have a hat. Make Orwell Fiction again. I've seen that hat. His ideas around mass surveillance and propaganda, expressed in books like Animal Farm in 1984,

they've shaped the way we talk about the world and how we talk about it. Thought crime. Double Speak. Big Brother. They're all parts of our vocab. We even created an adjective for him, Orwellian. And looking around, it feels like he predicted some of the biggest problems of our time. In an age where distrust in the media and institutions is rising, democracies are under threat, and lying seems to have lost its stigma. But one thing I can promise you this, I will always tell you the truth. Warwell was a self-proclaimed democratic socialist. He explicitly fought against authoritarianism.

But these days, his language is used across the entire political spirit. spectrum, particularly on the right. So why do his ideas resonate so strongly 75 years after his death? In a new film, Orwell 2 plus 2 equals 5, director Raoul Peck looks back on the writer's life, juxtaposing Orwell's own words with political events, like the January 6th capital insurrection, the persecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and the invasion of Ukraine. Raul Peck joins me to talk about what Orwell tells us about the world today and the ideological battle over those ideas. Hey, Raoul.

Hey, hi. Nice to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure. So before we get into the main narrative of your doc, let's start with the namesake, George Orwell. You're one of the big heavyweights of documentary filmmaking these days.

You're working with Alex Gibney, who's another. heavyweight. I'm curious what made you want to take this on? Like, why at Warwell, why this particular moment? Why are you doing it now? Well, I knew by knowing Orwell toolbox about authoritarian regime, I knew that it fit perfectly to the time we are in right now. At the same time, when I start working on the project, it was obvious for us, for most people, that Kamala Harris would become the next president of the United States. And for me, the film was as urgent. Because what we are living right now with the present administration in the U.S.

It's just an extreme development of what I've been building for the last five decades. You know, because I come from Haiti. I come from the third world. Yeah. So the idea of the Western countries using a certain set of ideas behind words, let's say democracy, justice, freedom, those terms when they were used toward us, were never meant to means what they means. To give you an example, when I was a young boy, I never could. understand how come president that, you know, argued to be, you know, the most democratic in the whole world, like Kennedy, like Johnson, Reagan, even, Clinton, they were the worst

in dealing with countries like Haiti, Rwanda, Congo, as if those words didn't mean the same for these countries, you know, they were supporting dictatorship in my country. country. I went to Congo as a young boy. They were supporting Mobutu. Mobutu came to power with the help of the CIA. So I had a great familiarity with double thinking, double talk, double speak. I always had to deconstruct all my life. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful. The love in the air. I've never seen anything like it. And murder They're respectable. One of the really surprising parts of your film,

you know, I was expecting a biography, which it is. But you also juxtapose Orwell's, you know, own words, his text, but you juxtapose this footage from different historical and political moments. Let's focus in on one of them, right? You've got some footage of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 21. Tell me how that specifically fits into Orwell's ideas or his warnings. Listen, it was a centerpiece of what happened in the last years, where a sitting president is reinterpreting history to a way that fits his own agenda. They were there with love in their heart.

That was an unbelievable and it was a beautiful day. They were peaceful people. These were great people. The crowd was unbelievable. They don't represent us. to pay the ultimate price for their crimes. An example needs to be made. We can take that place.

And then do what? Heads on pipe. Even though every citizen have watched those footage and saw that it was never about love. It was a whole attack on the Capitol where people died, where people got entrants, where people were fearing for their life,

congressmen, women, the vice president himself was in danger to be hanged. But then they wanted to erase that as if, you know, it's like in 1984, basically, where, you know, you erase the picture, you erase the sound because it doesn't exist

because it shouldn't exist, So it doesn't exist, you know, and that's the only way for any authoritarian regime to have influence upon you or upon the society is to redefine what is true and what is untrue. You know, the Bringsman is the title of your film. You've got Orwell 2 plus 2 equals 5. So that's a reference to the scene in 1984. Winston Smith is being tortured until he kind of complies with that false axiom, right? The two plus two is five. How many fingers am I holding up, Winston? Four.

And if big brother were to say not four, but five, then how many? Four. How many fingers, Winston? Stop, anything in five, but it didn't stop the plane. This is, you know, as you point out, this is kind of one of the things that happens under a totalitarian regime, right? There's this kind of forced inversion of reality, this need to get the population to deny what actually happened. So tell me more about that, because this is really kind of a central theme to your film. Yes, and, and, you know, it's not a coincidence

that usually that type of regime, they use every weapon in the tool. box of what Orwell defined, they attack history, they attack science, they attack justice, they attack language. Those are all the instrument within a society that enable us to have some sort of common ground to know when we have having a discussion that we agree on the terms of that discussion. We agree on the words of that discussion. But once you start pushing the meanings, you start forbidding certain expression, you know, you are basically losing the ability to have a real discussion or to build a society. You know, Orwell has this incredible sentence where I said, the degradation of language is the condition for the degradation of democracy. Let's talk about that.

I'm curious to hear you talk about where you see evidence of this kind of inversion, this use of language. today. To take this formidable example of President Donald Trump, it's like I am for law and order while encouraging rioters. I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters. Right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol. And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.

That goes on and on. So the idea is basically to make such a mess of any type of reference that you have. so you basically, you know, you don't know how to move, where to move, what to say. Kind of related to that, too, is you've got some scenes, you know, as shown classic book burnings, right? And totalitarian systems often, as well as this inversion of reality, there's, you know, the hard fact that there's, you know, campaigns against reading, banning of books, burning of books, right?

Why is literature in particular seen as so subversive? Well, because literature is what humanity have accumulated in terms of knowledge. You know, books are a sort of vaccine against ignorance. So, of course, you would attack books. You would, you know, and it's a sort of censorship as well. Because in those books, potentially, you know, there are writers, you know, analyzing your present behavior. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, I'm going to produce a work of art. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention.

And my initial concern is to get a hearing. You know, you find answers in books. You find direction. You find analysis. and all those are enemies because you want one acceptable faking it's the faking of the leader

and by example it goes with a certain cult of personality as well I am the leader I'm the one who knows the truth and I am the one who decide was truth or not and when that doesn't match

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People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services. But I guess I'm curious to you, when you're immersed in his own writing and his writing about his life, what surprised you most about Orwell when you step into his life? Well, to be honest, something happened, and I'm glad that it happened very early on of my research, because all well, the way I learned about him in school, I read animal forms, you know, barely 1984, because at the time it was, I guess, a difficult novel for me to read. But he came, or let's say he was presented as a science fiction writer, almost, a dystopian writer who sees the future, who prophes about the future as a catastrophic world. But no, he was talking about what he went through.

He's talking about his experience. He's talking about his knowledge of what power is and what human being can do to each other. He experienced how Britain was treating their colonies. So it was not science fiction. It was reality. And the books he wrote were not some dystopia. His book were warnings telling us, if you don't watch out, this is where you're going to land.

And the other aspect that I did not expect was I've understood that he went to my world as somebody from the third world. You mean like Myanmar when he was going to Myanmar, but even the fact that he was born in India. You know, when you are born, even as a young baby, as young child, the kind of emotion you get, the kind of warmth, his life with his nanny, you know, anybody who has had, you know, had the privilege and a chance to have. have a nanny know the affection that it can install. And it allows me to understand why he would go when he's 19 back to Miramar. It was in the research of that feelings that he had. I mean, this time he spent in Myanmar is really crucial to understanding him.

Tell me how his time there basically galvanized this anti-authoritarian and Bent that defined the rest of his work. Well, I think until that time, he probably had, as the young man he was, he, first of all, he wanted to go elsewhere and not go after Eton, go to Cambridge or Oxford, like most young privileged boy in England do. And he wanted to go and confront the real world. But then he realized that in Burma, he was basically a tool of imperialists. He was in a situation where he was actually the bully in the village.

And he resented the character that he became or the role that he was playing as basically a colonial policeman. And that was an important break for him. Right. And he, you know, that's really like he's got that famous essay shooting an elephant, right? And that's really what that's about is that that moment. I'm not going to thing, but he talks also very long on it in that essays why I write, which is one of the essays that also gave me, I would say, the red line of the whole story, the main storyline, you know, where he's very candidly, sincerely, you know, like an act of contrition telling what he felt when he went to Burma and why writing was important for him

and what was his, I would say, his motivation to become a writer and that the fight against injustice was important to him and was an important motivation for him. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. And so that station in Burma was one of the key, element of his life. Raoul, I want to move on to some parallels to things that are happening on today.

So the words dystopian and Orwellian, they both get a lot of plays these days, right? They're really part of the zeitgeist. You can see that when people are connecting with shows like Black Mirror and films like Minority Report. Why do you think these ideas about dystopia feel so urgent right now? Well, I would say I would have a problem if today we continue to use dystopia

because if you are basically creating a world that actually is absurd, yes, it seems in the future. But if it's a way not to deal with reality, then I have a problem with it because reality especially the one we are experimenting right now is absurd

so yeah like I mean dystopia defined a while ago but reality or documentary as defined by today yes and and that's also the goal of this film is to enable you to be

able to analyze your reality because Orwell is providing you with the tools, it providing you with the possibility to analyze to put names on what is happening today. Because I can see that. You know, I've had a lot of Q&As and discussion with the audience, not only in the U.S.,

but in Britain, in Germany, in France. And I could see how part of the audience is totally lost because they don't even know how to name what is happening, you know, and they are, they, they, they, they seems to be discovering that something like that could happen in what they thought was a solid democracy. That's kind of what makes, or well, like looking back on him as part of what makes him so amazing, right? Because he died in 1950. So he didn't see the internet. There was none of the surveillance tech that we have today, you know, predictive policing, facial recognition, that sort of thing. And he still managed

to kind of conjure up versions of that in his writing. Like, where did that insight come from? How did that happen? Because he analyzed the basic of the way our society's function. You know, when he says, you know, you need to know your history. That means a lot of those structure happened before. It's nothing new. What is new is the technology applied.

But in fact, he's analyzing. analyzing capitalism, is analyzing the way class works, the relationship between classes, the relationship to profit. That's his analysis. And as long as we are in the middle of a capitalistic society, those rules still exist. And that's why they are still so precise in his analysis, because those behavior were already there. in the beginning of the 20th century, we had a moment where, you know, radio, newspapers, et cetera,

book editing were in the very few ends. But what happened? There were resistance. There were people fighting that. And then there were regulations, anti-trust laws, you know? And so it was nothing new in that sense. And that's why when we talk about toolbox, those are toolbox of capitalism. Those are toolbox, you know, if we just accept those, if we just accept the reality as something that historically is new, we won't understand what's going on, you know?

And that's why those tools are important because they are not new. They are just presented differently. And their impact, of course, today, or even worse, because we are coming to a limit on many levels, the limit of, you know, climate change, the limit of water, the limit of population, when you have a population that is becoming older and older in the Western world.

The limit of the strength now, you don't have a bipolar world. You know, always work was used as a tool against the Soviet Union. It was a tool in the Cold War. And that's one of the things that Orwell's is so mistaken because he died basically four months

after finishing 1984. So he wasn't there to spin his book the right way. That's why I kept this sentence when he's one of the few letters where he's responding to accusation from the labor union saying, you know, you're almost a traitor. He said, no, I'm not attacking the labor union. I'm just warning you not to go into that kind of society like in fascism and communism. What's really interesting, though, right, is that if you look ahead

to now, right, there's not a lot of writers who have been claimed by people all over the political spectrum, right? So he was really clear about his convictions as a democratic socialist. But since then, his words, his writing have been invoked by the far left, the fascist right, and basically everyone in between, you know, there's Big Brother, Newspeak, Thought Crime, Double Think. These are all parts of the political language of our day, particularly so on the right these days. I think that's fair to say. And what's really interesting is U.S. President Donald Trump is among those who have recently praised or well publicly.

If humanity speaks, rights, thinks, and praise. language born on these aisles and perfected in the pages of Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolkien, Lewis, Orwell, Kipling, incredible people. So, like, I guess that's kind of what blows my mind. What is it about Orwell that has such a broad appeal across the political spectrum? Like, he was fighting fascists in Spain. It's amazing that the far right is invoking him. Well, because ignorance is strength, you know, they make almost,

Orwell say the contrary of what Orwell says. That's why this film is important because it's a sort of rehabilitation of Orwell. It's a sort of putting Orwell back where he belongs. And Orwell's word are very clear. There is no alternative facts for Orwell. Two plus two is not five. That's why I use that in the title

because it's the ultimate sample formula arithmetic formula that pays no doubt, you know, that the far right is using it is because they are counting on the people's ignorance. On the contrary, oh, well, explain this behavior very well. That's what authoritarian regime again do. They attack institutions, they attack language, They attack justice. They attack books and knowledge. And you come back to the party slogan, you know, war is peace, ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery, you know.

And that's exactly where we are. It's not because they use it that, you know, it makes them right about it. On the contrary, they fit the caricature. Well, you've been in Orwell's head quite a bit. bit lately. What do you think George Orwell would make of what's going on these days? Well, I think he would shake his head and he would just say, you know, I have nothing to add. This is exactly what I've been telling you 75 years ago. That's it. We don't have to rebuild the world again and again. We just have to learn from history.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for inviting me. That's all for today. Front Burner was produced this week by Joyita Shungupta, Matt Mews, Matthew Amha, Lauren Donnelly, Mackenzie Cameron, Sam McNulty, and Kevin Sexton. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabbison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chow.

Our executive producer is Nick McCabe Locos. And I'm Damon Fairless, in for Jamie Pouson. She'll be back. next week. Thanks for listening.