The Ministry of Untruth

Ministry, Rio de Janeiro

Sometimes when a novel becomes massively popular, it invades public spaces like a virus. Airports, trains, park benches, bus stops, and waiting rooms overflow with avid readers lost in the pages of the season’s blockbuster. Such is the case with George Orwell’s 1984. It has never been out of print, but you could be forgiven for thinking it was published recently. The election of pathological liars and historical negationists has massively boosted sales and the novel is flying off the shelves like never before along with Margaret Atwoods’s Handmaid’s Tale, which reads like a guide to Trump’s America, and Huxley’s near future Brave New World. It appears, and not for the first time, that the reading public has developed an insatiable appetite for stories that depict the end-game. Sunbathers sprawled out on the beach, commuters on the metro, young folk waiting in the bus station, all of them wide eyed as they flick through the pages of these nightmare novels with nodding recognition. One particularly depressed looking woman sits in the corner of a São Paulo bar with 1984 tattooed on one arm and its literary ancestor, Zamyatin’s We on the other. What is a little odd however is that you can buy 1984 in the Drogaria de São Paulo, one of Brasil’s biggest pharmacists where it sits alongside paracetamol and antidepressants. All I can think is that the shops’ buyers have a wonderfully twisted sense of humour. I, like many of my generation, was reared on anti-fascist politics, critical theory, and the literary history of dystopia. We also lived through the ideological delusions of the cold war. We should then have been more than prepared. Nevertheless, the speed with which historical objectivity and reason has been attacked  and grievously wounded, has left me and many others stunned. Like a virulent medieval plague, unphased by international frontiers, the brazen rejection of truth has wreaked havoc as it travels across the world from Moscow to Rome, Madrid to London, and from Washington to Brasilia, where it has found fertile soil. The rampant deforestation in Amazonia over the last five years was just the result of a few little fires that happen naturally. Opening new gun clubs and arming citizens is the best way to ensure the survival of democracy. Demanding the arrest of judges, is freedom of speech in action. COVID was nothing more than a mild dose of flu. The Workers Party plans to infiltrate schools and make children gay. Demonstrators at a rally clearly making Nazi salutes were just sending positive energy. And on it goes. Bolsonaro’s fanatical supporters now occupy an alternative reality in which history is rewritten to coincide with their prejudices. It is a narrative fuelled by a macabre and toxic combination of evangelical Christianity and intolerant far-right politics that borders on the edge of reason. It is truly disturbing. Nevertheless, on June 30th 2023, the Supreme Court voted Bolsonaro ineligible to run for President for eight years. It was a great moment despite the fact that the hysterical mob he represents is alive and frothing at the mouth. What finally tipped the balance in a blatant attempt to legitimise military intervention, was his unevidenced and unhinged declaration to an assembly of foreign ambassadors in June 2022, that the electoral system was untrustworthy and open to fraud. He has been seriously wounded and democrats everywhere hope that that is the last we see of him and his grave dead eyes. The fact remains however that fifty-eight million people voted for a homophobic, misogynist, racist liar, a coup monger who the British comedian Stephen Fry described as one of the scariest men he had ever met. As with Trump and other authoritarian demi-gods, the real problem lies with the ideological engineers who propelled a figure like Bolsonaro to the presidency of what people still claim is one of the biggest democracies in the world.