Obama's Orwellian Thanksgiving...

President Barack Obama and outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have both tried to nudge their way into America’s Thanksgiving (or Thanksgivukkah) dinners, with talking points about Obamacare and gun control, respectively. Not only is introducing contentious political issues into a family holiday a recipe for unhappiness, but it also reflects the disturbing Orwellian ambitions of Obama’s big-government liberalism.

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The great insight of George Orwell’s novel of totalitarianism, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was not that it exposed the brainwashing necessary for that system to function. That had been done already in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a chilling insight into the way that communism convinced its victims to confess to crimes they had not committed, to embrace and even look forward to their deaths as a form of love for the party’s ideals.

Orwell extended Koestler’s theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four with the invention of the propaganda language “Newspeak,” and the torture scenes in Room 101. Yet his unique contribution was to show that totalitarianism was not just focused on repressing the individual, but on interfering with the most intimate relationships between people. It is necessary, Orwell explained, to destroy such intimacy in order for Big Brother to rule.

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It is worth remembering that Thanksgiving was founded as a celebration of freedom by those who had escaped government repression. They recognized that the bounty of the New World went hand-in-hand with faith and liberty--something our present would-be masters have forgotten.

It is worth remembering that Thanksgiving was founded as a celebration of freedom by those who had escaped government repression. They recognized that the bounty of the New World went hand-in-hand with faith and liberty--something our present would-be masters have forgotten.