Orwell: 2+2=5 is a vitally necessary documentary after we have come through the madness that began with pandemic witch hysteria in 2020. Where the mainstream media could truly be called Lies Incorporated.
Orwell: 2+2=5
Director Raoul Peck
New Zealand International Film Festival 2025
Raoul Peck comes from Haiti, and his family first fled the Duvalier regime in 1961, when he was eight. Much later he was the Minister of Culture in Haiti in the mid-Nineties.
The director of the superb documentary profile of James Baldwin ( I Am Not your Negro) is now tackling the most pressing and urgent moral crisis the world is facing in Present Time.
How far down the dystopian world of 1984 are we?
The CIA occupies that region in the modern mind where every truth is obliged to live in its denial; facts are wiped out by artifacts; proof enters the logic of counterproof, and we are in the dream; matter breathes next to antimatter. (Norman Mailer, A Harlot High and Low,1974)
There is 25 years between Orwell and Mailer. 51 years separates Mailer and Present Time.
We are in the world he was so prescient about. A plethora of Intel agencies exist in America. The CIA is not the biggest. AI and ChatGPT, Russian and Chinese disinformation attacks, Government suppression of free speech by increasingly over-reaching hate crime laws.
What Mailer is describing is a precis of Newspeak, which is the real violence at the heart of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the Present controls the past.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Doublethink means the point of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both.
Doublethink can be as old as Shakespeare.
Forward since we have come so far/ And be it sun, or moon, or what you please/ And if you please to call it a rush-candle/ Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me. (Katherina to Petruchio, The Taming of the Shrew)
The documentary takes us on a space travellers’ voyage of Eric Blair’s history from birth, 1903 in Motihari India, to death in London 1950.
Sobering to think he was only 46. He was badly wounded in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and he suffered from tuberculosis over the time he wrote his last novel.
Born into an a lower-upper-middle-class family, this formed the moral underpinnings of his beliefs. The recognition of the behaviour of the colonial ruling bureaucracy led him to be a committed Socialist.
Orwell was a gifted writer before his teens. He had a poem, Awake Young Men of England, published in a local magazine at age 11. This was in 1914, at the beginning of the Great War.
A telling picture of a few months old, swaddled Orwell, and his Indian nanny. A look of poignancy and an inseparable bond from the eyes of the young woman. The image is repeated at the end of the documentary.
Writing talent led him to a place in Eton College. It also pushed him to confront his upper-lower-middle status.
He joined the Indian Imperial Police Force instead of carrying on with his peers in college. His father had a military and police background and was stationed in India when young Eric born.
His awakening to British Imperialism began when he became an integral part of the machinery itself. The beastly nature that men behave towards others they find inferior to themselves.
A journalist in that he lived the life of a tramp, a vagabond, and a street-dweller. And reported back what he saw. Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).
The informal Brotherhood of the Johnsons (from William Burroughs, the Place of Dead Roads). He was Orwell by then.
Being a die-hard socialist, he was keen to fight in the Spanish Civil War and join the Republicans against Franco and the fascists. This inspired a lot of artists including the Spanish Picasso.
Who to join? The Left in Europe were quite factionalised. The Communist supporters were becoming close to regarding Stalin as prototype big Brother.
Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), Orwell eventually chose to enter combat here, and where he got shot in the throat.
POUM lost favour with the other factions, and the European Communist Party put a price on their heads. Orwell and his wife were forced to flee. Fascist wolves in sheep’s clothing.
This is the genesis of Animal Farm and 1984. The recognition of how Totalitarian states arise. Orwell was recognising the inherent toxicity at both ends of the spectrum. It just so happens that Stalin and Mao became the worst tyrants.
Animal Farm was published in 1946, to general acclaim and he made some decent coin out of it. By that time he was battling significant chronic illness.
The documentary spends significant time at Bairnhill Farmhouse, Isle of Jura in Scotland, where Orwell retreated to spend significant time working on his last novel.
He had become a widower, and him and his wife had adopted a son earlier.
The doco starts with a dramatized re-enactment. Orwell with son Richard in the back of a car. Orwell holds up four fingers and asked how many? Four … comes the answer.
They will try and make you believe that it is five. That’s alright so long as you understand it is always four.
The phrase comes from Stalin’s Soviet Union and the legacy of the Five-Year plans. If you are a good Communist and go hard at the common collective good, you can achieve Five-Year plans in four.
Of course there is a narrative here.
The documentary is intercut with newsreel footage of most of the conflicts infesting the planet over the last millennium.
Shots of Rangoon and Mandalay in the 30’s and 40’s are juxtaposed to images of current time Myanmar. An Army General stating that the Rohingya people do not actually exist.
Then cut to the footage of the refugee camps in Bangladesh being overcome by storms.
A public execution of Nazi officers in Kiev, Ukraine 1945. Cut to present-day military insurgency, as Kiev sustains bombing from the Russian army.
Gaza scenes appear but they do not linger here.
Maybe one sub-text of the documentary is the Trump phenomenon.
There is extended footage of the 2021 January insurrection, much of which I don’t recall seeing before. Close up shots which could typically be from phones.
Trump-haters will feel vindicated and think the documentary is their pure voice. There is a shot of the unsuccessful assassination. Not the iconic one which sealed the election (he would have won anyway), but a more dishevelled one where Trump looks completely in shock. A human one, you know. He escaped death by nanometres.
In a parallel world, there would be a burst of cheering and clapping at this scene.
Then Trump would have been identified as the eternal traitor Goldstein.
Ironic that in this parallel world, there is an arch-villain Epstein.
Just how far we in the world of 1984?
There is a short montage of current politik-speak, and its’ meanings. Affirmative action equals targeted bombing.
A longer list of banned books over the last century is more dispersed in message. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was banned because it was anti-war? (Papa said that his Jamaican gardener always referred to it as De Call to Arms).
1984 was written as a warning. What he did not want to see come to pass.
Orwell: 2+2=4 is still the warning, thankfully.
Last word to The Book. When speaking about The Party.
The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives.
Power is not a means; it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of killing is killing. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me.
Rev. Orange Peel
