Donald Trump’s Orwellian nightmare moves on to the next stage
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, there’s a passage where a crowd has gathered on the sixth day of “Hate Week,” a week devoted to individual public displays of slavering obeisance to the Party, with equal measures of enmity on display for the Party’s foes. They are listening to a speaker give a rousing speech condemning Eurasia, the enemy the nation is at war with. The speaker is handed a slip of paper in mid-sentence and, without pause, without change in content or tone, he changes the name of the enemy he was speaking against from Eurasia to Eastasia. Those holding banners denouncing Eurasia as the enemy are suddenly embarrassed to discover they had unaccountably written the wrong name, and quickly trample and destroy those banners.
On September 26, 2019, the United States Senate passes a little-noticed Ukraine aid extension on the deadline for Ukraine to receive aid money allocated by Congress. They had to do this because Ukraine has not yet received all the money and, without an extension, the vote would have to be taken again and the allocation made a second time. The amount the Ukrainian government was to receive was approximately $250 million. They received every penny except $35 million. As of this writing that $35 million is still outstanding.
I brought this to the attention of Palmer Report readers (“The rancorous vindictiveness of this short-fingered vulgarian”) when I wrote, “Now that it has become clear that Trump has not released all the Ukrainian money, look for the Republican narrative to change accordingly from ‘all of the money’ to ‘most of the money.’” Well, sure enough, that is exactly what has happened.
In a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said, “At the end of the day the bottom line is most of the aid got out on time.” [Italics mine]. Esper made the change from the previous Republican talking point from declaiming that “all of the aid” had been given to Ukraine to “most of the aid” had been given to Ukraine – with an urbanity that can only be described as glibly Orwellian.
It’s important to recall that Donald Trump did not want Zelensky to actually investigate the Bidens in the first place. I’ll say that again: despite everything you may have heard from various talking heads and reporters covering the story, Donald Trump did not require that Voldomyr Zelensky investigate the Bidens. All he asked is that Zelensky make an announcement that he was going to investigate the Bidens. That’s it. What Zelensky did after that didn’t matter in the least. The point from the very beginning was to smear Joe Biden by way implication of an investigation so as to damage Biden’s chances in the 2020 election, period. It says a lot for Voldomyr Zelensky that he has not, to date, made any such investigation announcement and continues to hold out against the Orwellian despot in the west. If Zelensky did give in, I would not be surprised if the remaining $35 million got released right away as a direct consequence. Were I president of a small country in a desperate hot war with Russia, I’m not so sure I would hold out myself. Spasibo, tovarish Zelensky, spasibo.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.