Marching Toward Goodthink in San Francisco!

The protagonist of George Orwell’s great dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, is an employee of the Ministry of Truth — which, along with the Ministry of Love (which includes the Thought Police and carries out torture and liquidations), the Ministry of Plenty (which directs the economy and doles out rations), and the Ministry of Peace (which oversees the armed forces and conducts their perpetual wars), is one of the four divisions of the government of Oceania under “the Party.”

Four subsections or departments of the Ministry of Truth (or, as it’s also known in Newspeak, Minitrue) are mentioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  These are: the Records Department (or Recdep), the Fiction Department (or Ficdep), the Tele-programmes Department (Teledep), and, finally, the Pornography section (Pornosec), which produces “prolefeed” that is designed to distract the the proletariat or masses from dwelling on their lack of freedom and rights and on the empty meaninglessness of their lives.

The Ministry of Truth is housed in an enormous concrete pyramid that is nearly a thousand feet high and is decorated on its exterior with the Party’s three slogans: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.”  One of Minitrue’s central functions is to change history by altering the words in articles about both past and current events.  This is in order to ensure that the Party is always right.  In its vast basement, the Ministry’s pyramidal office building apparently contains huge incinerators in which documents are destroyed by putting them down “memory holes.”  “The past was alterable,” writes Orwell.  “The past never had been altered.  Oceania was at war with Eastasia.  Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

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A protégé of the great Mexican muralist (and Communist) Diego Rivera, Victor Arnautoff (who was also a Communist) became a prominent figure in the art of the New Deal and the Works Progress Administration (or WPA).  He is probably best known for his work on the extensive murals in San Francisco’s Coit Tower, for which he also served as the overall artistic director. His work plainly advances a socialist/Communist/Trotskyite critique of American society and history.

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I believe that it’s Alain Besançon’s A Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism, and the Uniqueness of the Shoah, which I read years ago in a translation by my friend and colleague Ralph Hancock, that makes an interesting argument regarding one distinction between Nazism and Communism.  Nazism, the argument goes, might conceivably have run out of victims for its mass murders.  Once all of the Jews — and all of the Slavs and the Gypsies and the other “lesser races” — were gone, and once only the Aryan Herrenvolk or “master race” remained — the extermination camps would have served their purpose and could be closed.  In Communism, however, not racial purity but ideological purity is the goal.  And there is always somebody whose ideological purity is suspect.  So, in theory, the “reeducation camps” and the killings might continue until everybody is dead except the last murderer.  Heresy trials are potentially almost infinite.  What was once the Party line might (and often did) suddenly become punishable “deviationism.”

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In October 2018, presiding over his first meeting as chair of the San Francisco school board, Stevon Cook omitted the Pledge of Allegiance with which board meetings had always opened.  In place of the pledge, he quoted a passage from the black poet and activist Maya Angelou:

“New SF school board president skips Pledge of Allegiance at first meeting”

While, so far as I’m aware, San Francisco has not yet followed the lead of some other school districts in banning racist trash “literature” such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, Mr. Cook apparently continues to lead the schools of San Francisco with remarkable wokeness, as shown in the council’s latest leap toward utopia:

“San Francisco’s Board of Education: Anti-Art Fools: They’ve voted to spend close to $1 million to destroy an important work by a major muralist (who was a Trotskyite).”

“‘Gross Violation of Logic and Sense’: Open Letter From Nearly 140 Scholars Implores SF School Board Not to Destroy Historic Mural: ‘Let’s stand up for the integrity of art as well as for historical interpretation, and for a shared analysis of the political reality of the United States in the past and the present.'”

“Controversial George Washington mural to be painted over at San Francisco high school”

One might have thought that Victor Arnautoff’s murals, which were themselves intended to provoke critical reflection on American history, society, and culture, might serve very well — like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird — as exemplars of American history, society, and culture meriting critical reflection.

But no.  Crimethink is doubleplusungood and cannot be tolerated.

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These are the seven leaders of what might be termed San Francisco’s Ministry of Education, or Mini-Ed:

Stevon Cook ([email protected]), chair

Mark Sanchez ([email protected])

Alison Collins ([email protected])

Jenny Lam ([email protected])

Gabriela Lopez ([email protected])

Faauuga Moliga ([email protected])

Rachel Norton ([email protected]).