George Orwell invented the slogan "War is Peace" as a satire so extreme it could never be mistaken for sincere ideology. It was meant to be obviously, grotesquely absurd, the kind of thing only a totalitarian state would inscribe on its Ministry of Peace while waging permanent war.
He underestimated us.
On March 7, 2026, the Bronx Anti-War Coalition held a vigil in Manhattan - not for victims of war, but for Ayatollah Khamenei. A masked speaker chanted, to robotic responses: "We stand in full solidarity with the IRGC and the Islamic Revolution... They are materially destroying the Zionist entity and U.S. airbases and U.S. soldiers." He then called for Iran's missiles to "reply" to American drones.
This was an "anti-war" event.
They're not hiding their logic. Their own website states plainly that they "support the right to resist colonial imperialism by any means necessary, including armed struggle" and that they are "not a pacifist movement."
And they've solved the definitional problem. Their "Points of Unity" adopt a redefinition of peace itself: peace is not the absence of conflict but rather the achievement of liberation through "the defeat of global systems of oppression." By any means necessary.
Literally, war is peace.
Missiles shot at U.S. soldiers, Jewish civilians and hotels in the UAE are peace work. Vigils for theocratic supreme leaders are peace activism. "Death to Israel" and "Death to the USA" are peace slogans. War is peace: not as irony, not as critique, but as a genuine operating principle stated without embarrassment on a public website.
And while they enthusiastically claim to support people's revolutions, they can suddenly oppose them when they don't align with their support for radical Islamist states.
In January 2026, the same coalition published a piece in Workers World about the popular uprising in Iran. Their verdict: "Iran is not erupting. It's being attacked." Iranians who took to the streets - many of them young women risking their lives for the most basic freedoms - were recast as tools of "U.S./Israeli hybrid warfare." The piece declared there are "only two sides," and that "neutrality here is collaboration." The group that calls itself pro-revolution condemned an actual popular revolution because it was the wrong revolution, against the wrong government. They claim to "defend people's revolutions." They mean specific people, specific revolutions — ones that fit their philosophy. People wanting to be free of their oppressive regimes are simple redefined as "imperialists" and their murders are justified.
All they have to do is redefine reality.
This is the same move made with "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism." Repeat it enough and the repetition becomes the argument. Never mind that anti-Zionist protesters routinely march behind signs calling for the elimination of the Jewish state, celebrate the massacre of Jewish civilians, and recycle medieval blood libels with a thin geopolitical coating. The label "anti-Zionist" is meant to function as a prophylactic against the charge of antisemitism — to make the question of what's actually being said, and who's being targeted, inadmissible. The word does the work so the content doesn't have to be examined. It's the same mechanism: fix the vocabulary, and reality has to conform to it.
Orwell understood that totalitarianism required controlling language. What he perhaps didn't fully anticipate was that a free society could generate its own Ministry of Truth voluntarily, through activist organizations, sympathetic media, and the social enforcement of approved terminology. And they have their own mechanisms of enforcement to ensure that no one in their "coalition" dare disagree with their tenets.
The media, in attempting to be balanced, parrot the obvious lies and perversion of language as legitimate, which gives them more power. Nobody forced journalists to describe the Bronx Anti-War Coalition as "anti-war activists." Nobody compelled them to accept the "anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism" frame at face value. They did it because the labels were available and the scrutiny was uncomfortable.
The result is that "War is Peace" is no longer a warning etched on a dystopian government building. It's on a coalition website in the Bronx. It's in press releases. And enough people in media and politics treat it as a legitimate peace movement that the satire has become indistinguishable from the reality Orwell was trying to prevent.
He thought the absurdity would be its own refutation. He didn't anticipate that the absurdity would go beyond his imagination.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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