George Orwell, Leader Worship, and the Question We Still Refuse to Ask
In 1944, George Orwell wrote a letter to a reader, Noel Willmett, responding to a question about leader worship. It was not a casual reply. It was a warning.
Three years later, Orwell would begin writing 1984. The ideas that animate that novel - Newspeak, doublethink, the Ministry of Truth, and the erasure of objective reality - are already present in embryo in that letter.
Orwell was not predicting a single tyrant. He was diagnosing a pattern.
That pattern is now uncomfortably familiar.
1984 and the Architecture of Control
1984 is set in Oceania, one of three perpetually warring totalitarian superstates (the others being Eurasia and Eastasia). Oceania is governed by the all-controlling Party, which enforces unthinking obedience to its symbolic leader, Big Brother.
The Party engineers a propagandistic language called Newspeak, designed not merely to censor speech, but to limit thought itself. Concepts such as doublethink- the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously - are embedded in the Party’s slogans:
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Orwell’s Fear Was Not Hitler Alone
Orwell made clear that the defeat of Hitler would not end the danger. In fact, he feared the opposite: that the methods of totalitarianism would survive, migrate, and adapt.
He warned that Hitler might disappear only to be replaced by other figures around whom blind devotion gathers - sometimes through fear, sometimes through love. Uncomfortably, Orwell grouped together figures as morally different as Hitler, Stalin, de Gaulle, Gandhi, and de Valera.
This was not moral equivalence. Orwell was not calling Gandhi a tyrant.
He was warning that once movements justify everything in the name of destiny, history, or moral certainty, democracy quietly dies. When the end justifies the means, truth becomes negotiable.
The Real Enemy: The Death of Objective Truth
What troubled Orwell most was not strong leadership, but the collapse of objective reality itself.
He foresaw a world where:
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history could no longer be universally agreed upon
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facts were bent to fit ideology
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intellectual classes excused authoritarian methods so long as they were “on our side”
This is the soil from which 1984 grew.
Newspeak was not merely censorship; it was language engineered to prevent thought. Doublethink was not hypocrisy; it was the enforced habit of believing contradictions without discomfort.
Orwell’s nightmare was a civilisation that no longer noticed the lie.
Trump: Fuhrer, Gandhi - or Something Else?
This brings us to Donald Trump, and the question that provokes such fury:
Is he a fuhrer - or something closer to a disruptive dissident?
From an Orwellian perspective, Trump does not resemble the all-controlling Party of 1984. He did not command the media, abolish opposition, impose a unified ideological language, or control historical memory. On the contrary, nearly every major institution opposed him.
That alone matters.
Yet Orwell would also warn against personalising politics. Any movement that treats criticism as betrayal risks drifting toward the very thing it opposes.
Here is the critical distinction:
Trump did not build a totalitarian system.
But he exposed how close existing systems already were to one.
That is why he provokes such unified hostility - not because he is morally pure, but because he is unpredictable, unaligned, and unwilling to speak the approved language.
Newspeak Is No Longer Fiction
What Orwell imagined has not arrived wearing jackboots. It has arrived wearing credentials, policies, and euphemisms.
Today:
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words are redefined to narrow thought
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dissent is framed as “harm” or “misinformation”
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history is revised in real time
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media narratives converge across borders
This resembles Orwell’s Ministry of Truth far more than any single politician ever could.
Try openly criticising Xi Jinping and see what happens. Even in Western democracies, criticism increasingly carries professional, legal, or social consequences. Orwell warned that intellectuals - not “the common people” -would be the first to accept this trade-off. His hope lay with ordinary people, whom he believed were less susceptible, at least initially, to fashionable totalitarian ideas.
The letter ends by framing war and alliances as a choice of evils. Orwell supported the Allies despite despising aspects of British imperialism and accepted Stalin tactically as the lesser immediate evil.
He was right to insist that such choices never absolve us from criticism.
Try openly criticising Xi Jinping and see what happens. Even in Western democracies, criticism increasingly carries professional, legal, or social consequences. Orwell warned that intellectuals - not “the common people” - would be the first to accept this trade-off. Orwell's hope lay in the "common people" resisting longer than intellectuals. He saw ordinary people as less susceptible to fashionable totalitarian ideas. The letter ends by framing the war (and alliances) as a "choice of evils," with Orwell supporting the Allies despite despising aspects of British imperialism and accepting Stalin tactically as the lesser immediate evil.
He was right.
Victim or Perpetrator?
From Orwell’s framework, Trump is neither saviour nor tyrant.
He is both:
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a victim of narrative control, institutional hostility, and historical revisionism
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and a flawed human being capable of polarisation and excess
Orwell would insist we hold both ideas at once - without flinching.
The true danger lies elsewhere: in systems that outlast individuals, punish dissent, demand loyalty over truth, and quietly teach people not to trust their own eyes.
Orwell’s Final Warning Still Applies
Orwell supported causes he distrusted because he understood that history rarely offers clean choices. But he insisted on constant criticism, especially of one’s own side.
He warned that to proclaim “all is for the best” while ignoring sinister symptoms is not optimism - it is surrender.
That warning remains.
Whether one admires Trump or despises him is secondary. The real question is whether we are drifting toward a world where truth is managed, language is policed, and dissent is made to appear abnormal.
If so, Orwell was not writing about 1984.
He was writing about us.
I have placed excerpts from George Orwell's letter below.
I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means.
Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system.
With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.
Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark.
Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.
...... To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. ....... there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin.
Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.
You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils—I fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany.
I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.
Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell
