By Husam Dughman
If George Orwell were alive today, he would in all likelihood be horrified to discover that he was wrong about his assumption that doublethink existed only in totalitarian societies. Supposedly democratic countries, too, seem to suffer from that strange malaise, something which certain parts of the world such as MENA (the Middle East and North Africa), Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and much of Asia have known for a long time, though not everybody in those regions has heard of Orwell’s neologism. More recently, the Russian-Ukraine conflict has laid bare a shockingly huge amount of doublethink in the words and actions of otherwise sober, sensible, and educated people. One salient example can be observed when numerous people in Western countries talk about the incompetence of the Soviet military machine and its failure to quickly overcome Ukraine, with its much smaller population and far weaker military might, and at the same time, those very people express the fear that Russia is going to take over the West.
- Husam Dughman
- Viewpoints
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