1984 and Operation “Epic Fury”

Abstract

George Orwell wrote his masterpiece 1984 in response to the dramatic events in Europe of the 1940s and presents profound insight into socio-political structures. The book was published in 1949, in a post-war historical period that was very extreme and different from the state of things during the “Long Peace” of the last several decades, and is of course a literary fiction from the dystopian-conspiracy genre. Yet, parts of the architecture of this fictional world resonate with some elements of our “Epic Fury” reality: The shifting alliances between the superpowers, the government propaganda or what we like to call the engineering of consciousness, the missiles that fall randomly and kill civilians, the executions, and the anti-Semitism. There is also the role of the psychologist as an agent of the regime, which poses a challenge to the politics of psychology. My presentation will correlate between certain aspects of the book and the reality of operation "Epic Fury," using Freudian and Jungian concepts.