The art of truth in an age of lies

“All art is propaganda,” George Orwell wrote in 1940. “On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.”

That, in Orwell’s view, was a lost understanding: clear to Victorian authors like Dickens; obscure to his contemporaries of the late 1930s, who were too coy or deluded to square “art for art’s saking in the ivory tower” with “political propaganda” and “pulling in the dough.” The man born Eric Blair was not.

The filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, a sweeping overview of the writer’s life and work, opens with a snippet of “Why I Write,” the 1946 manifesto in which Orwell laid out an aim to “make political writing into an art”:

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

Orwell had been shot in the neck by Franco’s fascists in 1937, as a foreign volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He was stunned by writers who used their pen to write around the jagged, bloody, earnest, coarse, partisan demands of the moment. Nazism was an event horizon. There’s no floating above it.

Jackboots are back. Orwell is bluntly relevant. But he’s an interesting subject for Peck, known for his definitive film on James Baldwin (2016’s Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro), historical dramas about the iconic Congolese decolonial leader Patrice Lumumba and the young Karl Marx, and Exterminate All the Brutes, a brutal survey of European colonial genocides.

There’s more to Peck’s Orwell than 1984 and Animal Farm: Intercut with contemporary footage, the film follows Orwell through his imperial twenties—a cop in colonial Burma, doing “the dirty work of empire”—his anti-fascist thirties, and his truncated forties, producing his best-known works as he battled tuberculosis, which killed him at 46.

And there’s much more to Peck, Haiti’s former minister of culture, than Orwell. with an academic background in economics and engineering, his documentaries are the product of exhaustive archival research and broad historical scholarship; like Orwell, his thinking bridges the colonial era and our own.

We spoke in Los Angeles about the new fascist moment, the arc of his work, and the genesis of Orwell: 2+2=5.

You started work on this documentary before the election, when it was still of the moment, but obviously a little less. What’s that been like—making this film in the middle of this kind of change in America?

My films, usually, I try to make sure that they will still have value and impact in 10, 20, 30 years. I never go for immediacy, for whatever is going on in the world. My work is always about going to the fundamentals to try to explain how democracy functions, how power functions, how abuse or authoritarianism functions, to explain what capitalism is. Because whether we like it or not, we are still in this long piece of history that we call capitalism.

You’d call this a film about capitalism, in the long view?

Well, of course. Because again, if you have to analyze what is happening in your country or in any other country, you have to contextualize, you know, what is this time in history? What is this society? How does it function? And we know economy is the central part of it. We know class is another part. When you have those elements, you are always capable to analyze where you are, with cultural differences or historical differences. We are not the same people all the time. We change, we evolve.

But more or less the way you would analyze what used to be called rabid capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century—the concentration of news ownership, you have those same symptoms today. You know that the press are in the hands of a few billionaires until there is a backlash, until the state comes in and regulates—those are cycles that we’ve seen before.

That’s why in my films I always make sure that I contextualize: Where are we in that long, dramatic arc of history, and how can we analyze what is happening right now? It’s part of understanding what’s going on: if you don’t know where you come from—where did that story start? What were the consequences?—you won’t understand what’s going on, and you won’t be able to imagine what’s next.

That’s interesting, because I was going to ask how you see Orwell’s life in conversation with others you’ve focused on: what’s the dialogue between Orwell and James Baldwin, or Orwell and Marx, or influences of yours like Frantz Fanon or Aimé Césaire?

All of them have analyzed society, their own society, in the historical moment that they lived. And all of them have traveled, all of them have included me in their analysis. I know my place through them. They all differ from the Eurocentric history, the rewriting of history. All of them deliver you instruments to analyze your own situation, your own life, your own place.

One of the authors I use immensely in Exterminate All the Brutes is Michel-Rolph Trouillot, his work Silencing the Past. All my life, I’ve tried to come to that understanding of where I come from, what I am, in the bigger story of the planet and human history. Fanon, Baldwin—that’s the basis of all their work.

Baldwin is probably the greatest psychoanalyst of [the] American psyche, of the white psyche especially, and I learned from them. For me, they are my elders. I stay on their shoulders and use them to continue that job, you know, to make sure that our current generation are aware of that heritage, those instruments of analysis.

Was it particularly important to you to have as much footage as you did of Palestine, of Gaza, in terms of understanding of the present moment?

Yes, Gaza in particular, because we are witnessing a genocide on TV every night—the one TV that shows it, of course. I’ve made at least four films that deal with genocide, and I know the signs; I recognized it very early on, since the beginning, and saw also the parallel: how states refused to recognize that word, scholars are hesitating to name it what it is.

I remember that footage that I use in Sometimes in April where the US spokesman is struggling in front of journalists to name the genocide going on in Rwanda. And she’s telling the definition, while realizing she’s exactly describing what is happening, but still trying to—we are in an Orwellian world there, you know, where you’re twisting words, or you don’t want to recognize what the words are saying, just not to say the truth.

It seems like genocide is such a point of genesis of [Orwell’s] Newspeak—it’s the one thing people can’t bear to name, would rather lie than name.

The word itself did not exist until after the Holocaust; Raphael Lemkin had to invent the word. And that tells you the if you can’t even name something, it doesn’t exist. But when you name it, it makes an impact. It forces you to have a political position on it. Do you support it? Do you agree with it? But you can’t say it doesn’t exist.

Definition is the thing. You see that what’s happening today with Donald Trump is the destruction of words, even the illegality of certain words. What is a lie becomes truth, and the truth becomes a lie. He makes sure that you are lost. You don’t know. He tends to accuse you of what he did; he reverses, constantly, his own deeds and puts it in your words.

Orwell [addressed] that when he said the degradation of language is the condition for the degradation of democracy, and it’s exactly that. They attack academia because academia is supposed to be the place where you define words, where you survey words, where facts are on the table.

And you attack justice. You attack all the institutions that are supposed to make sure that we speak the same language and have the same definitions, that there are laws we follow, that there are regulations. When you explode all that, or you make a sort of Italian salad with it, of course you’re lost, and that confusion is what they need to continue.

What makes people so vulnerable to that in a time when, in theory, you can get your information from wherever and whoever you want?

We overestimate the capacity of people to to stay awake all the time. It’s exhausting. That kind of propaganda of constant pummeling on you every day—and the news is part of it as well. It’s hard to keep up. People have jobs. They have problems every day. They have to survive. How long can you support that?

Even more, a big part of society is very often just to obey the law. People obey the law. That’s why a dictatorship or authoritarian regime, you can see in history that they the first thing they touch is always the law—to give a semblance of authority, of legitimacy. They need some cover. They need some sort of justification. So a big bulk of a population says, Well, it’s the government, it’s the law, and if they do it, it’s because they can do it, et cetera.

[Then it’s] let’s erase everything, reframe everything, and let’s start from scratch, and now I’m going to fill up your head with new material and tell you two plus two equals five. The same toolbox.

It seems like you trace an arc in Orwell’s work. In the ’30s, in Spain, he’s full of hope for a future where we take charge of our destinies. Post-war, when he’s writing 1984, he’s much less optimistic about people. Like you say, just taking care of the necessities is a struggle.

Does that resonate with you—in your own work and your own life, do you see an arc where it’s gotten harder and harder for people to resist the pressure?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because, first of all, the constant bombardment that we have today is unprecedented. We have that object [the phone] with us day and night, and I know I try to stay away from it, but it invades you whether you like it or not. You are afraid to miss something, which, of course, doesn’t make sense. So it’s harder today.

There is also a deterioration of institutions: the deterioration of schools [means] schools can’t keep up. They have been cutting their budget since the ’70s. Teachers have too much to do every day. They can’t follow each student the way they could sixty years ago. Life is quicker; it’s difficult even to concentrate. We’ve accelerated the destruction of the planet as well. So we are on the verge of something that’s never existed.

Fukuyama would say at the end of history. No, it’s capitalism [that’s] brought us on the verge of explosion. Will it explode? We don’t know. Will there be another crisis? Yes, probably, because that’s the cycle of capitalism. When the profiteers have gone too far, there is a bubble explosion. And who comes each time to save them? It’s the state. The last time was 2008: we were really near a [global] explosion, and Obama had to take care of that here and everywhere. Everyone had to save the banks who had made, very consciously, the damage. They knew what they were doing. Everybody was bailed out.

Not long after he died came Sputnik and an age—it was still a scary time, but one where you could argue that a lot of human development tilted towards progress. Do you look at this moment in a similar way, where there are also changes and developments that give you some optimism?

Yeah, but you have to distinguish between technological progress—you know, we have [made] incredible progress. But the problem is, in what hands are those new instruments, that new progress?

As long as profit is the first reason, or the first goal, to continue to develop, we are in trouble, because profit cannot be a rational way to deal with human society, to deal with common life. You know, it’s an aberration.

Marx’s economic analysis demonstrated the absurdity of that cycle. And by the way, something people don’t realize: Marx did not say the capitalists are bad guys. He said they are almost puppets in that system. You know, there is not—people can’t imagine how a billionaire is so scared, like a little boy, to lose his billions. You would think that, you know, it gives you a maturity, you are sure—no! How do you explain it psychologically? Why do you hang on [to] hundreds of billions when you know there is [only] so much you can do a day about eating, sleeping, and having fun, or even help other people? It’s totally irrational. So you let something irrational decide the fate of humanity. It doesn’t make sense.

Look at AI today. My problem is not AI as such. My problem is AI unregulated. The internet was an incredible instrument, an instrument of progress. But when it became privatized for profit—I remember the day I heard that first little music of AOL. I said, Oh my God, we are fucked. I knew that because we have seen different development, technological development, medical development, go the same way.

The progress of medicine. How many sicknesses are not cured because capitalistically, they’re not worth it? [Where] you have, actually, the technology to cure those sicknesses, but because the people who are sick don’t have the money to pay for it—usually poor people, Black, indigenous people—they estimate that there is no buying capacity, so let them die. So no research.

Do you see any counter to those trends? When you talk about the conjuncture of colonialism, authoritarianism, capitalism—when you look at the situation, do you see opportunities for politics to move in a different direction?

If we take humankind as a whole…you know, even democracy is progress. It’s in the renewal of democracy that we have been let down. The role of the citizen within democracy—especially in the Western world, where we have become perfect consumers, and where the self, [personal] happiness is the most important, not the collective—we’ve lost that. We’ve lost the connection with the other, not only the other far away, but the other very close to you.

Your world, your surroundings, are getting smaller and smaller. The connection with society is not as close. And you become more isolated, more fragile, if you can’t discuss what’s happening, [or] trust the person you’re discussing it with. Or if you’re just doing it through the social network, where you don’t shake hands and see eye to eye. It is hardly possible today with the life we are having.

If you take all the small organizations in the whole country here, they’re all doing a great job. But to connect them means that they have to sit down and discuss and come to an agreement about the diagnosis, and then an agreement about what’s next. What is our strategy? What is our tactic? That takes time. And you can’t do it on the internet.

The Civil Rights Movement was one of the last big movements. It was a lot of meetings, in churches, in universities, in every place where you can have people—people of different race, class, gender—with fights. Some of them were pushed back. Some of them were excluded. But if you take the whole movement, young people decided that they would go to the South and risk their life. And some of them were arrested, tortured, killed. They knew that [was possible], and they took that choice.

That’s the thing you can only do when you you feel that there is a collective behind you, there is a sense of the history, and everybody agrees to it. This is where we need to go, because our survival depends on it. As Orwell said, if there is hope, it lies in the proles. Not in the definition of the Marxist proletariat, but the bigger definition of society—civil society, with all its nuance and differences.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.