| Summary/Abstract |
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984—which has become a bestseller among Russians after their country invaded Ukraine in February 2022Footnote1—a dictatorship wages war not to achieve any foreign policy objective nor grand utopian vision, but to distract the population and break its desire to resist oppression and injustice at home. “[T]he consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger,” as Orwell put it, “makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.”Footnote2 Hijacked by a self-serving governing class, war is a callous hoax, its sole purpose to keep society in check and autocratic rule intact.
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