Facecrime
I’ve read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four many times, but I haven’t opened it for a long long time. I recall a great many of his Newspeak terms—and I think his explanation of Newspeak’s nomenclature and aims is one of the most brilliant inventions of political literature and perhaps even literature—but I had forgotten this particular term until I was reminded of it yesterday.
The Orwell quote describing it:
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
Facecrime. That’s the offense the howling Twitter mob accused 16-year-old Nicholas Sandmann of committing. The fact that these people were purposely misled by propagandists doesn’t excuse them, because even if he had been smirking at a Native American elder playing the drum in his face, what’s the enormous big deal that would justify physical threats against him and his family? The facts that later emerged utterly contradicted the original propagandist story, of course, but in many people’s minds Sandmann’s facecrime persists and remains an unconscionable outrage.
In Orwell’s novel, the government is the main enforcer of this extreme social conformity and need to control one’s visage at all times. But even in the novel, one’s friends, co-workers, family, and/or anyone in the public at large could report and denounce you. These days it’s not the government, it’s fellow citizens who are the main conduits for facecrime accusations. Youth will not protect you if you check off the wrong demographics—and I think hatcrime (that’s not a typo) could be added to Orwell’s lexicon.
Twitter is the perfect mechanism for public shaming and metaphorical stoning. Orwell didn’t quite foresee Twitter, but he was no less a genius for that.
[ADDENDUM at 2:32 PM: A few minutes after I published this piece, I went to National Review just to see what they were talking about there today. An article by Kyle Smith entitled “Hatcrime and Facecrime” immediately caught my eye, for obvious reasons.
I think it’s pretty clear that Kyle Smith hadn’t seen my post when he wrote his. I hadn’t seen his, either, when I wrote mine. As they say, “great minds…”. Some ideas are just too good (or perhaps too obvious?) not to be thought of by multiple people, I guess.]
Many leftists are triggered by the mere appearance of a MAGA hat, much as facts and evidence are to leftists as Kryptonite to Superman (as Larry Elder likes to say).
NRO has a lot of ‘splainin to do. They really screwed this up.
No doubt that’s the reason why all those people, aghast and angry, foaming and fearful, incensed and incredulous at the results of the 2016 elections, flocked to acquire (and presumably read) “1984”….
Somehow, certainty of four (or even eight more years) of obligatory Democratic rule (with more weaponized government agencies, a fawning media at its beck and call, and the furthering leftist agenda—all stymied by a loud braggart with orange hair—were enough to search for an explanation from Orwell.
I suspecting that Kyle Smith might not be referencing Orwell, particularly with the lead ‘hatcrime’ term.
It’s a weakness of our general opposition, that younger folks are not properly ‘keyed’ on 1984. It’s just ‘an old book’ for many of them … and that’s a miscue.
During the NBC interview, Savannah Guthrie stated, “There is something aggressive about standing there.” Wasn’t it a few years ago that ‘standing there’ was celebrated with the slogan She Persisted?
So standing doing nothing is ‘aggressive’ while someone getting in your face is a peaceful protest. Phillips wanted the kid to react with a punch.
Not too long ago a guy screamed in a lady’s face at a pro-life march and kicked the phone out of her hand. I remember comments that applauded his actions as the lady recording him on her phone was ‘aggressive’.
The Progressive defines itself as above reproach, all of its actions sanctified and righteous. They can Unperson whomever they want for any reason. Which is why they can fete Donald Trump or John McCain at one time and vilify them the next.
People are just cogs in their world who can be discarded easily. This is why someone can punch a ‘smug face’ for no reason other than they are a cog, not a real person.
Justice Kavanaugh was guilty of a similar “emotioncrime” because he was enraged at being slandered by leftist nutcases & elected liars.
I’m for making the left pay dearly and repeatedly.
eeyore:
“Standing there” as opposed to “sitting there”? If Sandmann had sat down, would that have been acceptable?
I know the answer—of course not. But I’m making a historical reference.
Ted Clayton:
Oh, Smith is referencing Orwell, all right. In fact, he includes the same quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four that I use, and he references Orwell again in the body of the piece.
Followed some links from here to Althouse to her son at his blog, worth reading because of his eminently sane viewpoint on the controversy, especially the framing narrative.
I have mentioned before that I came to this story late, and never read any of the original false reports; when I first saw just a still of the boy and the old man, I honestly thought he was smiling at being told some kind of native indigenous lore or such. Imagine my surprise to learn he was commiting the crime of Smirking While White and harassing the old man by Standing in Place.
http://jaltcoh.blogspot.com/2019/01/why-are-adults-freaking-out-about.html
“Some have defended the outrage against the kids by pointing out their “Make America Great Again” hats. But it shouldn’t be a national news story that some teenagers have political views that are different from yours. No matter how strongly you disagree with their politics, attacking kids for being politically active is cowardly. I’m against Trump and I support a legal right to abortion, but I’m not going to express my political views at the expense of a random kid who I don’t know.
It seems like most of the people who are doubling down on the initial outrage have been focusing on the young person’s smile. How is it OK to make a national news story out of not liking someone’s smile? Mocking someone’s smile is as bad as telling someone they have to smile more, and we’re all supposed to think the latter is blatantly offensive, right?
As an extreme example, a Facebook post by Slate calls the kid’s facial expression “the smirk of evil.” Think about it: adults going online to type out that a random kid — not a famous person and not someone who’s even being accused of a crime (as far as I know) — is “evil.” And his full name, image, and school have been made public. I don’t know how adults can sleep at night after going to work and trashing a kid who isn’t even alleged to have done anything seriously wrong.
…
Just think how different the reaction would have been if the media had framed the story differently — if they had focused on other people hurling homophobic and racist slurs, instead of focusing on the kid’s smile.
The day after the incident, Slate ran a piece saying the “new footage doesn’t exonerate the kids in the red caps.” But “exonerate” them from what? Standing around and smiling?
The onslaught against these kids has been a Kafka-esque farce. They were summarily pronounced guilty (not in the legal sense, of course, but in the media) . . . without the charges even being specified.
We need to resist this kind of online bullying. If it’s allowed to be done against people who are on the other side of you politically, it will happen to people on your side too.”
Posted by John Althouse Cohen on Tuesday, January 22, 2019
AesopFan:
Thanks for those quotes from Cohen’s piece. Excellent.
Note that, in the coverage of this by the MSM, Phillips was given the respectful title of “elder”–as in “tribal elder”–to give him more status and prestige, and his claims more gravitas.
Does being older make Phillips an automatic “tribal elder” and, by the way, what are Phillip’s tribal affiliations, and is he in good standing with his tribe?
“Facecrime” and “hatcrime” are phrases that are going to stick in commentaries. These kids didn’t do anything remotely wrong. They were targeted because of their hats, their faces, and their skin color.
Neo posted a link on another thread about Phillips. He’s an enrolled member of the Omaha tribe and they consider him an “elder,” although it’s not clear that’s got any function in the tribe. I hope some of them will soon become ashamed of him, if they read real news.
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Thanks Neo … I have now gone & read the article you link.
It’s great to see 1984 getting its due! I will have to give it a fresh read.
Snow on Pine, Neo’s link about Phillips’ tribal affiliation:
https://journalstar.com/news/local/omaha-tribe-member-at-center-of-viral-video/article_1bd27a94-818e-5d1e-9b9a-60699897128f.html
The “facecrime” posting is both timely, relevant here, and particularly apt and illuminating as regards a foundational difference between the left and the not-left.
The leftist mind is extraordinarily sensitive to facial expressions: scanning and re-scanning for any evidence that the leftist is in danger of being disregarded and deprived of what it desires more than anything else … inclusion, access, and a penetrative influence into and control over, the other.
This is the mindset and interpersonal strategy typically expected in a primitive tribe, or a chimp troop, or a thug-ocracy. It’s part of the psychological world of the those who are hypersensitive to the possibility that they may be fatally disregarded, cut out of their share, subject to exclusionary plotting.
It is not the mindset or preoccupation of those inhabiting a classically liberal polity wherein your welfare and life are not – ostensibly – dependent upon a kind of obscene associative arrangement which makes every social act or exchange a potential matter of life and death.
If you own property, if it is protected by law, if you cannot be deprived of access to the freemarket, to free association, and exchange, then this sub-human realm of obsession, falls away behind you.
But, with the left, it never does. The whole point of the left is to reconstruct, or devolve, the assumed anthropology of the classical liberal into the anthropology of the neurotic affirmation seeker, dependent for its existence and meaning on a constant stream of social validations.
In fact the Marxist mind shrugs at natural freedom, considering the primary human problem to be one of alienation. Hence … inclusion … inclusion …. and more inclusion. And we see this all the time, most especially now, in left’s obsession with the “tyranny of biology” (modern feminism); with the supposedly horrible exigencies of the natural world which make freedom meaningless outside a communal life (Marxism); with the “ableism” of the privileged, which now must be sacrificed on the altar of equity and coerced caring.
Natural freedom, political freedom, economic freedom, is not enough: because, apparently, not everyone can be or will be persuaded to make use of it. Because nature is “unfair” we will remake human nature so that all is fair and none are deprived of their “fair” share of the affirmations and especially the sacrifices of others. And part of this is vigilantly scanning the countenance of others so as to alert us if their compliance is formal, grudging, or not fully felt.
And speaking of privilege, what, after all, makes the biological offspring of some social element, more entitled to its support than those who the collective has anointed as equally deserving?
No, you cannot ultimately share a legal space with leftists. They are a bottomless, life sucking pit of resentment.
Kind of like Hell, but without the poetic charms.
Yes, 400 years or so ago I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, and strangely enough I was moved to revisit it, this time as an audiobook on YouTube. (The reader is quite good, except for some surprising mispronunciations.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYYVZIuuReo
“Hatcrime” is quite apt. And it seems to me that all this bally-hoo is highly suggestive of some social Big-Brother’s training in turning individuals into automatons, who now reliably and robotically re-create themselves.
I was also struck by the many resemblances of Orwell’s writing to Miss Rand’s. It seems to me I remember her somewhere disparaging the book, but I think they made many of the same points, and sometimes even the phraseology strikes me as similar. Of course, Orwell is looking at the phenomenon from a different angle; he is fundamentally concerned with the stifling of the individual, the killing of the human within the human body, with turning the human into a mechanical robot.
.
But ultimately, the concern of both is to warn us all what can happen unless we encourage ourselves to think for ourselves, to hang onto our humanity and above all to our rational capacity and our individual selves, because in the end that is the only thing that can save each of us from psychic death.
. . .
But eeyore, above, wrote,
Reading that, it struck me that this sort of thing is often called “passive-aggressive” behavior. It seems like a month ago, but IIRC in Neo’s first posting on this — this utterly negligible pile of rotting manure — the video she included consisted almost entirely of Mr. Sandmann’s standing there calmly, smiling at the drummer. If I came at that with the sort of mindset that Mizz Guthrie apparently has, I can understand her thinking of his stillness as “aggressive.”
I have always despised that term as being both self-contradictory and a ready-made weapon to be used against others who are putting up a resistance to doing as they’re being told. I HATE it when people are vilified regardless of their actual behavior, conduct, actions; the more so when what they are doing is perfectly normal, acceptable behavior, and also when it consists of resisting an actual, unprovoked attack by either passive compliance aimed at forcing the attacker to cope with manhandling (actually or metaphorically) a deadweight, or by active defensive fighting.
GRRRRRR.
.
Anyway, I said it before and I’ll say it again. Those young men conducted themselves admirably, and with a degree of self-restraint and maturity that should not be disparaged by calls to remember that they are “children.” They are not. They are well along the way to manhood. Some of them may lose their way in the years ahead, but in that incident at least they showed their present mettle.
Oh. At the outset of this latest diatribe, I wanted to mention that I started the audiobook three weeks ago, long before this steaming pile came up.
Not that it matters.
My mother was born in Eastern Europe and was very suspicious of smiling. Unlike other American mothers, who would tell their daughters to smile all the time, mine would say, “stop smiling, it makes you look stupid.”
Trying to understand my mother’s curious advice, turns out, smiling is cultural. Americans smile a lot. But, not so much in the former Soviet Union, where my mother was a guest in their gulag accommodations. I, not withstanding, smile broadly and with dimples.
But, since leftism has gripped the US in the throat, we’re becoming as repressed as Russians looking over their shoulders in the former Soviet Union.
Smiling advice for foreigners currently traveling in Russia, where they are still suspicious of smiling, may now come in handy here:
https://www.hofstede-insights.com/2018/01/08/ask-expert-smile-russia/
Basically, employ a brief, tepid, close mouthed smile— if you must— infrequently. No grinning. Forget about laughing.
There was an example of a Venezuelan Communist working as a translator in North Korea who got jailed for what resembled a face crime- his alleged tone of voice. From Pyongyang with Love—Autocracies Befriend Autocracies.
It appears that Commie regimes don’t do irony well. Ironic that many of the lefty interlekshuls love irony. 🙂