We live in an increasingly Orwellian world. 2025 is the new 1984, where Big Brother is watching; War is Peace; Ignorance is Strength; Doublethink, Newspeak, Unperson, Thoughtcrime, and the Thought Police all feel chillingly familiar. Recent images of Gaza have shown us a desolate ruin. Vast swathes of infrastructure have been reduced to rubble.
Housing is uninhabitable, hospitals are overwhelmed or destroyed, and nearly all educational institutions have ceased to function. It is not only a literal field of ruins; Gaza is also a moral and legal wasteland, where international law has been violated with impunity, and the agonising death screams of babies and children fall on deaf ears so regularly that it barely registers in the mainstream news. No crime in history has been so well documented by its victims, and yet inaction and censorship reign.
Gaza has revealed a deeper truth: language itself has become a field of ruins, words emptied of meaning. Ethnic cleansing is rebranded as “voluntary migration.” Children shot in the head while queuing for bread and water are no longer seen as innocent five-year-olds, but labelled “Hamas operatives.” Opposing genocide is called “antisemitic.”
In 1984, protagonist Winston Smith worked at the Ministry of Truth, altering historical documents to suit The Party’s revisionist agenda, fabricating news, manipulating facts, and erasing realities. That ethos now seems eerily mirrored in the reporting of most Western mainstream media. A damning report by the UK’s Centre for Media Monitoring, after analysing over 35,000 pieces of content, concluded that the BBC’s coverage of Gaza was “systematically biased against Palestinians.” Some governments publicly decry the slaughter, while simultaneously selling the weapons used to carry it out. We are being gaslit on a global scale.
The persistence of such a widely documented and openly boasted-about obscenity, tweets and TikToks flaunting kill counts, IDF soldiers parading in the underwear of murdered Palestinian women, dancing in ruins and on graves, is a grotesque paradox. Supported by Western weapons and diplomatic protection, this horror unfolds in plain sight. No one in Western political or media spheres can credibly claim ignorance. The evidence is overwhelming. Yet it continues, day after day.
If the world’s most powerful states can defy the very laws they helped create, and silence those who speak out, then the entire concept of international justice collapses. This isn’t just hypocrisy; its colonisation laid bare, even as we’re told that colonisation is a myth.
In a just world, those who support genocide would be recognised as the maniacal, psychopathic criminals they are, not put on pedestals and glorified. History teaches us that attempts to justify genocide and holocausts lead, inevitably, to trials and imprisonment. Yet in this Orwellian world, it is not the enablers of war crimes who face punishment, but the ordinary people who dare to say “no.”
When it comes to Gaza, the hypocrisy and silence of the so-called champions of human rights is deafening. We are being fed a narrative in which Palestinian lives simply do not matter
These are regular citizens with a conscience, deplatformed, sacked, surveilled, smeared, hit with travel bans, legal action, and in some cases, arrested.
Take 81-year-old Deborah Hinton, a former British magistrate honoured by Queen Elizabeth II for her community service. In her peaceful retirement she walks the cliffs, fundraises for her local cathedral choir, and supports charities.
Last month, she was detained in a police cell for seven hours, fingerprinted, and had her DNA swabbed. It was the first time she had ever been arrested, and it left her “shaking uncontrollably” and “traumatised.” Her crime? Speaking out against inhumanity. She now faces a possible six-month prison sentence under UK terrorism legislation.
On August 9th, British police arrested over 522 people for protesting the UK’s decision to ban the group Palestine Action, supporting them now carries a sentence of up to 14 years. Many of those arrested were pensioners holding cardboard signs, dragged away in handcuffs as “terrorists.” This in a country where police often don’t even turn up to actual crime scenes.
Just days ago, a man was arrested for wearing a shirt that read Plasticine Action, before being “de-arrested.” (Plasticine Action is a group of artists protesting the rise of AI-generated animation and authoritarian tech practices.) All this time, I thought terrorists were those who blew up buildings and massacred civilians. But now, thanks to the British government, I know better, terrorists are, apparently, elderly citizens wielding paint and cardboard.
When it comes to Gaza, the hypocrisy and silence of the so-called champions of human rights is deafening. We are being fed a narrative in which Palestinian lives simply do not matter.
In every atrocity in history, it has been the silence of the majority that enabled horrors to continue unchecked. If you’ve ever wondered how so many stood by during the Holocaust, ask yourself: isn’t that exactly what we’re doing now?
