How Fighting Fake Dystopias Created a Real One
Part 2

2,264 words

This is the follow-up to Why Fictional Dystopias Do Not Prevent Real Ones

I recall several years back, my friend and fellow YouTuber, Fritz Imperial, posted the following quote on Twitter: “The real dystopia was created by fighting fake dystopias.” The recent unrest in the United Kingdom, the subsequent crackdown, and the comparisons made with dystopian literature on social media had me thinking about this quotation. It’s not only classics like 1984 or Brave New World which are popular today. Many such stories have been produced and heavily promoted by the mainstream in more recent decades.

For example, there’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1985 novel which was adapted into a TV series by Hulu in 2017. This series tells the story of a Christian fundamentalist future United States where women are enslaved, mandated to wear long red robes and white hoods, and forcibly impregnated in internment camps by misogynistic white men in suits. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this series is essentially the paranoid delusions of feminists during the Trump-era put onto a TV screen.

How about the Watch Dogs: Legion, Ubisoft’s open-world action game released in 2020. The game is set in London after the UK has been taken over by an isolationist fascist regime, governed by a PMC called Albion and their CEO Nigel Cass. The regime proceeds to stage a terrorist attack in order to implement a mass surveillance state, detain immigrants en masse, and cut Britain off from the rest of the world. The game’s attempt at doom-mongering over the outcome of the Brexit Referendum is about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

But the most egregious example of all which I know of is the 2005 film V for Vendetta, based on Alan Moore’s graphic novel of the same title. The movie is set in London in the near future after the UK has been taken over by a totalitarian Christian fundamentalist, neo-fascist, white supremacist regime, ruled by a political party known as Norsefire. In this regime, immigrants, Muslims, and homosexuals are interned in concentration camps and experimented on, a mass surveillance grid tracks people’s every movement, jackbooted armed troops patrol the streets and enforce curfews, and any criticism of the regime is punishable by death.

Our “heroes” include:

• V, an anonymous violent revolutionary who dons a Guy Fawkes mask and carries out assassinations and terrorist attacks.
• Evey, a young woman whose parents were executed by the regime for their seditious activism.
• Gordon, a closeted gay TV host with a secret collection of contraband including a copy of the Quran and gay porn.
• Valerie, a lesbian who was interned for her sexuality, experimented on, and executed in a concentration camp.

Our “villains” include:

• High Chancellor Sutler, a cartoonishly evil one-dimensional totalitarian dictator who screams every single line of dialogue.
• The Bishop of London, a paedophile priest who has young girls delivered to him on command.
• The Voice of London, a TV propagandist who is broadcast throughout the city shouting political doctrine at the camera.
• Creedy, the power-hungry leader of Britain’s fascistic secret police.
• Chief Inspector Finch, the detective assigned to identifying and capturing V.

The movie begins with Evey being caught violating curfew by the fascist secret police who attempt to rape her before she is rescued by V. He then recites the “Remember, Remember, the 5th of November” poem, the date which it happens to be before detonating a bomb to destroy the Old Baily in London. The following day, V breaks into the TV station where Evey works and broadcasts a message declaring that there will be a revolution one year hence on November 5^th, during which he will blow up the House of Parliament building as Guy Fawkes attempted to in 1605.

Now accused of being V’s accomplice, Evey is forced to go into hiding with him. V proceeds to assassinate high ranking members of the Norsefire party. Chief Inspector Finch is assigned to the case, but during his investigation, he uncovers a conspiracy. He learns that the St. Mary’s Virus which had gripped the nation years earlier was actually created in a concentration camp and deliberately released by the Norsefire party to justify totalitarian rule.

V sends out hundreds of thousands of Guy Fawkes masks to citizens in London along with a message to take to the streets to witness his destruction of the House of Parliament on the 5th of November. He rigs a bomb to an old train line which runs under parliament. V makes a deal with Creedy to turn himself in in exchange for killing High Chancellor Sutler who Creedy will replace. After Sutler is dead, V kills Creedy and his men but is mortally wounded in the fight. Evey loads his body onto the train rigged with the bombs. Finch discovers the rig, but allows Evey to initiate it, having learned of the conspiracy behind the St. Mary’s Virus. The House of Parliament blows up as thousands wearing Guy Fawkes masks look on and the regime falls.

I could point out some of the many logical inconsistencies with the story. Like for example, why does V, a revolutionary fighting a totalitarian Christo-fascist regime choose Guy Fawkes as his icon when the real Guy Fawkes was a radical Catholic whose motive for planning the Gunpowder Plot was to restore a Catholic monarch to the throne? Why does Gordon, a gay man persecuted by Christian fundamentalism have such an affinity for the Quran that he secretly keeps a copy hidden in his house at risk of punishment by death? Why does London in this theoretical totalitarian future (from 2005) look nicer than London does in the real world in 2024? In the movie, the city looks clean, high-tech, and well-run, and the family which is intended to represent average people is shown living in an apartment which, in reality, would cost a fortune in London.

I could also point out how lazy, unimaginative, and on the nose the political messaging of the movie is. The main villain’s full name is Adam Sutler, a blatantly obvious derivative of Adolf Hitler. He’s constantly shown alongside fascistic political banners screaming in front of a crowd of jackbooted troops with rifles, again an obvious caricature of the Nuremberg rallies. And what work of multiculturalist propaganda would be complete without images of famished human corpses littered about a concentration camp? There’s also the ham-fisted and unoriginal manner in which the film comments on political issues of its time such as the Religious Right, the War on Terror, the gay marriage debate, or the perception of Islam following 9/11, all of which feels incredibly forced.

I could also bring up how, in order to avoid contradicting the narratives the film wants to push, there is no mention at all of Guy Fawkes’s deeply held religious beliefs which served as his motive for the Gun Powder Plot. His desire to return England to Catholicism is never once addressed in the movie. It only mentions the fact that he tried to blow up the House of Parliament. What the film glorifies is not the conviction of a man like Guy Fawkes, but simply the nihilism of wanton destruction.

But what really stands out about V for Vendetta is how it is that the fictional dystopian Britain depicted in this libtard power fantasy is the mirror opposite of the reality of British society today.

• It’s not white Christian fascists who are put on national television to spew political diatribe. It’s anti-white black and brown ethno-narcissists.
• It’s not white Christian fascists systematically sexually abusing young girls with the complicity of the authorities. It’s gangs of Pakistani Muslims.
• It’s not white Christian fascists who are coercing people (including children) into twisted body-altering medical procedures. It’s lesbian, homosexual, and transgender “rights” activists.
• It’s not white Christian fascists who make walking the streets of London at night unsafe. It’s knife-wielding black teenagers.
• It’s not white Christian fascists rewriting the works of Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, and Agatha Christie to fit their political ideology. It’s radical feminists and anti-racist ideologues.
• It wasn’t white Christian fascists who colluded with Big Pharma to use a virus as a pretext for greatly expanding the power of the state. It was progressive liberal globalists.
• It’s not white Christian fascists who are arresting people for simply expressing a political opinion. It’s a government which lauds “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as their highest values.

V for Vendetta imagines a dystopian future where England is controlled by a far-right, white supremacist, Christian fundamentalist, totalitarian regime. It’s the producers’ lazy and uncreative way of fearmongering about an ethnically homogenous, culturally Christian, socially conservative England. However, we don’t need to imagine what such a place would look like. It existed just a few decades ago, before multiculturalism. And back then, there were no grooming gangs, puberty-blockers, acid attacks, stabbing sprees, nudge units, or thought police in England.

In other words, the values which V for Vendetta attempts to pathologize as dystopian and totalitarian are those of the England of 1948, the England in which George Orwell wrote 1984. This was the societal context which Orwell had in mind when he set out to illustrate a dystopian nightmare so alien to the reader, they would shudder in fear just picturing the existence of such a place. And we also don’t need to imagine what England would look like if it were controlled by the “heroes” of the film. It’s England today, with all the aforementioned horrors.

Media such as V for Vendetta, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Watch Dogs: Legion serve the same function in today’s world which the Two Minutes Hate served in Oceania in 1984. In Orwell’s novel, party members are required to routinely sit through a film denouncing Emmanuel Goldstein, the ideological enemy of Big Brother and either Eurasia or East Asia, depending on who they are at war with at the time. They are encouraged to unleash their hatred of the enemies of Big Brother by shouting and throwing objects at the screen in disgust. These fictitious dystopias serve the same purpose for present-day progressives. The only difference is that instead of ginning the audience up into a frenzy in which they scream and lob items at their TVs, they conjure an internal sense of self-righteous moral superiority in the viewer.

It’s also worth noting the real-world figures which served as the inspiration for these pieces of dystopian fiction. Watch Dogs: Legion is inspired by Nigel Farage and the results of the 2016 Brexit Referendum. The Handmaid’s Tale TV series was made during the Trump administration and the novel it is based on was made during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. V for Vendetta makes elusions to the War on Terror and the Religious Right, both of which played a part in the presidency of George W. Bush, and the graphic novel which it is based on was, in-part, a commentary on Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership of the UK.

Each of these works of media allude to popular right-wing figures in the US and UK over the past 50 years. As a right-winger myself, I would regard each of these figures as controlled opposition. Nigel Farage won his Brexit Referendum and Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, and Donald Trump all served terms in office, yet none of them have reversed or really even held back the progressive drift of politics in their countries over that period of time. As to why, I am of the belief that their critiques of liberalism were simply surface level and at their core, they remained liberal egalitarians in accordance with the postwar consensus. If they were in fact genuine in their beliefs, that would mean that they lacked the fortitude to use their power to push back against the slide to where we are today in any meaningful way. In other words, they were the furthest thing from a strongman tyrant with the will to claim absolute authority.

However, these works of fiction build these individuals up to be the second coming of Adolf Hitler. What this does is create this constant state of paranoia among leftists and liberals that anything remotely right-wing will inevitably give rise to a fascistic totalitarian regime where “victim groups” are hauled off to concentration camps. This galvanizes them into a perpetual state of hysteria under which they are prepared to go nuclear over the slightest deviation from progressive orthodoxy. This is the same paranoia which has given us cancel culture, Antifa, and Trump Derangement Syndrome; something the entertainment industry has played no small part in creating.

It should come as no surprise that fans of media like V for Vendetta cheer on with glee as the British government hands down prison sentences to working class English people over posts they made on social media. The message of the film is not that authoritarianism, censorship, and political violence are bad in and of themselves. The message is that if any worldview contrary to the progressive egalitarian fantasy is ever allowed to see the light of day, it’s bound to result in a genocidal totalitarian dystopia and that any amount of authoritarianism, censorship, and political violence is justified in preventing that from happening.

Communist regimes of the 20th century legitimized themselves by portraying capitalist countries as oppressive, unjust, and impoverished in their propaganda. The entertainment industry has done the same for the ruling universalist egalitarian ideology of the present day. By demonizing any and every alternative as irredeemably evil, they’ve created a zealous ideological vanguard on a never-ending witch hunt for wrong-thinkers, creating a perpetual state of terror throughout public life in the Western world. That’s how fighting fake dystopias create a real one.