BACKGROUND: (Wikipedia):
"Orwell: 2+2=5 is a 2025 documentary film, directed and produced by Raoul Peck. It follows the life and career of George Orwell, and how his political observations are still relevant in present day, particularly the lessons from his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.[]Damian Lewis narrates the film as Orwell. The documentary had its world premiere at the Cannes Premiere section of the Cannes Film Festival on 17 May 2025, where it was nominated for the L'Œil d'or."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell:_2%2B2%3D5
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: RAOUL PECK: "Even though every citizen have (sic) watched those footage and saw that it was never about love. It was a whole attack on the Capitol where people died. Where people got entrance, where people were fearing for their life. Congressmen, women. The vice president himself was in danger to be hanged. DF: Right.] But then they wanted to erase that, as if-- you know, it's like in 1984, basically. You know, where, you know, you erase the picture, you erase the sound because it doesn't exist, because it shouldn't exist. So, it doesn't exist, you know? And that's the only way for any authoritarian regime to have influence upon you or upon the society, is to redefine what is true and what is untrue. [music] DF: You know, that brings me to the title of your film. You've got Orwell: 2+2=5. So that's a reference to the scene in 1984 where Winston Smith is being tortured until he kind of complies with that false axiom, right. That 2+2 is 5."
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CBC: (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation): Orwell: 2+2=5.CBC 'Front Burner' demonstrates how George Orwell's words became our reality: Transcript: Published by CBC news, on November 7, 2025. Guest Host: Daemon Fairless;
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GIST: DF: Raoul, you've been in Orwell's head quite a bit lately. What do you think George Orwell would make of what's going on these days?
RAOUL PECK: Well, um. [chuckles] I think he would shake his head, and he would just say, you know, I have nothing to add. This is exactly what I've been telling you 75 years ago. That's it. We don't have to rebuild the world again and again. We just have to learn from history.
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Hi, I'm Daemon Fairless, in for Jayme Poisson.
[Music: Theme]
DF: I think it's fair to say that there's no author who gets more attention in our public and political conversation than George Orwell.
SOUNDCLIP
SPEAKER 1: It's very Orwellian. I've used that term before in the context of this administration's approach to science.
SPEAKER 2: I think I'm going to go back and reread George Orwell. I mean, this kind of doublespeak makes no sense at all.
CHRIS CUOMO: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." That's from George Orwell's 1984. This president wants to control the present by having people change the past.
JOSH HAWLEY, U.S. Senator: You're telling me you're going to get CISA out of the business of policing narrative control? I mean, narrative control. Good Lord. I mean, what could be more Orwellian than that?
KELLYANNE CONWAY: Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point...
SOUNDCLIP
ELON MUSK: I have a hat: Make Orwell Fiction Again.
JOE ROGAN: [laughs] I've seen that hat.
[laughter]
DAEMON FAIRLESS: His ideas around mass surveillance and propaganda expressed in books like Animal Farm and 1984, they've shaped the way we talk about the world and how we talk about it.
Thought crime, doublespeak, Big Brother -- they're all parts of our vocab. We even created an adjective for him: Orwellian.
And looking around, it feels like he predicted some of the biggest problems of our time. In an age where distrust in the media and institutions is rising, democracy is under threat, and lying seems to have lost its stigma.
SOUNDCLIP
DONALD TRUMP: But one thing, I can promise you this: I will always tell you the truth.
[crowd cheers]
DAEMON FAIRLESS: Orwell was a self-proclaimed democratic socialist. He explicitly fought against authoritarianism.
But these days his language is used across the entire political spectrum, particularly on the right.
So why do his ideas resonate so strongly 75 years after his death?
In a new film, Orwell: 2+2=5, director Raoul Peck looks back on the writer's life, juxtaposing Orwell's own words with political events like the January 6th Capitol insurrection, the persecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and the invasion of Ukraine.
Raoul Peck joins me to talk about what Orwell tells us about the world today, and the ideological battle over those ideals.
[Music: Theme]
DF: Hey, Raoul.
RAOUL PECK: Hey, hi. Nice to meet you.
DF: Yeah, nice to meet you. Thanks for coming on.
RAOUL PECK: My pleasure.
DF: So before we get into the main narrative of your doc, let's start with the namesake, George Orwell.
You're one of the big heavyweights of documentary filmmaking these days. You're working with Alex Gibney, who's another heavyweight. I'm curious what made you want to take this on, like why Orwell, why this particular moment. Why are you doing it now?
RAOUL PECK: Well, I knew by knowing Orwell's toolbox about authoritarian regime,
I knew that it fit perfectly to the time we are in right now.
At the same time, when I start working on the project, it was obvious for us, for most people, that Kamala Harris would become the next president of the United States.
And for me, the film was as urgent because what we are living right now with the present administration in the U.S. is just an extreme development of what have been building for the last five decades.
You know, because I come from Haiti. I come from the Third World.
[DF: Yeah.] So the idea of the Western countries using a certain set of ideas behind words, let's say democracy, justice, freedom -- those terms, when they were used toward us were never meant to means (sic) what they means. (sic).
To give you an example, when I was a young boy, I never could understand how come president that, you know, argued to be, you know, the most democratic in the whole world, like Kennedy, like Johnson, Reagan, even Clinton, they were the worst in dealing with countries like Haiti, Rwanda, Congo.
As if those words didn't mean the same for these countries, you know. They were supporting dictatorship in my country. I went to Congo as as a young boy. They were supporting Mobutu. Mobutu came to power with the help of the CIA. So, I had a great familiarity with doublethinking, double-talk, doublespeak. I always had to deconstruct all my life.
SOUNDCLIP
[Clip from Orwell: 2+2=5 trailer]
NARRATOR: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful."
DONALD TRUMP: The love in the air. I've never seen anything like it.
NARRATOR: "And murder respectable."
DF: One of the really surprising parts of your film -- you know, I was expecting a biography, which it is.
But you also juxtapose Orwell's, you know, own words, his text. But you juxtapose this footage from different historical and political moments.
Let's focus in on one of them, right. You've got some footage of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, '21.
Tell me how that specifically fits into Orwell's ideas or his warnings.
RAOUL PECK: Listen, it was a centrepiece of what happened in the last years, where a sitting president is reinterpreting history to a way that fits his own agenda.
SOUNDCLIP
DONALD TRUMP: They were there with love in their heart. That was an unbelievable-- and it was a beautiful day.
DONALD TRUMP: They were peaceful people. These were great people. The crowd was unbelievable.
SOUNDCLIP
CAPITOL PROTESTER 1: They don't represent us. They need to pay the ultimate price for their crimes.
CAPITOL PROTESTER 2: Yes!
CAPITOL PROTESTER 1: An example needs to be made!
SOUNDCLIP
CAPITOL PROTESTER 3: Let us in!
SOUNDCLIP
CAPITOL PROTESTER 4: We can take that place.
COMPANION: And then do what?
CAPITOL PROTESTER 4: Heads on pikes!
RAOUL PECK: Even though every citizen have (sic) watched those footage and saw that it was never about love. It was a whole attack on the Capitol where people died.
Where people got entrance, where people were fearing for their life. Congressmen, women.
The vice president himself was in danger to be hanged.
[DF: Right.] But then they wanted to erase that, as if-- you know, it's like in 1984, basically. You know, where, you know, you erase the picture, you erase the sound because it doesn't exist, because it shouldn't exist. So, it doesn't exist, you know?
And that's the only way for any authoritarian regime to have influence upon you or upon the society, is to redefine what is true and what is untrue.
[music]
DF: You know, that brings me to the title of your film. You've got Orwell: 2+2=5. So that's a reference to the scene in 1984 where Winston Smith is being tortured until he kind of complies with that false axiom, right. That 2+2 is 5.
SOUNDCLIP
O'BRIEN: How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
WINSTON: Four.
O'BRIEN: And if Big Brother were to say not four but five, then how many?
WINSTON: Four.
[Winston winces, whimpers in pain]
O'BRIEN: How many fingers, Winston?
WINSTON: [whimpers] Stop! Anything you-- Five. But [unclear] stop the pain!
O'BRIEN: No, no, Winston. Winston, that is no use. You are lying.
DF: This is, you know, as you point out, this is kind of one of the things that happens under a totalitarian regime, right.
There's this kind of forced inversion of reality, this need to get the population to deny what actually happened.
So, so tell me more about that, because this is really kind of a central theme to your film.
RAOUL PECK: Yes. And, you know, it's not a coincidence that usually that type of regime, they use every weapon in the toolbox of what Orwell defined.
They attack history, they attack science, they attack justice, they attack language.
Those are all the instrument within a society that enable us to have some sort of common ground, to know when we have having a discussion that we agree on the terms of that discussion, we agree on the words of that discussion.
But once you start pushing the meanings, you start forbidding certain expression, you know, you are basically losing the ability to have a real discussion or to build a society.
You know, Orwell has this incredible sentence where he said, "The degradation of language is the condition for the degradation of democracy."
DF: Let's talk about that. I'm curious to hear you talk about where you see evidence of this kind of inversion, this use of language today.
RAOUL PECK: To take this formidable example of President Donald Trump. It's like, I am for law and order, while encouraging rioters.
SOUNDCLIP
DONALD TRUMP: I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.
SOUNDCLIP
DONALD TRUMP: Right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol.
[crowd cheers]
DONALD TRUMP: And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
[some laughter]
DONALD TRUMP: Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.
RAOUL PECK: That goes on and on.
So the idea is basically to, to make such a mess of any type of reference that you have. So you basically, you know, you don't know how to move, where to move, what to say.
DF: Kind of related to that too is, and you've got some scenes, you know, that's showing classic book burnings, right.
And totalitarian systems often, as well as this inversion of reality, there's, you know, the hard fact that there's, you know, campaigns against reading, banning of books, burning of books, right.
RAOUL PECK: Oh, yeah.
DF: Why is literature in particular seen as so subversive?
RAOUL PECK: Well, because literature is what humanity have (sic( accumulated in terms of knowledge.
You know, books are a sort of vaccine against ignorance.
So of course you would attack books. You would -- you know, and it's a sort of censorship as well. Because in those books potentially, you know, there are writers, you know, analyzing your present behaviour.
SOUNDCLIP
NARRATOR: "When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I'm 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."
RAOUL PECK: You know, you find answers in books, you find a direction, you find analysis. And all those are enemies because you want one acceptable thinking. It's the thinking of the leader.
DF: The Big Brother, yeah.
RAOUL PECK: And by example, it goes with a certain cult of personality as well. You know, I am the leader. I'm the one who knows the truth, and I am the one who decide what's truth or not. And when that doesn't match, well, there are alternative truths, alternative facts. Which is the biggest aberration of all.
[music]
DF: One of the interesting things about your doc is that you're using Orwell's words, his essays, his letters, his diaries. You do span us from his birth and his childhood, his early adulthood. It's, it is pretty sweeping.
SOUNDCLIP
[tranquil music]
NARRATOR: I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class.
NARRATOR: People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services...
DF: But I guess I'm curious. To you, when you're immersed in his own writing, and as, you know, writing about his life, what surprised you most about Orwell when you stepped into his life?
RAOUL PECK: Well, to be honest, something happened, and I'm glad that it happened very early on of my research.
Because Orwell, the way I learn about him in school, I read Animal Farm, you know, barely 1984, because at the time it was I guess a difficult novel for me to read.
But he came, or let's say he was presented as a science fiction writer, almost.
[DF: Yeah. Yeah.] A dystopian writer who, who sees the future, who prophetize about the future as a catastrophic world.
But no, he was talking about what he went through. He's talking about his experience.
He's talking about his knowledge of what power is and what human beings can do to each other.
He experienced how Britain was treating their colonies.
So it was not science fiction. It was reality. And the books he wrote were not some dystopia.
His books were warnings telling us if you don't watch out, this is where you're going to land.
And the other aspect that I did not expect was I understood that he went to my world as somebody from the Third World.
DF: You mean like Myanmar, when he was stationed there.
RAOUL PECK: Oh, going to Myanmar.
[DF: Yeah.] But even the fact that he was born in India. You know, when you are born, even as a young baby, as a young child, the kind of emotion you get, the kind of warmth, his life with his nanny.
You know, anybody who has had, you know, had the privilege and a chance to have a nanny know the affection that can, that it can install.
And, and it allows me to understand why he would go when he's 19, back to Myanmar. It was in the research of that feelings that he had.
DF: I mean, this, this time he spent in Myanmar is really crucial to understanding him.
Tell me how his, how his time there basically galvanized this anti-authoritarian bent that defined the rest of his work.
RAOUL PECK: Well, I think until that time, he probably had, as the young man he was, he, first of all, he wanted to go elsewhere and not go, after Eton, go to Cambridge or Oxford like most young, privileged boy in England do.
And he wanted to go and confront the real world.
But then he realized that in Burma he was basically a tool of imperialists.
He was in a situation where he was actually the bully in the village, and he resented the character that he became or the role that he was playing as basically a colonial policeman. And that was an important break for him.
DF: Right. And he, you know, that's really like... He's got that famous essay, "Shooting an Elephant," right? And that's, that's really what that's about, is that moment.
RAOUL PECK: Among other thing. But he talks also very long on it in that essay, "Why I Write," which is one of the essays that also gave me, I would say, the red line of the whole story, the main storyline.
You know, where he's very candidly, sincerely, you know, like an act of contrition, telling what he felt when he went to Burma and why writing was important for him and what was his, I would say, his motivation to become a writer.
And that the fight against injustice was important to him and was an important motivation for him.
SOUNDCLIP
NARRATOR: "My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice."
RAOUL PECK: And so that, that station in Burma was one of the key element of his life.
[music]
DF: Raoul, I want to move on to some parallels to his work, to things that are happening on today.
So the words "dystopian" and "Orwellian," they both get a lot of plays these days, right.
They're really part of the zeitgeist.
You can see that when people are like connecting with shows like Black Mirror and films like Minority Report.
Why do you think these ideas about dystopia feel so urgent right now?
RAOUL PECK: Well, I would say I would have a problem if today we continue to use dystopia, because if you are basically creating a world that actually is absurd, yes, it seems in the future
But if it's a way not to deal with reality, then I have a problem with it.
Because reality, especially the one we are experimenting right now, is absurd.
DF: So, so, yeah. Like I mean, dystopia defined a while ago, but reality or documentary as defined by today.
RAOUL PECK: Yes. And that's also the goal of this film, is to enable you to be able to analyze your reality.
Because Orwell is providing you with the tools.
He's providing you with the possibility to analyze, to put names on what is happening today.
Because I can see that.
You know, I've had a lot of Q&As and discussion with the audience, not only in the U.S. but in Britain, in Germany, in France, and I could see how part of the audience is totally lost because they don't even know how to name what is happening, you know.
And they, they seem to be discovering that something like that could happen in what they thought was a solid democracy.
DF: That's kind of what makes Orwell, like looking back on him, is part of what makes him so amazing, right?
Because he died in 1950, so he didn't see the internet.
There was none of the surveillance tech that we have today.
You know, predictive policing, facial recognition, that sort of thing.
And he still managed to kind of conjure up versions of that in his writing. Like, where did, where did that insight come from? How did that happen?
RAOUL PECK: Because he analyzed the basic of the way all societies function.
You know, when he says, you know, you need to know your history, that means a lot of those structure(sic) happened before.
It's nothing new.
What is new is the technology applied.
But in fact, he's analyzing capitalism. He's analyzing the way class works -- the relationship between classes, the relationship to profit.
That's his analysis.
And as long as we are in the middle of a capitalistic society, those rules still exist.
And that's why they are still so precise in his analysis, because those behaviour were already there in the beginning of the 20th century.
We had a moment where, you know, radio, newspapers, etc., book editing, were in very few hands.
But what happened? There were resistance. There were people fighting that. And then there were regulations, anti-trust laws, you know?
And so it was nothing new in that sense.
And that's why when we talk about toolbox, those are toolbox of capitalism. Those are toolbox -- you know, if we just accept those, if we just accept the reality as something that historically is new, we won't understand what's going on, you know?
And that's why those tools are important. Because they are not new, they are just presented differently. And their impact, of course, today are even worse, because we are coming to a limit on many levels.
The limit of, you know, climate change. The limit of water. The limit of population, when you have a population that is becoming older and older in the Western world. The limit of the strength.
Now you don't have a bipolar world, you know. Orwell's work was used as a tool against the Soviet Union.
It was a tool in the, in the Cold War.
And that's one of the thing that Orwell is so mistaken because he died basically four months after finishing 1984.
So he was not there to spin his book the right way. That's why I kept this sentence when he's, you know, one of the few letters where he's responding to accusation from the labour union saying, you know, you're almost a traitor.
He said, no, I'm not attacking the labour union. I'm just warning you not to go into that kind of society like in fascism and communism.
DF: What's really interesting, though, right, is that if you look ahead to now, right, there's not a lot of writers who have been claimed by people all over the political spectrum. So he was really clear about
[RAOUL: Absolutely.] his convictions as a democratic socialist.
But since then, his words, his writing's been invoked by the far left, the fascist right, and every-- basically everyone in between.
You know, there's Big Brother, newspeak, thought crime, doublethink. These are all parts of the [RAOUL: Yeah.] political language of our day. Particularly so on the right these days, I think that's fair to say.
And what's really interesting is U.S. President Donald Trump is among those who have recently praised Orwell publicly.
SOUNDCLIP
DONALD TRUMP: ...of humanity speaks, writes, thinks and prays in the language born on these isles and perfected in the pages of Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolkien, Lewis, Orwell and Kipling. Incredible people.
DF: So, like, I guess that's kind of what blows my mind. What is it about Orwell that has such a broad appeal across the political spectrum? Like he was fighting fascists in Spain. It's amazing that the far right is invoking him.
RAOUL PECK: Well, but because ignorance is strength, you know?
They make almost Orwell say the contrary of what Orwell says.
That's why this film is important, because it's a sort of rehabilitation of Orwell. It's a sort of putting Orwell back where he belongs.
And Orwell's word are very clear.
There is no alternative facts for Orwell. You know, 2+2 is not 5.
That's why I use that in the title, because it's the ultimate simple formula, arithmetic formula that pays no doubt, you know.
That the far right is using it is because they are counting on the people's ignorance.
On the contrary, Orwell explained this behaviour very well.
That's what authoritarian regime, again, do. They attack institution, they attack language, they attack justice, they attack books and knowledge. And you come back to the party slogan.
You know, a war is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery, you know.
And that's exactly where we are. It's not because they use it that, you know, it makes them write about it. On the contrary, they fit the caricature.
DF: Raoul, you've been in Orwell's head quite a bit lately. What do you think George Orwell would make of what's going on these days?
RAOUL PECK: Well, um. [chuckles] I think he would shake his head, and he would just say, you know, I have nothing to add. This is exactly what I've been telling you 75 years ago. That's it. We don't have to rebuild the world again and again. We just have to learn from history.
DF: Raoul, thank you so much for coming on.
RAOUL PECK: Thank you for inviting me.
[Music: Theme]
DF: That's all for today. Front Burner was produced this week by Joyita Sengupta, Matt Meuse, Matthew Amha, Lauren Donnelly, Mackenzie Cameron, Sam McNulty and Kevin Sexton. Our YouTube producer Jon Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabason. Our senior producer is Elaine Chau. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Lokos. And I'm Daemon Fairless, in for Jayme Poisson. She'll be back next week. Thanks for listening."
The entire broadcast can be heard at:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/how-orwells-words-became-our-reality-transcript-9.6971015
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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