November 30 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the most misunderstood but instructive conflicts of the 20th century: the “Winter War” between Russia and Finland.
There is no “ideological spectrum,” and all those vile misologies that arose in the last century – Fascism, Bolshevism, Nazism, and Maoism – are masks that hide men obscenely obsessed with godlike power over other men. Orwell grasped this perfectly when he wrote of those “nasty little isms,” and anyone who has read 1984 sees how the absence of any real coherent system of values is not only possible in, but indispensable to totalitarianism. The notional ideology of Oceania, for example, was “Ingsoc,” or English Socialism, but that term was devoid of any real meaning.
It was also Orwell who penned that vital principle of all totalitarianisms: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” So Eastasia, which had recently been an ally of Oceania, not only ceased in one day being that ally, but became the enemy of Oceania…and the politically correct history was rewritten so that Eastasia had always been the enemy of Oceania. The Winter War shows this in practice.