By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“Two plus two equals five.” That this is false would be apparent to most first graders. Yet this is, in effect, what President Donald Trump wants us to believe when he tells us that the United States is in the midst of an “insurrection” and that there is an “invasion from within” that requires US troops to quell. Of course, there is no insurrection or invasion. But Trump is using a classic tool of totalitarians, demanding absolute obedience, even including the outright rejection of reality. He is provoking conflict as a pretense to justify the deployment of US troops to Democrat-controlled cities. He has already sent the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles, and now has sent the National Guard into Chicago. He is attempting to send them into Portland, Oregon as well. These deployments are being challenged in court, with a federal judge – a Trump appointee, no less – temporarily blocking Trump from sending troops to Oregon.

“Two plus two equals five” is a famous line from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984.” In the story, England is under an oppressive government demanding complete obedience while conducting constant surveillance by “Big Brother.” Citizens like the book’s protagonist, Winston, are subjected to relentless propaganda to get them to believe the government’s lies. For those who fail to believe, imprisonment and torture follow.

“There’s no emergency, and there’s no justification for having guards or troops here in the city of Chicago or in the Chicagoland area. In fact, what we have seen over the last few weeks is the escalation of violence and chaos conducted by ICE agents,” Ed Yohnka, ACLU of Illinois communications director, said on the Democracy Now! news hour.

In one striking example, ICE agents conducted a nighttime raid on an entire apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, rappelling from a Blackhawk helicopter onto the roof, smashing down doors, and dragging residents outside in their pajamas. Children were zip-tied with their hands behind their backs.

Cristóbal Cavazos, a Chicago community activist who has been organizing community defense groups, described other examples of the Trump administration’s violence on Democracy Now!

“We’re seeing a historic onslaught in Chicago, the killing of Silverio Villegas González. We’re seeing it at Broadview detention center, friends of mine who have been tear-gassed, people being thrown like pancakes, ICE in the Loop, ICE going down the Chicago River on boats. It’s really an attack on Chicago. They’re trying to break our spirit.”

Trump has also threatened to arrest Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, both Democrats.

Cristóbal Cavazos went on, “Trump has really done a propaganda war… He’s trying to scare us. He’s trying to build a lot of fear in the community to stop us from fighting back. But, you know, frankly, it’s not going to work. We’re going to go out there.”

The Trump administration is aggressively attempting to use every legal artifice it can to exert authoritarian control, from threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, originally enacted in 1792, to the Alien Enemy Act of 1798. But Trump is also using propaganda, from the daily press briefing at the White House, where Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issues a stream of official lies about what the administration is doing, to the online publication of videos by the Department of Homeland Security, edgily edited to show ICE and CBP agents chasing and arresting people.

As George Orwell wrote in “1984,” his last book, published in 1949,

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it…The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

Orwell’s life’s work is the subject of a new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5, directed by the acclaimed Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, and produced by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney.

Speaking on Democracy Now!, Gibney described the relevance of George Orwell, and “1984,” to the current state of affairs in the United States:

“We have a president who…invents things on the spot, but he expects them to be revered as true. Two plus two equals five. That’s how he impresses us with his power, that he can make us rudder against our own common sense. That’s the danger we must all rise up against.”

The authoritarian party that rules in Orwell’s “1984” had three principal slogans:

WAR IS PEACE.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

By the end of “1984,” Winston is brutalized into accepting the lies. This need not be our fate. Trump’s attempt to send troops into American cities can and must be resisted.