George Orwell’s Three-Power World—and Ours

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four does not present a world of many nations. It presents a world of three empires—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—locked in permanent, shifting conflict. The alliances are deliberately fluid. One day Oceania is allied with Eastasia against Eurasia; the next day it is the reverse. The public is required to instantly forget yesterday’s enemy and embrace today’s. The deeper purpose of this system is not military victory but mental control. If the Party can change who the enemy is, it can change what reality itself means.

What Orwell was describing was not a fantasy of chaos but a theory of stability: a three-power system in which no one wins, no one loses, and conflict never ends.

We now live in something very close to that world.

The United States dominates the Western Hemisphere and the Atlantic order. China dominates East Asia and increasingly the Pacific and much of the global manufacturing system. Russia dominates a northern arc—from Eastern Europe through Central Asia—using energy, war, and coercion to compensate for its weaker economy. None of these powers is strong enough to rule the world, but each is strong enough to enforce a regional sphere.

And just like in Orwell, alliances are not moral commitments; they are tools.

Europe is “America’s ally” while being economically bound to China. India works with Washington while buying Russian oil. Turkey is in NATO while coordinating with Moscow. Saudi Arabia shifts between the dollar and the yuan. Nothing is permanent. Everything is transactional. The public is told these are contradictions. In reality, they are the system working exactly as designed.

This is where Trump fits in.

Trump does not think in terms of rules-based order or international law. He thinks in terms of turf. Venezuela is in America’s hemisphere, so Washington gets to decide what happens there. Ukraine sits in Russia’s historical sphere, so Putin’s actions are something to be bargained over rather than confronted absolutely. Taiwan sits in China’s orbit, so deterrence is maintained rhetorically while real red lines quietly soften. None of this requires Trump to admire Putin or Xi. It only requires him to accept that great powers get their neighborhoods.

Africa, in this worldview, is what Orwell called a “disputed zone”—a place where all three powers operate, extract, and interfere, precisely because no one controls it. China builds ports and mines. Russia sends mercenaries and weapons. The U.S. applies aid, sanctions, and pressure. The people who live there are not the point. The denial of territory to rivals is.

Orwell’s insight was that a three-power world does not bring peace. It brings endless, low-level conflict and constant narrative manipulation. Today’s ally can be tomorrow’s threat. Yesterday’s outrage can be erased by tomorrow’s deal.

The real war, then and now, is not over land. It is over memory—who gets to say what has always been true.

Orwell is the Prophet of Trump's Brave New World

I am among those who believed the Aldous Huxley predicted the future in his Brave New World. It was not Big Brother who crushed us individually and as a people.  We would simply sell out for drugs and entertainment.  

Which is true. And electing a game show host President underlined that truth with a Sharpie.  

And yet, world politics really is devolving into the spheres of influence Orwell predicted.  Huxley saw our individual fall into oblivion. Orwell saw the new world order.

Poet Flyer by E. John Knapp, a Review

 

E. John Knapp’s Poet Flyer surprised me. The beginning of the story is routine and predictable as a war memoir. Whirlwind love. Whirlwind training. Go to war on arrival in England. On the surface it looks modest: a slim volume of poems written by a former B-17 navigator, telling the story of his life in verse. Then with no warning, tragedy rips through Knapp's life.  From that fatal day forward the book becomes an account of survival. Not survival in the cinematic sense, but the quieter, lonelier kind—the survival of the man who lived while his crew did not.

Knapp does not frame his story as a war epic. He begins with training, with the formation of a ten-man bomber crew that becomes, by necessity, a family. Anyone who has served in a tightly knit unit will recognize the texture of those early pages the way shared danger forges intimacy faster than time ever could. Knapp makes us feel how completely his identity became bound up with theirs.

The central tragedy of the book is brutally simple. Knapp is grounded for a mission. The crew flies without him. Their aircraft is shot down after returning over the target—a fatal decision by the mission leader. Other crews see three parachutes. Six men, at least, are dead. Knapp survives because of an accident of paperwork and timing. 

What makes Poet Flyer extraordinary is how Knapp refuses to soften that fact. There is no melodrama, no attempt to turn the event into a lesson. Instead, the poems circle it again and again, the way a mind circles a trauma it can never resolve. He writes about guilt not as a single emotion but as a permanent companion, one that walks beside marriage, fatherhood, career, and old age. The war ends. His life goes on. But his empty seat in the bomber never disappears.

And yet this is not a book of despair. One of Knapp’s great achievements is to show how a person can carry unbearable knowledge and still live fully. He comes home to his wife. They raise children. He works. He loves. But always, somewhere in the background, there is the image of a burning aircraft and three white blossoms of parachute silk. The happiness is real—and so is the haunting.

The choice to tell this story in verse is crucial. Prose would have invited explanation and narrative smoothing. Poetry allows Knapp to write the way memory actually works: in flashes, fragments, images that refuse to be put in order. His language is plain. He writes like a man trained to calculate courses and distances, now measuring the space between what happened and what should have happened.

Poet Flyer is a war story that does not pretend war ends when the shooting stops. It is about survivor’s guilt—but also about moral luck, about the terrifying truth that who lives and who dies is often decided by chance.

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A particularly painful aspect of the story for me is how John lost his comrades.  My uncle Jack was on active duty with the U.S. Air Force from 1958-1978. He was a navigator on a KC-97 tanker plane in 1963.  He was on stand down to get married.  Just before his wedding his entire crew was killed in a midair explosion. I was 10 years old and attended the wedding with my family. I can vaguely remember a very somber event.  Jack did three full-year tours in Vietnam and three shorter tours after that tragic event.  

Sachsenhausen Nazi Death Camp.

Sachsenhausen occupies a grim but central place in the Nazi camp system. Located just north of Berlin near the town of Oranienburg, it was established in 1936 as a model concentration camp—designed not only to imprison enemies of the regime but to demonstrate how the entire terror apparatus was meant to function. Unlike Auschwitz or Treblinka, Sachsenhausen was not primarily built as a mass extermination center, but it became a central node in the machinery of murder, forced labor, and bureaucratic control that made the Holocaust possible.

Because of its proximity to Berlin, Sachsenhausen took on a special role. It housed many political prisoners, resistance figures, and high-profile detainees, including German dissidents, foreign politicians, clergy, and later Allied prisoners of war. Just as important, it was the administrative and training hub for the SS-run camp system. The SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was headquartered nearby, and Sachsenhausen became the place where guards were trained and procedures standardized. What was learned here—how to break prisoners, how to organize forced labor, how to manage mass death—was exported to camps across occupied Europe.

Sachsenhausen was also a killing site in its own right. Tens of thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and execution. In 1941, the camp was used to murder at least 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, many shot in a specially constructed execution facility known as Station Z. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed “undesirable” were imprisoned and killed here. While it did not have the industrialized gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen had gas vans, shooting installations, and crematoria designed to process bodies efficiently.

The camp’s layout itself reflected Nazi ideology. Prisoners’ barracks were arranged in a fan shape around a central parade ground, allowing guards in a single watchtower to survey the entire compound. This was not accidental. Sachsenhausen was built as a demonstration of how surveillance, discipline, and terror could be made architectural. The prisoner was never meant to escape being seen—or being controlled.

Sachsenhausen’s role in the broader death-camp system was therefore structural as well as lethal. If Auschwitz was the industrial heart of genocide, Sachsenhausen was part of its brain. Procedures for registration, punishment, labor deployment, and extermination were refined here before being implemented elsewhere. The men who ran Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz often trained in or passed through Sachsenhausen.

When Allied forces closed in during 1945, tens of thousands of Sachsenhausen prisoners were forced on death marches westward; many died along the roads. Those left behind were liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. The site later became a Soviet special camp, where thousands more prisoners died, adding another tragic layer to its history.

Sachsenhausen is the place where bureaucratic murder was organized, tested, and perfected—a reminder that genocide does not begin with gas chambers, but with offices, training programs, and men who learn how to make cruelty efficient.

 

My Books of 2025: A Baker's Dozen of Fiction. Half by Nobel Laureates

 

The Nobel Prize 

In 2025, I read 50 books. Of those, thirteen were Fiction.  Of that that baker's dozen, six were by Nobel laureates in Literature: four of whom I never read before. Early in the year, I was talking to one of my well-read friends about Nobel laureates in Literature. She reads the leading author of a country before she visits for the first time.  She had read Blindness by Jose Saramago before visiting Portugal. He won the Nobel Prize in 1998. I decided to read it and was stunned.  It was terrifying. If asked for a genre for this book, I would say Horror! Brilliant and frightening.

Next was The Vegetarian by 2024 winner Han Kang.  Another beautiful and haunting novel.  When I hear the word vegetarian now, I think of the crazy beginning of this novel. Until this year I never read Ernest Hemingway the 1954 laureate.  I finally read The Old Man and the Sea and loved it. Later I read In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who won the prize in 1970.  I had meant to read this novel for more than a decade. It is so good.  It says so much about life in the Soviet GULAGs that could not be said in the relentless reporting of The GULAG Archipelago. 

The fifth was A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux the 2022 winner. I bought the book at The Red Wheelbarrow English-language bookstore across from Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in November and read it on the plane back to America.  It’s about her father and her family’s life in the years after World War II.  On a long flight back from Asia, I re-read The Remains of the Day by 2017 Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. I have read all of Ishiguro’s books.  This one is my favorite.

I read a history book by the 1953 Nobel laureate: The Great Democracies by Winston Churchill, bringing my total to seven winners of the Nobel Prize in literature. Next year I plan to read Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn, A Happening by Ernaux, and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway.

Leading the list of the other seven novels I read was Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald.  It is a novel that begins two decades after World War II but is very much about The Holocaust. It unfolds slowly showing how that tragedy radiated through life far from the horror of the camps. 

Another friend recommendation was Piranesi, a strange fantasy novel with many references to C.S. Lewis and the Inklings. My wife read the John Grisham novels The Firm and The Exchange to me on long car trips.  The Firm was great.  The Exchange not so much. 

The last three are re-readings: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera was just ss strange and good a decade after my first reading. Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers confirmed my delight in the world of Lord Peter Wimsey. This month I re-read The Killer Angels by Michael Shaaara.  I first read this book in 1980 after three years as a tank commander in West Germany. I toured Gettysburg soon after and could not believe Lee ordered Pickett to charge across that field or Hood to charge up Little Round Top.  In re-reading it seemed much clearer that Longstreet was the moral center of this brilliant story. 

A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux, a Review

 

Annie Ernaux’s A Man’s Place is a short book that carries the moral weight of a much larger one. It is nominally about her father—an unremarkable café-grocer in rural Normandy—but in truth it is about class, shame, memory, and the price of social mobility. Ernaux, who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature for turning her own life into a tool of social analysis, already has her method fully formed here: she strips language down until it is almost clinical, refusing lyricism, nostalgia, or sentimental rescue.

The book begins with her father’s death and then works backward, reconstructing the man he was and the world that shaped him. He came from the French peasantry, left school early, and spent his life clawing his way into a fragile petit-bourgeois respectability. He was proud, suspicious of refinement, quick to anger, and deeply anxious about not belonging. Ernaux refuses to romanticize him. He was not a noble worker or a tragic hero. He was simply a man whose entire emotional life was structured by class hierarchy.

What makes A Man’s Place so unsettling is that Ernaux includes herself in the indictment. Through education, books, and speech, she escaped the world her father inhabited. But escape came with betrayal. Every new word she learned widened the distance between them. Every gesture of middle-class ease was a silent rebuke to his roughness. She describes how he became self-conscious around her, afraid of saying the wrong thing, aware that he was being measured by standards he did not choose. This is not a story of generational conflict in the abstract; it is the lived experience of social mobility as emotional violence.

Ernaux’s style is a lovely instrument for this subject. The prose is flat, precise, almost bureaucratic. That is not a lack of feeling—it is an ethical decision. She refuses to decorate her father’s life with the kinds of language that would falsify it. His world was not poetic; it was practical, anxious, and constrained. By writing this way, she honors his reality while also exposing its limits.

The book also quietly dismantles the idea that personal identity can ever be separated from social structure. Her father’s masculinity, pride, and emotional reticence were not personality quirks; they were survival strategies in a world that punished weakness and ignorance. Ernaux shows how deeply those strategies shaped her childhood—and how impossible it was for him to adapt when she moved into a different class universe.

There is no reconciliation at the end of A Man’s Place. Ernaux does not claim to have healed the rift between herself and her father. Instead, she offers something more honest: understanding without absolution. She sees him clearly, and she sees herself clearly too—as someone who benefited from the very systems that made his life small.

In less than a hundred pages, Ernaux achieves something rare: a portrait of a man that is neither sentimental nor cruel, and a memoir that refuses to flatter its author. A Man’s Place is not about loving your parents despite their flaws. It is about recognizing how history, class, and language decide what kinds of lives are possible—and what kinds of love those lives can sustain.

God, Human, Animal, Machine by Megan O’Gieblyn, A Review

Megan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine is not a book about technology so much as a book about belief—specifically, what happens to belief when God disappears but the habits of faith remain. Its animating insight is that much of our contemporary language about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and human enhancement is recycled theology. O’Gieblyn is unusually well positioned to see this, because she did not arrive at the subject as a detached critic. She was raised in a Christian fundamentalist household, homeschooled for much of her youth, and enrolled in the Moody Bible Institute, one of the most conservative evangelical Bible schools in the United States, with the intention of studying theology and entering ministry.

That formation matters. Moody is not a vague spiritual environment; it is doctrinally orthodox, Scripturally literalist, and saturated in eschatology. O’Gieblyn absorbed a worldview in which truth was absolute, history was teleological, and human life had cosmic significance within a divinely authored plan. When she lost her faith and left Moody, she did not leave those habits of thought behind. Instead, God, Human, Animal, Machine shows how they reemerged—transposed into secular keys—when she encountered the metaphysics embedded in modern technological discourse.

The book’s central claim is blunt and persuasive: many of the grand promises surrounding AI and digital consciousness are not scientific conclusions but metaphysical inheritances. When technologists speak of “uploading” minds, achieving immortality through data, or creating systems that transcend human limitation, they are echoing Christian doctrines of resurrection, salvation, and divine omniscience. O’Gieblyn does not argue this as a cheap debunking move. She understands the appeal. Having once believed in a world governed by transcendent meaning, she recognizes the emotional force of narratives that promise continuity, purpose, and escape from death.

What gives the essays their bite is her refusal to sneer. She knows from experience that belief systems are not held because they are foolish, but because they answer real human longings. At the same time, she brings a former-believer’s suspicion to secular dogma. She examines metaphors—mind as software, brain as hardware, self as information—not as neutral explanatory tools but as formative commitments. Once adopted, they quietly reshape ethics, politics, and how we value human life. Optimization replaces dignity; intelligence displaces wisdom.

Throughout the book, O’Gieblyn reads technological futurism the way a theologian reads doctrine: testing coherence, tracing hidden assumptions, and noting where rhetoric outruns evidence. Her fundamentalist background sharpens this instinct. She knows how totalizing systems protect themselves from doubt, and she sees similar mechanisms at work in certain strains of techno-utopianism.

God, Human, Animal, Machine ultimately resists easy conclusions. It does not argue for a return to faith, nor does it celebrate disenchantment. Instead, it offers something rarer: an account of intellectual afterlives. The gods may be gone, O’Gieblyn suggests, but the structures of worship persist. Technology has not freed us from theology; it has given it new names.

Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels is one of the war novels that improves with rereading—not because it grows more comforting, but because it grows more unforgiving. I first read it in 1980, just after leaving active duty in the U.S. Army, having spent years as a tank commander training for a war that everyone assumed would be fought on the East–West border in Germany. I read it because a friend recommended it. I was expecting a good historical novel. Which it is, and much more. It is a study in command failure, moral and physical courage, and the limits of men who have more trust in faith than reason.

Shaara’s great achievement is that he makes Gettysburg intelligible without making it heroic. The novel is built around a small number of viewpoints—Lee, Longstreet, Chamberlain, Buford, and a few others—and that restraint is its strength. Each man is intelligent. Each is serious. And yet the catastrophe unfolds anyway. There is no incompetence big enough to explain the slaughter. That is what makes the book unsettling. War here is not chaos; it is order pushed to the point of failure by men who believe too much and reason too little.

After reading the book in 1980, I went to Gettysburg and walked the field. Anyone who has done that knows the moment of disbelief Shaara keeps circling. Pickett’s Charge—an infantry assault across nearly a mile of open, rising ground against entrenched troops behind a stone wall—is not just tragic; it is tactically insane. Having spent years training in German terrain, rehearsing attacks and defenses down to the last contour line, I could not make it make sense. Shaara doesn’t try to justify it. Instead, he explains it, which is something else entirely.

Lee emerges as the most troubling figure in the book. He is dignified, paternal, deeply religious—and disastrously wrong. Shaara portrays him as trapped by his own past successes and by a vision of honor that no longer matches reality. Lee believes his men are invincible because they have been before. He believes moral force can substitute for artillery, terrain, and logistics. This is not villainy; it is worse. It is faith masquerading as judgment.

Longstreet, by contrast, feels like a modern officer stranded in the wrong war. He understands defense. He understands firepower. He understands that attacking fortified positions is madness. Shaara gives him the clearest moral voice in the novel, and the most painful one. Longstreet knows what will happen, says so repeatedly, and is overruled. Any soldier who has watched a bad plan move forward because rank demands obedience will recognize this dynamic immediately.

On the Union side, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain provides the book’s narrow beam of light. His stand on Little Round Top is deservedly famous, but Shaara resists turning it into a simple triumph. Chamberlain’s decision to fix bayonets is not glorious—it is desperate. The men are exhausted. Ammunition is gone. The choice is not between victory and defeat but between annihilation and a slim chance to survive. That distinction matters, and Shaara never lets us forget it.

What makes The Killer Angels endure is that it refuses to flatter the reader. It does not celebrate war, and it does not reduce it to absurdity either. It insists that intelligent, honorable men can make catastrophic decisions and that those decisions, once made, grind forward with terrible momentum. The book understands something soldiers learn early: bravery does not cancel bad terrain, bad intelligence, or bad orders.

Standing at Gettysburg after reading Shaara, the landscape itself becomes an argument against romanticism. The slope is real. The distance is real. The stone wall is real. And the idea that courage alone could overcome those facts feels not noble, but grotesque. Shaara knew that. The Killer Angels is not about why men fight so well. It is about why they die so predictably when leadership confuses belief with reality.