George Orwell × Raoul Peck: 2×-2 = -4

Or How to Dissolve Totalitarianism in Images Through a Critique of the Western World

This article on the film by internationally renowned Haitian director Raoul Peck, George Orwell: 2+2=5, is a profound reflection not only on the film’s distorting mirror, but also on the very nature of totalitarianism, both in Orwell’s time and today.

From its very first minutes, the film reveals the extent of its ambition—and its misguidedness. Over a voice-over excerpt from The Prevention of Literature, the 1946 text in which Orwell describes a society that has become totalitarian because its ruling class maintains power through force and fraud¹, Raoul Peck unfurls a carousel of faces: Orbán, Pinochet, Museveni, Min Aung Hlaing, Putin, Ferdinand Marcos, and finally George W. Bush. The technique is visually effective. It is also a bewildering oversimplification. For of all the leaders summoned into this gallery, only one—Putin—runs a totalitarian regime. The others fall into categories that are certainly unsavory, but profoundly different: military dictatorship, kleptocracy, junta, African “Big Man”clinging to power, illiberal democracy. As for Bush’s inclusion, it stems from an anti-imperialist reflex that shares with totalitarianism only a tenuous metaphorical connection.

Is this a flaw in the direction? Rather, it is a flaw in reasoning, one that taints the entire film, for totalitarianism is not simply authoritarianism taken up a notch; it differs from it by nature: where one is content with silence, the other demands adherence and sets out to replace reality with a mandatory fiction. By placing a Burmese junta, a Ugandan autocrat, and an elected American president on the same level, the documentary achieves the opposite of what it aims to achieve: it dilutes Orwellian thought into a muddle.

In1984, Winston Smith posited an axiom upon which the entire edifice of internal resistance rested: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows²”. Yet Peck’s film takes the Orwellian equation and produces a negative result. Orwell multiplied by Peck does not equal four: it equals minus four. The filmmaker is not lacking in talent, but his interpretive framework—anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, heir to a Marxist tradition that has never accepted or understood the concept of totalitarianism—leads him to strip away from Orwell what constitutes its very heart. The viewer leaves more confused than when they entered. It is this missed opportunity that must be examined: it says something about the Western intelligentsia’s difficulty in naming the world in which we live.

I. Film Editing as Newspeak

Orwell had insisted, in Politics and the English Language³, that the primary weapon of political lies is not spectacular falsehood but semantic slippage—the almost-correct word that, by its very familiarity, prevents us from thinking about the difference. Peck’s film transposes this mechanism into the language of the image. Three sequences suffice to show that the filmmaker, having gone to war against Newspeak, ends up practicing it.

The first hangs by a thread—that of a rope. In the voiceover, an excerpt from1984 accompanies Eurasian prisoners, “guilty of war crimes,” who are to be hanged in a park. Then archival footage from Babi Yar. Context⁴ by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa: the public execution, in Kyiv in January 1946, of twelve Nazi criminals responsible for the Babi Yar massacre—33,771 Jews murdered in two days⁵. Finally, footage shot on January 6, 2021, in front of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., where rioters, Trump supporters, brandish a makeshift gallows while shouting “Hang them!” The thread connecting these images is purely visual—the rope, the gallows, the crowd. But the editing, by removing Loznitsa’s images from their context, reverses their meaning. His film, honored at Cannes in 2021, is a work of relentless rigor, entirely devoted to the massacre of Jews in the ravines of Babi Yar—the testimony of a survivor, Dina Pronicheva⁶, the scrolling on screen of Vasily Grossman’s text Ukraine Without Jews⁷ —each image is weighed down by its burden of pain and truth. Peck retains from all this only the spectacle of the execution of the murderers. The word Jew does not appear. The Nazis had sought to make Europe Judenrein; the Soviets continued this: in official discourse, the Jews murdered at Babi Yar became “peaceful Soviet citizens who were victims of fascism⁸ .” What Peck retains from Loznitsa prolongs this erasure: for the vast majority of viewers, the name Babi Yar will mean nothing; they will see German Nazis hanged by Soviet executioners before a crowd, without knowing that this crowd is watching the murderers of tens of thousands of Jews die. The sequence is stripped, layer by layer—Nazi, Soviet, and cinematic—of its Jewish reality.

To treat this scene as a variation on a single theme linking the justice meted out to the executioners of Babi Yar with the seditious pantomime at the Capitol is to abolish any distinction between justice, terror, and sinister farce. The gulf between Loznitsa’s use of it—patient, contextual, haunted by the duty to remember—and Peck’s—illustrative, instrumentalized, stripped of its substance—indicates the distance between a filmmaker who provokes thought and one who delivers a blow. By letting the images “speak for themselves,” Peck conceals the most decisive intervention—that of the editor who chooses the order, the rhythm, and the juxtaposition.

With the second sequence, the shift leaves the realm of the image to infiltrate a single word. When Peck refers to the Spanish Civil War—Orwell’s formative experience—he describes the July 1936 coup plotters as “conservatives”. Not nationalists, as historians say; not fascists, as part of the left would say. The word appears at the end of a long sequence devoted to American Republicans. The juxtaposition is no accident. By downgrading the Spanish coup plotters from fascists to conservatives, Peck brings them closer to the American present. This almost imperceptible shift is a textbook example of what Orwell denounced: imprecise political language does not merely reflect confused thinking; it creates it. Orwell, who had been shot in the throat on the Aragon front while fighting fascism, and who had risked his life a second time by escaping the Stalinist police in Barcelona, deserved better than a euphemism intended to serve a partisan analogy.

The third sequence is more sophisticated and revealing. Against a black background, in multicolored letters, Peck displays a series of official terms followed by their “translation” into plain language. “Special military operation” = invasion of Ukraine. “Vocational training center” = concentration camp. “Pacification” = elimination of unreliable elements. “Lawful use of force” = police brutality. Each of these equivalences brings to life what Orwell called for: tearing away the verbal veil that power casts over violence. Euphemism masks reality; the “translation” restores it. The operation adds meaning.

Then comes the final card: “Anti-Semitism in 2024” = “A term exploited to silence criticism of Israeli military action.” Everything invites the viewer to accept this equivalence as yet another revelation. But the logical operation is reversed without any indication to that effect. In all the previous cases, a euphemism concealed a brutal reality. Here, it is a political and historical concept—anti-Semitism—that is reduced to a rhetorical stratagem. It is no longer a matter of unmasking a euphemism but of hollowing out a concept. The path no longer leads from the deceptive word to the hidden thing, but from a historical reality—the oldest hatred in the world, whose resurgence is abundantly documented—to its dissolution. The operation does not restore meaning; it strips it away and brings about its negation.

The rhetorical tour de force consists in passing off this reversal as continuity. The series of “authentic” translations has instilled a reflex of trust in the viewer. The final caption inherits the credibility of the previous ones. This is an effective mechanism of propaganda: not the raw lie, but one embedded in a chain of truths. The Kremlin’s Newspeak turns a war into a police operation; Peck’s “translation” transforms a millennia-old hatred into a circumstantial argument. Both gestures share the same structure: substituting the real with a verbal artifact that neutralizes it.

II. A Filmmaker and His Blind Spots

Every filmmaker carries within them a framework of thought that predates the film they undertake. Raoul Peck has deployed this framework with consistency and talent, from *I Am Not Your Negro* to *Exterminate All the Brutes*. It is a framework forged in anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism, in which the West always sits in the dock, and where forms of domination can be read as economic and social logics.

It is with this background that Peck encounters Orwell and finds a kindred spirit. A man who served the British Empire in Burma and came to feel a physical revulsion for it, and a fighter who took up arms in Spain. Peck recognizes in Orwell the foundation of his own cinema: a man transformed by his encounter with oppression. It is here that the film finds its rare moments of grace, as well as in the sequences set in Barnhill, on the Isle of Jura, where we come close to understanding the struggle of a dying man to finish a book.

But this brotherhood has its blind spots. The tradition from which Peck hails has always maintained a relationship of avoidance with the concept of totalitarianism. The Soviet Union, Maoism? Authoritarian deviations from an emancipatory project. Comparing them to Nazism, classifying them under the same concept designating a unique type of regime—that, for this school of thought, has long been unacceptable. It is therefore understandable why Peck treats the Burmese episode as the founding act of Orwell’s entire thought and makes him a precursor of colonial repentance. And why, in an interview with L’Humanité⁹—the party mouthpiece that, for decades, faithfully relayed Moscow’s line, including the characterization of POUM militants as “agents of fascism”—does he reduce Why I Write¹⁰ to the idea that Orwell “always preferred to question the prevailing idea,” sidestepping the central sentence, capitalized by Orwell himself: “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been, directly or indirectly, AGAINST totalitarianism and FOR democratic socialism¹¹”. To invoke Orwell in these columns by reducing him to a mild-mannered critic of “the prevailing idea” is to engage in a small exercise in Newspeak—emptying words of their historical content to retain only a harmless moral halo, broad enough for everyone to identify with, including the heirs of those he targeted.

This framework results in a shift that structures the entire film. We enter through anti-imperialism, which is legitimate. But, imperceptibly, anti-imperialism morphs into anti-capitalism, then into anti-Westernism—and we find ourselves facing a film whose center of gravity is no longer totalitarianism but the denunciation of global capitalism. Trump and Netanyahu are the prime targets; Putin passes through the opening carousel without the Russian Federation ever being analyzed for what it is. China is mentioned, but the imperialism crushing Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong is forgotten. Theocratic and totalitarian Iran is almost absent. Not a word about October 7. Not a word about the totalitarian nature of Hamas, nor about the Israeli far right, whose denial of the Palestinian people creates, in a mirror image, a totalitarianism that erodes Israeli democracy itself. Orwell devoted his life to fighting totalitarianism; Peck devotes his film to fighting capitalism, and grants totalitarianism only a supporting role.

Yet the crux of the matter lies elsewhere, and Orwell stated this clearly. In that same essay, Why I Write, he sets forth the premise: his work in Burma had allowed him to gain some understanding of the nature of imperialism, but those experiences were not sufficient to give him a correct political orientation¹². The Burmese starting point and the centrality of Spain in 1936 form the very structure of Orwell’s thought, the explicit articulation of a before and an after.

III. The Great Turning Point—Spain and the Birth of a Worldview

It was the events in Barcelona in 1936–1937—the liquidation of the POUM¹³ by the NKVD¹⁴, the falsification of history in real time—that had a decisive effect. “I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936,’ at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish Civil War¹⁵.” Burma had opened Orwell’s eyes to imperialism; Spain shaped his understanding of totalitarianism. For Peck, 1936 is merely a stage in the journey of a rebellious man. For Orwell, it is the year his life took a turn.

It happens, in someone’s life, that an event shifts the very axis of their understanding of the world. For Orwell, this event has a place and a date: Barcelona, May 1937. Everything that came before—Burma, the London underworld, the mines of Wigan Pier—may have led to it, but like a staircase leading to an unexpected door.

Orwell arrived in Barcelona in December 1936. He joined the POUM militias, fought on the Aragon front, and was shot in the throat. Peck shows this, then moves on quickly. What he does not show enough is the decisive shock: upon his return to Barcelona, Orwell saw the Stalinist machine begin to turn. Within a few weeks, the Spanish Communists, acting under the direction of the NKVD, set about liquidating the revolutionary forces; the POUM militias become “agents of fascism”; Spanish revolutionary Andrés Nin disappears. But what is most astounding is not just the violence: it is the falsification. Events in which Orwell had taken part were described in the newspapers in a way that bore no relation to what he had seen. This is no longer propaganda in the ordinary sense; it is the substitution of fictional reality for lived reality, relayed to London by what Orwell called “enthusiastic intellectuals building emotional constructs on events that had never taken place¹⁶.”

British imperialism never demanded that the Burmese love their servitude. Stalinism demanded that its own supporters believe—sincerely or under duress—that opponents were fascists. It is this difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism—not of degree but of nature—that Orwell perceived in Spain, and it is this that permeates every page of 1984.

From this experience arise two questions that form the core of all his later work and that Peck never poses. What links the Hitlerian and Stalinist regimes? How can emancipatory socialism turn into its opposite? Unthinkable within Peck’s intellectual framework: is this why the film skims over the Spanish episode? He devotes more time to a lengthy excerpt from Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom¹⁷ —the collectivization of land, the show of hands. The choice is revealing: the Spain dreamed of by the far left is preferred to the Spain experienced by Orwell. Yet it is the moment without which 1984 would never have been written.

IV. Toolbox or Imagination Machine—Two Irreconcilable Readings of1984

There are two ways to read 1984. One consists of drawing on its formulas—Big Brother, Newspeak, doublethink—and applying them like ink stamps to current events. This is the reading of social media and that of Peck. The other consists of treating the novel as a framework for thought that cannot be reduced to the sum of its quotations—and asking what it allows us to anticipate¹⁸. This approach raises a question that Peck sidesteps. What if 1984 described not only the effects of capitalist or imperial domination, but an autonomous political phenomenon—power as an end in itself?

Peck treats Orwell’s work as a “toolbox”—a phrase that recurs in his interviews¹⁹. The expression seems modest; in reality, it is disastrous. A toolbox implies instruments that can be used separately. We take the “Newspeak” screwdriver for Trumpist propaganda, the “doublethink” hammer for Fox News, the “Big Brother” wrench for Chinese surveillance cameras. Each tool is torn from the system that gives it meaning. The result is a film where everything is equivalent: the British Empire and the gulag, Silicon Valley and Pyongyang—in short, the abolition of distinctions.

A completely different reading is possible. 1984 is not a collection of prophetic quotations but a unique fictional device that functions as a whole. Oceania’s society is not a hybrid of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, but a second-generation variant²⁰ —laboratory totalitarianism, stripped of the dross of its models and reduced to its essence. Orwell described neither the past nor the present: he invented a machine for conceiving future totalitarianisms. At its core is power as an end in itself, an idea borrowed from the oligarch Wickson in Jack London’s The Iron Heel²¹ —the first novel to sketch out a totalitarian system.

In1984, it is O’Brien’s speech and his three assertions: What do we want? Power, nothing but power. Who are we? The priests of power. What power do we want? First, power over minds; if we have that, all the rest follows²². Peck does not cite these principles. And this silence is not a simple oversight: within his intellectual framework, where domination is always ultimately economic, the idea of a power that would be its own end is unthinkable. The toolbox scatters Orwell into fragments applicable to everything and illuminating nothing. The “imagination machine” restores the novel’s power of foresight.

V. Rediscovering Orwell’s Arithmetic

There exists, in the history of literature, an equation that has changed its meaning three times in under a century. In 1864, Dostoevsky’s underground man²³ asserts the right to proclaim that two times two equals five: it is a cry of freedom against determinism. In 1920, Yevgeny Zamyatin revisits in his dystopian science fiction novel We the multiplication table, elevated to a dogma as an instrument of servitude²⁴, while the imagination, through numbers and love, opens a breach in the glass wall of the Single State. Then comes Orwell, and everything changes. Winston Smith writes in his diary: “Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four.” No longer multiplication but addition, the most basic operation, the one verified by counting on one’s fingers. The reversal is radical: it is no longer the individual who brandishes the irrational against the system—it is the totalitarian system that imposes the irrational against the individual. Common sense, which Dostoevsky despised, has become the last bastion of freedom.

It is this significance that Peck’s film fails to capture—and yet it is precisely this that makes Orwell indispensable. For the world in which we live is not one of uniform, vaguely “authoritarian” domination that could be denounced by juxtaposing shocking images with a voice-over narration. It is a world where powerful totalitarian systems—in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran—are coalescing, arming themselves, innovating, and challenging democracies with a strategic intelligence that would no doubt have astonished Orwell by its fidelity to the model he had imagined.

Peck’s film dissolves this singularity into a catalogue of indignations and it obscures the evil we face. Orwell had already warned against this kind of self-deception. In the preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm²⁵, he observes that intellectuals in free countries are less able to grasp the reality of totalitarianism, which they judge by the standards of their own countries. The Ukrainian enduring Russian bombardment, the Chinese dissident who vanishes into the Party’s prisons, the Iranian woman risking her life by removing her headscarf—all know they are living in the world of 1984.

Belgian writer Simon Leys noted with gentle irony that Orwell had always faced his many enemies with composure, but that one wondered whether he could have kept his cool in the face of some of his admirers²⁶. Peck is one of them—a sincere admirer, a talented filmmaker, a man whose indignation is beyond doubt. But misdirected admiration can, under the guise of homage, do almost as much damage as outright hostility. Orwell asked only one thing of us: to stand firm on the fact that two plus two equals four. Peck, by multiplying Orwell by his own personal certainties, arrives at minus four. 

1. George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature” (1946), in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. IV, Secker & Warburg, 1968. The exact phrase in English is: “a society in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without quite deceiving themselves”
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part I, ch. 7
3. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946), in Collected Essays, vol. IV.
4. Sergei Loznitsa, Babi Yar. Context, Atoms & Void, Slot Machine, Kyiv, 2021.
5. Figure established by the Jäger Report. The Jäger Report is an account of Einsatzkommando 3 written in 1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger at the request of his superior. The massacre took place on September 29–30, 1941. See Wikipedia.
6. Dina Pronicheva (1911–1977), an actress at the Kyiv Puppet Theater and one of the few survivors of the massacre. Her testimony appears in Loznitsa’s film.
7. Vasily Grossman, “Oukraïna bez evreïev” [Ukraine Without Jews], published in the newspaper Einigkeit (Yiddish), November 25, 1943, and later in Znamia, 1943. The text appears in Loznitsa’s film.
8. Soviet formulation adopted as of March 1, 1944, in the report on the Babi Yar massacres by the GSK (Extraordinary State Commission). Cited by Arkady Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union, Yad Vashem, 2018.
9. Raoul Peck, “Interview with Raoul Peck, director of ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,’” L’Humanité, February 19, 2026.
10. George Orwell, “Why I Write” (1946), Gangrel, No. 4, Summer 1946.
11. Capitalized in Orwell’s original text
12. George Orwell, “Why I Write,” Ibid.
13. Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), founded in 1935 by Andrés Nin and Joaquín Maurín. An anti-Stalinist Marxist party, partly inspired by Trotskyism, which fought against Francoism on the Aragon front.
14. In June 1937, the POUM was declared illegal by the Republican government under Soviet pressure. Its leaders were arrested and accused of being “agents of fascism”—a completely fabricated charge. Andrés Nin, abducted on June 16, 1937, was tortured and murdered in a secret NKVD prison.
15. George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943), in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. II, Secker & Warburg, 1968.
16. George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” op. cit.
17. Ken Loach, Land and Freedom, 1995.
18. This is the interpretation of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rosat, in The Spirit of Totalitarianism, Hors d’atteinte, Paris 2025
19. In October 2025 on PBS Hour, then on February 19, 2026, on Euronews Culture, and in March 2026, successively in Big Issue – The Guardian / The Nerve and Monocle
20. Jean-Jacques Rosat, The Spirit of Totalitarianism, op. cit.
21. Jack London, The Iron Heel, Chapter, The Philomaths, “Here is the word. It is the king of words—Power. Neither God nor Mammon, but Power. Let it roll off your tongue until it burns.”
22. See Jean-Jacques Rosat’s commentary, The Spirit of Totalitarianism, op. cit., Chapter I. The Journey of a Novel
23. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Zapiski iz podpol’ia [Notes from Underground], 1864, Part One, Ch. IX: “Twice two makes four; that is a wall.” And: “Twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing.”
24. Yevgeny Zamyatin, My [We], 1921, Note 12: “And wouldn’t it be absurd if these two happily, ideally multiplied twos started thinking about some kind of freedom, that is, about some mistake??”
25. George Orwell, Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm (March 1947) available online at the Orwell Foundation. Text written for a Ukrainian edition published in Germany in displaced persons camps by anti-Stalinist exiles; the original English text is lost; the preserved text is a retranslation from Ukrainian.
26. Simon Leys, Orwell or the Horror of Politics, Flammarion, Paris, 1974.