"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
George Orwell, the novel 1984.
"Deep in December, it's nice to remember
Although you know the snow will follow
Deep in December, it's nice to remember."
Tom Jones, "Try to Remember," from The Fantasticks, 1960
"That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.”
George Orwell, the novel 1984, 1949
The past is being rewritten. It is easier just to go along with the new reality. But it isn't reality, and in the long run it isn't happy.
FBI Director Christopher Wray announced he would not serve out his term as FBI director. He would resign to coincide with Trump taking office.
President-elect Trump had said he planned to fire Christopher Wray and replace him with Kash Patel. In a speech to FBI employees Wray said that in his view resignation "is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work." Wray is giving Trump what he wants. He is going along. He is normalizing Trump. It doesn't reinforce FBI values and principles. It sacrifices them.
FBI directors are given 10-year terms of office for the very reason that Congress wanted the FBI to be independent and outside the cycle of presidential terms of office. Wray is a Republican, appointed to government positions by Republicans, and appointed to his current position by Trump himself in his first term, when Trump -- against tradition -- fired the prior FBI director, James Comey. Wray is not a deep state Democratic operative. He is an FBI institutionalist.
Wray's resignation changes the reality and future memory of what is happening. Trump wants to fire an FBI director loyal to FBI's purpose and replace him with a partisan loyalist who promises to do partisan investigations. Had Wray been fired and replaced it would have frozen into the record the truth of a partisan takeover of the agency. Resigning in advance changes the story. It is just Trump filling a vacancy, a routine act. Anticipatory compliance is easiest. It avoids a fight. But it makes Wray complicit in the lie.
Trump wrote an alternative reality on Truth Social yesterday:
The resignation of Christopher Wray is a great day for America as it will end the Weaponization of what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice. I just don’t know what happened to him. We will now restore the Rule of Law for all Americans. Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me, and has done everything else to interfere with the success and future of America.
This isn't true. Try to remember: Christopher Wray's FBI obeyed the law. The search warrant of Mar-a-Lago was carried out with cause, after repeated efforts to retrieve documents, with openly acknowledged obstruction by Trump, and with a search that revealed exactly what the FBI alleged, which was hidden national security documents that Trump denied having.
I realize it is strange to pair a quotation from a tender play about young love, The Fantasticks, with Orwell's dark warning of a dystopian political future, 1984. But both contained a warning about the human desire for reconciliation, for loving too well and easily, for failing to recognize that conflict is inevitable, and that truth is hard. We are hearing alternative facts. Trump can sell. He is motivated and relentless and he has loyal allies who are selling the same story. They had better. If they don't he will "primary" them.
He is rewriting himself as victim and hero. We are in for a lot of this. We need to have the courage to remember what we saw with our own eyes.
"And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested." – George Orwell, the novel 1984
Read David French in 12/11 NYTimes for a different take on Wray’s resignation. The law won’t let Trump appoint Patel as interim director. Patel doesn’t meet the requirements. A strategic resignation.
We will do well to remember Peter's comments. The first act of any tyrant or would be tryant is to rewrite the history of their ascension to power. There is a basic human need not to mention a governmental necessity for the public in general to believe in the legitimacy of the those who govern. Otherwise there would be constant civil war. This need, however, does not erase our obligation to remember what we saw and what we felt. If anything, it will help us retain our skeptism of future grand statements and actions and in doing so, help curb some of the more outlandish acts and provocations.