British Prime Minister Johnson sent a chill down every sensible person’s spine after paraphrasing 1984’s infamous “war is peace” slogan during his latest meeting with his French counterpart. London’s official readout of their interaction at this week’s G7 Summit in Germany revealed that “The Prime Minister stressed any attempt to settle the conflict now will only cause enduring instability and give Putin licence to manipulate both sovereign countries and international markets in perpetuity.” This can be interpreted as a direct response to Prime Minister Macron’s efforts to mediate between Moscow and Kiev, including his recent call not to “humiliate” Russia during peace talks.

Orwell’s masterpiece saw the doublethink phrase “war is peace” enter into the popular lexicon as an warning for the population to be skeptical of their leaders whenever they claim that peace can only be achieved through war, and perpetual war at that. Speaking of which, Johnson published an op-ed earlier this month where he urged the West to prepare for supporting Kiev for years to come in its conflict with Russia. These two developments suggest to cynical observers that the British Prime Minister might even be purposely playing a role out of that novel, which just so happened to take place in a future version of the UK.

There’s nothing conspiratorial about publicly speculating as much either since the modus operandi employed by the totalitarian state in that book is arguably effective for controlling the Western populace. “War is peace” is precisely the slogan that the elite are relying upon to unify their civilization under the US’ declining unipolar hegemony on a false anti-Russian pretext. That’s also why they’re scaremongering about the supposed “threat” that President Putin poses to their national model of “democracy”, neither of which exist in reality but the first nevertheless fulfills the purpose of pressuring people to unquestionably comply with whatever their authorities demand.

Johnson seems to relish in the role that he’s appointed himself to play in this perception management operation against his own people as proven by him suggesting that the G7 leaders take off their shirts “to show that we’re tougher than Putin”, who obviously lives rent-free in his head. While all of this might be somewhat amusing on its own – Johnson fantasizing about a perpetual proxy war against Russia, paraphrasing the infamous “war is peace” slogan, and being so jealous of President Putin that he wants to have his own bare-chested photoshoot to show the world who’s supposedly really “tougher” – it’s actually quite disturbing if one takes the time to reflect upon it.

It’s no longer cliché or an exaggeration to conclude that the present times largely parallel those that were predicted in 1984. In fact, it seriously seems as though Johnson – or rather, whoever might be advising him –decided to consciously apply certain concepts from that book. “War is peace” sounds like unbelievable fantasy at first since readers might naively assume that no population could be so naïve as to fall for that slogan, yet that’s precisely what Johnson just said in so many words while meeting with Macron. While he was joking about taking off his shirt at the G7 meeting, his earlier mentioned op-ed about a perpetual proxy war against Russia is no laughing matter.

The UK’s new Chief of General Staff even reportedly claimed that he considers his job to be preparing his country to once again fight a war in Europe. Taken together, these developments aren’t just indicative of some overzealously anti-Russian fringe elements roleplaying a fantasy war against that Great Power but are genuine statements of intent that must be taken extremely seriously no matter how dystopian all of this feels for every sensible person. The general dumbing down of Western society over the decades made it possible for leaders like Johnson to paraphrase 1984’s infamous doublethink slogan without many even noticing, which should scare anyone who realizes what’s really going on.