“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” — George Orwell
What we have witnessed since October 7, 2023, has overturned every concept we thought we understood — above all, the idea of peace itself.
Were Orwell alive today, even he could not have imagined scenes more surreal than those unfolding before our eyes.
In Orwell’s world, tyranny does not rely on violence alone but on the corruption of language and the inversion of meaning. Good becomes evil, war becomes peace, and slavery becomes freedom. Words are hollowed out and repurposed as instruments of control; “Big Brother” dictates what is right and wrong, and morality is redrawn according to the logic of power.
Here, Orwell’s “doublethink” operates at full capacity — the ability to believe two contradictory truths at once, until lies harden into reality and moral reason collapses under its own obedience.
In our own time, domination no longer depends solely on force but on the ability to legitimize it. The right of Powerreplaces the power of Right, and justice is reduced to an ornamental vocabulary stripped of efficacy.
After two relentless years of war — an all-consuming machinery of annihilation — not only were lives extinguished, but the very meaning of existence was assaulted. No stone was left unmoved, no human untouched in meaning or form.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, killing has been refined into an algorithmic logic — an act executed with technical precision and emotional neutrality, as though it were just another line of code or a move in a video game.
Yet the language of these systems betrays a deeper ideology. Their weapons are not named with acronyms or serial codes, but with words drawn from the vocabulary of purity and salvation — names like Lavender, and more strikingly, Gospel.
Gospel is more than a name; it is a paradox layered in theological and political irony. That a secular military, rooted in a tradition that once rejected the Gospel message, would adopt it for a killing system reflects not a lapse in judgment, but a mastery of symbolism. Once a proclamation of peace through suffering, Gospel now serves as code for targeted annihilation — not scripture, but strategy. The name gestures toward the Christian right, particularly American evangelicals, whose support for Israel is often driven less by shared values than by apocalyptic expectation. In this context, salvation is rewritten as suppression, and faith becomes a battlefield lexicon.
These names — Lavender, Gospel — are not accidental. They reflect a modern theology of cleansing, where extermination becomes a sanctified task and annihilation is rebranded as redemption. But beneath this spiritual façade lies a colder logic — not Christian, but Nietzschean: a vision of order that demands purification, the erasure of weakness, the triumph of strength. Zionist pioneers once embraced this Nietzschean call — casting off the moral burden of exile in favor of purity, rootedness, and will. Holiness becomes an order of purity — no longer a sacred mystery, but a system of elimination. And with it, the holy order is once again given to the chosen people: not as a promise of justice, but as a divine license for domination. In this world, to purify is to erase, to protect is to destroy, and to cleanse is to kill. This is the purification ritual of the algorithmic age: belief and technology converge, and genocide is rendered as code — rational, neutral, inevitable.
Thus Orwell’s prophecy is fulfilled not in dystopian fiction but in the daily grammar of our politics: when words are emptied of meaning, language itself becomes a weapon of tyranny. “Peace” is invoked to justify war; “security” to conceal extermination; “freedom” is practiced as the newest form of servitude — an enslavement coded and executed by artificial intelligence, and justified in the very language of humanism stripped of its humanity.
Today’s reality, for all its absurdity and despair, feels like the only possible version of order left standing amid a tragedy without end.
The machinery of domination no longer seeks merely to destroy — it seeks to legitimize its own continuity through the permanence of war itself. Like a vampire, it survives only through the steady flow of victims.
Trump’s announcement of a “peace deal” can thus be read as the highest expression of this logic — the most that could be achieved in a world where surrender and humiliation have become pillars of coexistence, and collapse itself a natural condition of existence.
The question that forces itself upon us is no longer whether war can be stopped, but whether its authors can ever be compelled to retreat. What would it mean, ethically and politically, to accept the narratives they have written in our blood? And what scars would such acceptance leave upon the human conscience?
Trump’s ability to impose this version of “peace” appears, in this light, almost cosmic — as if he had momentarily tamed the monstrous will to annihilation, momentarily halting its advance.. But that pause carries no promise of peace; it exposes instead the fragility of the entire world before the logic of force, where even the faintest pause in killing now passes as a miracle. In an age where war has become the rule and peace the fleeting exception, the temporary silence of guns is mistaken for salvation.
And as Trump rushes to enshrine this moment in history — self-nominating for the Nobel Peace Prize — the tragedy of our age is laid bare: peace has become a trophy, not a condition of life.
The victims fade into the background of the photograph; they exist only as the necessary backdrop for the winner’s smile.
Trump and his administration were not external to this genocidal warfare but part of the system that enabled it, while Netanyahu and those surrounding him embodied its visible face.
The real beneficiaries of this long war were never the generals or the politicians but the transnational corporations and weapons manufacturers that turned human bodies into testing grounds, converting genocide into an open market of profit sustained over two relentless years.
Even Alfred Nobel foresaw the irony.
Branded the “merchant of death” for inventing dynamite, he sought redemption by creating a prize for peace — a moral balm for his own invention of destruction. But in the world we inhabit now, the irony has turned complete: the Nobel Peace Prize itself has become an emblem of the order it was meant to resist, a medal bestowed in the name of peace upon those who perfect the art of war.
We live in an Orwellian world par excellence, where fiction no longer anticipates reality but merely reports it.
Orwell’s imagined totalitarianism — cloaked in the future tense of dread — was, in essence, an exact mirror of his own time: the age of fascism and empire, of moral collapse dressed as moral order.
Our era is its descendant — a new convergence of the same forces, armed not with flags and speeches alone, but with algorithms and moral justifications. The system evolves in ever more refined forms, its language growing more persuasive with every atrocity it hides.
In this world, technology reshapes reality to mirror its own logic: it allows us to see ruins and architecture in the same glance, as if devastation and progress were two sides of the same coin.
Weapons bear names that breathe perfume and grace — Lavender, Gospel — words of comfort turned into codes for annihilation. Beauty and death are fused in a single lexicon, and language itself becomes the perfume that masks the stench of erasure.
In such a world, peace prizes are given to those who master destruction, while true peace endures only in the faces of those who are never honored —
in Francesca Albanese, who turned international law into a weapon against silence;
in the flotilla convoys that sailed toward the siege, not away from it;
in Greta Thunberg’s voice, crying for justice when nations fell quiet.
They are the rightful laureates of a prize that does not yet exist.
Today’s Nobel is only a reflection of the world that created it — a peace in Trump’s image, and prizes for those who perfect the choreography of war in the name of salvation.
Perhaps peace itself must first be liberated before it can be celebrated.