In this thoughtful and subtle analysis of the totalitarian system of brainwashing and manipulative exchanges, Csesław Miłosz offers a new interpretation of Ketman, which, in his able hands, is transformed into a trans-ideological and trans-civilizational idiom that operates equally well within religious and secular ideocracies. Miłosz's provocative and thought-stimulating interpretation of Ketman enabled him to reveal different literary devices and interpretive techniques concealing one's true political, moral, aesthetic, and religious views. These devices and techniques appear to have been invented or perfected by Central and East European intellectuals who were desperately trying to survive and act decently in a world of cynical lies and severe censorship. The acceptance of an alien dogma while practicing one's religion secretly or keeping fidelity to one's values, Ketman appears to have originated as trans-civilizational phenomenon, instead of something easly reducible to Islam or the Stalinist phase of Communism. By and large, the history of philosophy is a history of Ketman as far as the pre-modern forms monotheism are concerned [...].

George Orwell played a decisive role in the struggle against totalitarian consciousness and organized hatred. It was through his satires, dystopias, and political essays that the literature of lonely humanists and skeptical liberals became the battleground where the cynical nature of violent politics and organized hatred of the twentieth century was revealed in a thrilling way. He exposed totalitarianism and ideocratic hatred inherent in the age of the making and unmaking of enemies. He also uncovered the trajectories of modern consciousness and imagination that were characteristic of Western societies and were deeply symptomatic of the fabrication of political and ideological adversaries. Orwell’s name may well be said to have become the banner raised by those who believed in the valid uniqueness of human life, individual reason, and individual conscience. The quest for enemies and the invention of adversaries may be said to have been the major themes that permeated Orwell’s fiction and political essays. He penetrated the politics of organized hatred that resulted from the phantoms and forgeries of the modern troubled imagination as nobody else in modern literature and philosophy. If Central and Eastern Europe may well be said to have become a litmus test in world history concerning the intensity and lunacy of modern political and ideological hatred, then Orwell can certainly qualify for the title of the honorary Central and East European. The article deals with Orwells’s concepts of nationalism, fanaticism, ideological bias, and hatred, which were explicitly discussed in his essay “Notes on Nationalism”.