The Orwellian Pager Horror in Lebanon
We all woke up in a new world — a world that wears the face of familiarity but beneath its surface, there is a silent, creeping terror. Like the pages of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where truth is warped and reality inverted, we have entered a production where what was once trusted now conspires against us. The lines that separate the mundane from the malevolent have vanished, leaving us grasping for clarity in a haze of dread. We wake up, we check our devices, and, now, we wonder if they will be our last connection to life — or death.
In Orwell’s world, Big Brother watches every move, every thought, but here, in our new program, the tools of surveillance have become more than what their original construction purposed them to be. Wiretaps are no longer enough. In this twisted parallel of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is not just our thoughts or conversations that are subject to manipulation but our actual existence. The pagers, the phones, the walkie-talkies — they do not simply listen anymore. They detonate. They obliterate. We are no longer afraid of being watched; we are afraid of being erased.
On September 17, 2024, much like in Oceania where the Party ceaselessly rewrote reality, the past itself seemed to dissolve, slipping through our fingers like sand. The pagers that detonated in Lebanon, manufactured by a Taiwanese company with branches sprawling across the globe like the tangled bureaucracies of Kafka’s The Castle, betrayed us with a faceless efficiency. What were once simple devices of communication, mere conduits for connection, have morphed into extensions of terror, their function twisted beyond recognition — similar to Orwell’s Newspeak, where even the words we rely on become weapons of control and death. K., the wandering protagonist of The Castle, would find himself equally lost here, caught in a labyrinth where each radio, like the Castle’s distant authority, becomes an unreachable entity, promising safety and connection but delivering only confusion, betrayal, and the crushing of the soul — like the endless corridors of bureaucracy that twist K.’s quest for employment into a perpetual struggle for answers that never come.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, trapped in contradictions, slowly unravels under the weight of omnipresent lies and surveillance. Winston realizes that no corner of his life is beyond the Party’s control. We now inhabit a world where trust has become a distant memory, where the tools that once connected us are stealthily turned into instruments of annihilation. Who could have imagined that something as innocuous as a pager — designed to deliver urgent messages — would now carry death and dismemberment, waiting silently and then ringing with grim finality just before exploding? Like a sick parody of communication, the devices beckon their victims, drawing them into an inevitable, preordained dark fate. The betrayal is more than physical — it is a fracture in reality itself, a perversion of what we thought we knew, recalling Winston’s eventual realization that even rebellion, even thought itself, is never free. As he discovers the hopelessness of escaping Big Brother’s merciless gaze, we too are forced to confront the dystopian nature of a world where the objects we rely on are quietly weaponized and death and torture come cloaked in the guise of the mundane.
In this “brave new world,” it is not enough to merely avoid these devices. Planes, cars, even the humble cell phone — all are potential harbingers of doom. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, even the words people speak can be twisted into evidence of guilt, used against them in the most vile ways. Now, the same is true of the objects we use, the products we thought would make our lives easier. They are the new thoughtcrimes, capable of condemning us with a single ring.
The chaos in Lebanon is a mirror of Orwell’s proles, the masses crushed beneath the weight of a system too vast and cruel to resist. Yes, Hezbollah fighters and soldiers were among the dead, but so were doctors, civil servants, emergency workers — people who trusted that the world was still the same as the day before. Just as the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four, faceless and forgotten, lived on the margins of the Party’s machinery, these individuals, too, exist outside the corridors of power, yet find themselves ensnared in the unforgiving gears of a system they can neither see nor understand. In the shadow of this global control, they are not considered enemies, nor rebels, but simply irrelevant — collateral in a world that grinds forward with cold indifference. Their lives, like the proles’ insignificant existence, are erased without a second thought, snuffed out by the devices they believed would serve them. The horror is not only in their deaths but in the absurdity of it all, the sense that they were never more than fleeting, nameless victims in a vast, impenetrable web of power. Their futures, like Winston’s futile hope for revolution, are swallowed by a system that does not even notice their passing, a nightmare where safety is an illusion and control is exerted with a distant, indifferent hand that never reveals itself.
What makes this horror even more chilling is the calculated precision of it. As Winston was ultimately destroyed by the system not through violence but through the stripping away of his mind, so too are we undone not by direct attack but by the slow, insidious corruption of the objects around us. Trust, like truth in Orwell’s world, has become a casualty. The next plane you board, the next phone you answer, might be the last. There is no refuge left; the gadgets we once trusted, now rigged by Big Brother himself, explode in our hands or next to our balls, tearing apart any semblance of control. What was progress is now sabotage, and every beep, every ring, feels like a death sentence disguised as a lifeline.
The notion of survival in this world now depends on import substitution. Like Winston’s realization that he could not trust even the words he read or the memories he held dear, the Global South and East too must now face the cold fact that they can no longer trust what they import from the West. Where once they bought the West’s cars, planes, and gadgets, they must now question whether they are ticking time bombs. Just as Winston could no longer trust his own perception of reality, the Global South and East can no longer trust the products that fill their lives. In this disorienting position, where every object may hide potential lethal danger, they find themselves in a position not unlike K. — wandering aimlessly in a world of invisible threats and unseen accusers, where guilt and danger are omnipresent yet never fully understood, and survival hinges on deciphering a code that has no key.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party was willing to kill anyone who threatened its hold on power, and we are left to wonder if the same holds true for the West and its allies. The helicopter crash that killed Iran’s President Raisi and his entourage — an accident or the natural evolution of a system that plants explosives in pagers? The death of heads of state, like the rewriting of history in Orwell’s world, now seems not only possible but inevitable. We are living in a world where accidents may not be accidents at all.
The final question, like the one Orwell left unanswered, hangs heavy over this new reality. If they are willing to kill with walkie-talkies and pagers, what comes next? Will our food be poisoned? Will a virus be unleashed? Just as the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four were kept in a state of perpetual fear, we too are entering a world where the next disaster is not just likely — it is expected. The future has arrived, and like Winston, we stand before an endless chasm, realizing that every path draws us further into a complex and cobblestoned alleyway network of control, where even our thoughts and tools betray us. Essentially, we face the same inevitability Winston did — where resistance feels futile and the overwhelming system ensures there is no escape from what is to come. After all, as with Winston’s world in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the mechanisms of control have infiltrated every nook and cranny of existence — as even the simplest devices are turned into instruments of punishment and pain, showing that no act, no object, and no thought is beyond the reach of those pulling the strings.
Source: Eurosiberia
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