ORWELL, DANTE, AND THE EARTHLY GODS 2025
Author: ©2024 William Castano-Bedoya
THREE-MILE CHRONICLES:
“God, deliver us from all harm and danger.” That simple prayer was what my mother would say whenever thunder shook the skies of my childhood, and today I quietly repeat it during my daily three-mile walk, trying to quell a growing fear. It’s not that I disbelieve in the society I live in—one that has spent decades perfecting its institutions and setting an example for the world—but I am troubled by this newly elected earthly god whose very first acts in pre-governance reveal a haughtiness that prefers domination over service.
A piece of news so absurd it borders on utopian in its infamy has seized my imagination: the intention to reclaim the Panama Canal. This announcement strikes me as the culmination of certain earthly gods’ arrogance, blinded by ego and ambition, forgetting that their mandate extends not over maps, but over lives. They seem unaware that real power is not measured by territory but by justice, and that greatness is found not in the urge to possess, but in the capacity to serve.
In my political naivety, I’m not surprised by how this expansionist rhetoric resonates with a strategy shared by several of these gods in power today. A reckless four-year government is being announced, sowing fear among millions of souls. Fear, repeated ruthlessly each day, weighs on the most vulnerable—made into convenient targets of threats and accusations. That very fear—a stronghold for so many earthly gods—also protects rulers of dubious legitimacy elsewhere. These days, we’ve seen how the earthly Syrian god, expelled from his homeland, finds refuge alongside the cunning Russian Bear, confirming my mother’s sarcastic saying: “God makes them and they find each other.”
Just as George Orwell portrayed in Animal Farm how leaders dress in sheep’s clothing yet rule like wolves, Dante offered in The Divine Comedy a portrait of human hell, teeming with figures consumed by their own passions and abuses of power. Were Dante alive today, he might add a new circle for those who rule without moral justification, condemning immigrants to exile or turning on the weakest while boasting of their own greatness.
I imagine a modern-day purgatory inhabited by fearful immigrant families who, fleeing death or hunger, end up fueling these earthly gods’ prosperity through their labor. Ironically, those who generate wealth are persecuted in the name of “saving the nation.” In the reality of our world, the map is filled with earthly gods who, standing between Orwell’s political satire and Dante’s circles of Hell, vie for power with arrogance.
There stands the Venezuelan Jaguar, lord of Dante’s third circle—the circle of gluttony—devouring the very hopes of his people with his hunger for control. Not far from its jaws, on an island enclosed by both visible and invisible walls, lurks the Cuban Crocodile, buried in the sixth circle—the circle of heretics—clinging to worn-out doctrines that have stifled its people’s breath for decades. Further north, along rivers and lakes once full of promise, the Nicaraguan Wolf prowls through the seventh circle—the circle of the violent—howling to silence any dissent.
Across the globe, the North Korean Dragon writhes in the eighth circle—the circle of fraud—spinning a realm of absolute propaganda that keeps its population chained to a manipulated reality. Meanwhile, in the frigid plains of the Far East, the Russian Bear lurks in the ninth circle—the circle of traitors—spreading into neighboring territories under historical or geopolitical excuses.
Yet this dance of earthly gods is not confined to a single hemisphere. In the vast lands of the Chinese Dragon, ethnic minorities are oppressed amid a steamrolling economic expansion that quiets any opposing voice behind a wall of control immune to criticism. On the African continent, various regimes—the Lion and other terror-feeding beasts—have plunged their peoples into the darkness of hunger and genocide, creating mass exoduses and a deep wound in humanity’s collective conscience. Similarly, in certain regions of the Arab world, the Falcon of the moment subjugates the population through iron-fisted laws and censorship, shielded by petrodollars and indifferent to the repercussions of its repression.
In the heart of an empire of abundance rises the American Eagle, caught in Dante’s fourth circle of Hell—the circle of the greedy and the wasteful. This pre-governance god flaunts power by laying claim to territories like pieces on a global chessboard: today it mentions Panama, tomorrow Greenland, disregarding the human dignity behind imaginary borders. Like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, who became tyrants by stealing others’ labor, the Eagle forgets that its opulence springs not from its own virtue but from the toil of millions of immigrants who uphold its economic machinery day after day.
Thus, the earthly gods—the Jaguar, the Crocodile, the Wolf, the Dragon, the Bear, and the Eagle, not to mention the Lion and the Falcon in other regions—hungry for power, fall in line with Orwell’s logic that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Meanwhile, in Dante’s imagination, their seats in the circles of Hell are already reserved, where their excesses and abuses become eternal punishments—reminding us that anyone who rules by force and deception ends up caught in the web of their own ambition.
Even so, the American earthly god proclaims his divinity more loudly than any other. He declares immigrants a threat, when in fact these so-called “invaders” are what sustain much of his abundance. He shouts, “Give me back the canal,” forgetting that, if justice were fair, half his territory would belong to Mexico. He blames immigrants for bringing fentanyl yet overlooks that a large percentage of the illegal weapons devastating Latin America come from within his own borders—those very weapons so easily procured there, which cause as many deaths each year as certain armed conflicts that the Eagle ironically professes to be distant from.
In the paradox of his aggressive and cruel agenda, the American god disregards gun violence on his own streets, avoiding treating it as a real enemy to be subdued. Instead, he searches for weaker external targets to fuel his rhetoric, while the plank in his own eye—the daily tragedy of assault-weapon victims—remained unresolved in his first term, thwarted by political interests and the donations of those who bankroll his presidential campaigns.
In this worldwide puzzle of algorithms that divide populations and shape consumption patterns, it is the invisible hands of anonymous workers who keep the superpowers shining. They are the modern-day slaves of a Purgatory they cannot escape, caught between the illusion of Paradise and an economic Hell that consumes them.
In his delusion, this American earthly god dreams of revoking birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants, ignoring how many men and women in power—those he will command—were themselves born under the same conditions he now seeks to disparage.
“Choose the most vulnerable as your worst enemy and you will rise to power.” I wrote a few months ago. Sadly, this axiom has become the creed of today’s earthly gods, who forget that their prosperity depends on the labor of the very people they despise.
If the scales of history could measure more than profits—if they could capture the moral debt to every immigrant who tills the fields or assembles products in factories—they would unveil the inequity these gods prefer to overlook. The time has come for a new system to emerge, in which superpowers are required—by ethics rather than concession—to accept universal quotas of immigrants and to offer them decent jobs, fair pay, and a life with full rights.
Only then can we leave modern-day slavery behind and restore dignity to the hands that forge global prosperity. Only then can we hope to cast off the Hell of exploitation and the Purgatory of inequality, aiming for a worldly Paradise where everyone can live with dignity.
Dante, in describing Paradise, imagined a place of harmony, free from the world’s miseries. Achieving a similar harmony in our present world demands that these earthly gods remember power is not eternal and that serving the common good is more worthwhile than expanding borders or inflating one’s ego. Perhaps, once greed and pride yield to justice and conscience, we will take our first step toward building a new order—one that might finally offer us a genuine place of peace.
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William Castaño
William is a Colombian-American writer who captivates readers with his ability to depict both the unique experiences and universal struggles of humanity. Hailing from Colombia’s Coffee Axis, he was born in Armenia and spent his youth in Bogotá, where he studied Marketing and Advertising at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University. In the 1980s, he immigrated to the United States, where he naturalized as a U.S. citizen and held prominent roles as a creative and image leader for projects with major corporations. After a successful career in the marketing world, William decided to fully dedicate himself to his true passion: literature. He began writing at the turn of the century, but it was in 2018 when he made the decision to make writing his primary occupation. He currently resides in Coral Gables, Florida, where he finds inspiration for his works. William’s writing style is distinguished by its depth, humanity, and authenticity. Among his most notable works are ‘The Beggars of Mercury’s Light: We the Other People’, ‘The Galpon’, ‘Flowers for María Sucel’, ‘ Ludovico’, and ‘We’ll meet in Stockholm”.
