Tag: 1984

149 words

Angelo Plume and Endeavour had a very entertaining chat about the disconnect between the fictional dystopias and real dystopias created by liberals, and why so many people fail to see when they are living in one. It is now available for download and online listening.

(more…)

2,275 words

Recently, an all-too-familiar act of violence perpetrated against white children resulted in several weeks of unrest in the United Kingdom. (more…)

2,265 words

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. — George Orwell, “England, Your England”

Evening has fallen, the swans are singing.
The last of Sunday’s bells is ringing.
The wind in the trees is sighing,
And old England is dying.
— The Waterboys, “Old England” (more…)

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.

236 words / 1:57:46

Every month in 2024, Greg Johnson will invite some of our authors and friends to read and discuss some of the best material from our catalog and more in what we are calling The Counter-Currents Book Club. The first meeting was held in place of our most recent Counter-Currents Radio broadcast, where Greg was joined by Margot Metroland, James J. O’Meara, and Kathryn S. to discuss our latest publication by Jonathan Bowden, The Cultured Thug. It is now available for download and online listening. (more…)

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill (1628)

1,994 words

I was carrying out a literary exercise of quite a different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself . . . — George Orwell, “Why I Write”

 Litera scripta manet.
(That which is written, remains.)
— John Dewey (more…)

You can pre-order Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.

2,507 words

Jonathan Bowden (ed. by Greg Johnson)
The Cultured Thug
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2023

Stylistically there are two kinds of Jonathan Bowden essay. There are the neat, trim, polished ones that clock in at 800 to 1,100 words, like a review in The Spectator. Then there are the luxuriant, digressive ones that are always rambling off onto weird, and often interesting, tangents. The difference between the two is that the latter kind usually come to us as transcripts of speeches from gatherings where Bowden had an hour or more to fill, and thus had good reason to pad out his thesis with amusing asides and intriguing anecdotes. (more…)

1,816 words

[M]an has ascribed to all that exists a connection with morality and laid an ethical significance on the world’s back. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Everybody wants to rule the world. — Tears for Fears (more…)

Orwell’s passport photo from his time in Burma.

1,255 words

When did Eric A. Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, lose his virginity? Most biographers haven’t wrestled much with this particular issue. But then came along John Sutherland, a retired academic who published an entertaining book called Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography back in 2016. (I briefly described this cute volume in a 2019 end-of-year Favorite Books wrap-up.)

John Sutherland, bless his soul, spends about half his book reconstructing the carnal history of E. A. Blair. (more…)

2,200 words

The following is being published in commemoration of George Orwell’s 120th birthday on June 25.

George Orwell is one of those authors well worth stealing, as Orwell famously wrote of Charles Dickens. I am not the first person to start an essay like this. While rummaging through my memory files I recalled a cover piece in the January 1983 Harper’s, and 40 years later I am astounded to discover it begins almost exactly the same way. (more…)

Mizzy (right), who has been making TikTok videos about harassing random white people in London in highly illegal ways and then crying “racism” when anyone tries to stop him.

1,650 words

Bad chemistry

I wrote in Counter-Currents in 2021 about Professor Kathleen Stock, a philosophy lecturer hounded from her post at my alma mater, the University of Sussex, by student activists for her comments and writings on gender identity. She has recently been “deplatformed” by Oxford University, and has now come under attack from a curious source: the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

You might assume these eggheads would be busy publishing peer-reviewed papers on enzymes, salts, and various reactions in test-tubes, but their remit seems considerably wider in these heady days of woke kangaroo courts. The RSC’s new journal, Digital Discovery, has as its mission statement to publish “theoretical and experimental research at the intersection of chemistry, material science and biotechnology.” (more…)

2,165 words

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the book of the Machine. – E. M. Forster

Welcome, my son.
Welcome to the machine.
— Pink Floyd

Writers of fiction are obviously not bound to set their work in their own times. (more…)

2,399 words

Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. — George Orwell, 1984

American college students have said, ‘Like 1984, man’, when asked not to smoke pot in the classroom or advised gently to do a little reading. — Anthony Burgess, 1985

I made a half-hearted New Year’s resolution not to mention Orwell’s 1984 this year, not once. Like most of these Janus-faced pledges, however, it didn’t last long. But hasn’t the book been over-visited? (more…)

1,701 words

The propaganda is ripe today in my country, though it has been this way all my life. It isn’t until now, however, that it has become so flagrant and out in the open that everyone in their right mind can see it. Unfortunately, the number of insane people seems to be higher than ever, and an ever greater portion of people in the so-called “home of the brave” pretend to be asleep in the hope that, if they don’t see the monster, it won’t see them.

It’s gotten to a point where I have begun to ask myself: Do people actually believe this garbage anymore? (more…)