Tag: Nineteen Eighty-Four

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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…)

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Whenever a conservative or Right-winger accuses Leftists of acting like the Party from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the unerring refrain from the Leftist chorus is “Don’t you know George Orwell was a socialist!” The implication is that, especially in these politically polarized times, Orwell is the property of the Left. He wore their uniform, and so Right-wingers are, by invoking his name, committing a kind of theft.

Orwell’s best-known writings, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are dark satires of that exact attitude: A man’s thoughts ought to belong to a political faction, and that political faction has some sort of right to them. (more…)

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David Ryan
George Orwell on Screen
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2018

This book took me down a rabbit hole when I discovered it last June. For several days I didn’t want to do anything but watch old television dramatizations and documentaries about George Orwell’s works and life. There have been a surprising number of them, and most of the key ones can be found online or in other digital media. (more…)

Soviet propaganda poster from 1931 telling the workers that the 5-year plan can be completed in 4 years with enough enthusiasm.

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Part 1 here, Part 2 here

4. Doublethink

Among the many useful concepts bequeathed to us by Orwell, “doublethink” tops the list. It is a priceless tool for understanding how “normies” function within the repressive, PC societies of the West. The novel offers us two separate discussions of doublethink, which complement each other. The first occurs early in the story, and is the most famous passage dealing with the term:

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Part 2 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

3. The Denial of Reality and the Control of Language

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Part 1 (Part 2 here)

1. Introduction

Everyone thinks he knows what’s in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Is there really anything left to say? It’s as if George Orwell’s masterpiece has been sucked dry. At least, that’s what I thought until I recently reread it, for the first time in over thirty years. (more…)

O’Brien (Richard Burton) demonstrates that 2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4.

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Did the international crises of 1947 and 1948 leave their mark on the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four? I’ve spent a lot of time on this question, and so far as I can tell, the answer is – yes; but only obliquely. And George Orwell may not even have been conscious of the fact.

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June 8th is the 70th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Greg Johnson interviews Margot Metroland on some of Orwell’s sources and influences, the loosely “Trotskyite” political context in which he wrote, and the possibility that he was bumped off by Stalinists. (more…)

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Connolly, Burnham, Orwell, & “Corner Table”

“In the torture scenes, he is merely melodramatic: he introduces those rather grotesque machines which used to appear in terror stories for boys.”
—V. S. Pritchett, The New Statesman, June 18, 1949

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On Saturday, March 7th, 2015, I sat down with Tito Perdue and his wife Judy in Atlanta and interviewed him about his life and work. (more…)

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English original here

Ray Bradbury, spisovatel nejlépe známý díky románůmMarťanská kronika, 451 stupňů Fahrenheita, a autor stovek dalších povídek, zemřel 5. června 2012 ve věku 91 let. S jeho osobou ztrácí Amerika nejen jednoho ze svých nejlepších spisovatelů, ale také jednoho z našich posledních skutečných spisovatelů.

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Editor’s Note:

The following text is a transcript of Jonathan Bowden’s lecture, “Nineteen Eighty-Four and Totalitarian Leftism,” which was delivered to the 23rd New Right meeting in London on September 26, 2009. In editing this transcription, I introduced punctuation and paragraph breaks. I also deleted a couple of false starts. You can listen to the lecture at YouTube here. Several bits were unintelligible and are marked as such. If you can understand these words, please post a comment below. (more…)