Tag: Nineteen Eighty-Four

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I’ve been involved in theater off and on for over forty years, acting, writing, and not succeeding at it in any worldly terms. I’m an okay character actor, I’ve written good plays that are considered well-written, literate, humorous, and that no one wants to put on.  (more…)

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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…)

Orwell’s passport photo from his time in Burma.

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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…)

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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…)

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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:

(more…)

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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…)