This post is a summary of an article published in January 2015, written by editor Robert Butler at http://www.intelligentlifemagazine.com/content/features/robert-butler/orwells-world
It is now 65 years since George Orwell died, and he has never been bigger. His phrases are on our lips, his ideas are in our heads, his warnings have come true. How did this happen? If there were to be a statue outside BBC's new offices in central London that captured the spirit of its modish interior of "workstation clusters", and the daily struggle of the 5,500employees to produce content across multiple platforms for an audience of 240m. In 2016 a statue of George Orwell will be unveiled. Orwell spent a mere two years ( 1941-1943 ) at the BBC. The critic Cyril Connolly, an exact contemporary, thought that only D.H. Lawrence rivalled Orwell in the degree to which his personality "shines out in everything he said or wrote". Any reader of Orwell's non-fiction will pick up on the brisk, buttonholing manner. The Orwell's bronze statue will look down on the comings and goings of BBC staff who, returning his gaze, can read some chiselled wisdom from his works on the wall behind him. The Financial Times recently called Orwell "the true patron saint of our profession". Why Orwell? One answer to "why Orwell?" is because of his posthumous career. Five years before his death in 1950, he was, in the words of one of his biographers, "still a faintly marginal figure". He had published seven books, four of them novels, none of which put him in the front rank of novelists. It was only with his last two books, "Animal Farm" and "1984" (published in 1945 and 1949) that Orwell transformed his reputation as a writer. These two books would change the way we think about our lives. The interest in Orwell is accelerating and expanding practically daily. Since his death 65 years ago, the estate has been handled by A.M. Heath. Bill Hamilton, his literary executor describes the onward march of '1984'. We are selling far more. We are licensing far more stage productions than we have ever done before. We are selling in new languages. We have recently done our first Kurdish deals too. We suddenly get these calls from, say, Istanbul, from the local publisher saying, "I want a thousand copies to the demonstrators in the square outside as part of the campaign." As a global recognised name, it is at an peak. A new hollywood movie of "1984" is in the pipeline, "Aninal Farm" is also in development as a feature film, and Lee Hall, who wrote "Billy Elliot", is writing both a stage musical version of "Animal Farm" and a television adaptation of "Down and out in London and Paris". It is boom time for Orwell. Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale, advises,"To understand Putin, read Orwell." By Orwell, he means "1984": "The structure and the wisdom of the book are guides, often frightening precises ones, to current events. "This is just the top end of the range. Barely a minute goes by when Orwell is not namechecked on Twitter or Google. Only two other novelists have inspired adjectives so closely associated in the public mind with the circunstances they set out to attack: Dickens and Kafka. An office worker defines the word as "people monitoring everything you do, that was orwellian." In the years after his death, Orwell was co-opted by cold-war warriors as a powerful voice against communism and Soviet Union. After the collapse of communism, libertarians would use Orwell as an argument against Big Brother and the nanny state. Yet he had categorically stated that everything he had written had democratic socialism at his very heart. It was possible to spot Orwellian scenarios on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The film "The Lives of Others", set in 1984, depicts the nightmare apparatus of the secret police in East Germany. But the toxic fear of McCarthyism that runs through a film like George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck" is very bit as Orwellian. For decades "Animal Farm" and "1984" have been mainstays on the British English-literature syllabus. Generations have grown up familiar with concepts of Big Brother, Doublethink and Thoughtcrime. Orwell was in any reading list for teenagers in the 1970s. But in the university, we looked at his essays, but not his fiction. In those days, Joyce and Lawrence were seen as the towering novelists of the 20th century. Yet, today, "1984" can claim to be the most influential novel of the century. There would have been no surge of interest 35 years after publication if Orwell had gone for the other title he liked: "The Last Man in Europe". Nor would the appeal have been as global. I doubt "1984" would have become as big as it has in Brazil, where, along with "Animal Farm", it is now on the government's school syllabus, if "Europe" had been in the title. The vision of the future Aldous Huxley had conjured up in "Brave New World", of a society rendered passive by a surplus of conforts and distractions, seemed prescient. In 1985, the cultural critic Neil Postman argued in "Amusing Ourselves to Death" that Orwell feared that what we hate ruin us, while Huxley feared that what we love would ruin us. Talking with the cast of "1984", I asked the actors what they had researched in terms of everyday life in 2014 to help them understand the world of the play. One answer was Edward Snowden showing how the NSA snoops on ordinary Americans, another was news footage from the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, and a third, from the actress playing Julia, was that the most useful research for her had been living in N.Y. in the wake of 9/11, the fear and paranoia that followed. To Edward Snowden, the tech that Orwell depicts, he says, "now seem quaint and unimaginative. Now we have got webcams that go with us everywhere. We buy cellphones that are the equivalent of a network microphone that we carry around in our pockets. Times have shown that the world is much more unpredictable and dangerous." The general public, on learning of something like Snowden's revelations, still goes out and buys Orwell's books. Bloomberg News reported that "1984" had moved from 11,855th on Amazon's list to number three. What is extraordinary is that Orwell had a purpose in writing "Animal Farm" and "1984" which has now largely evaporated. He had gone to Spain to fight fascism, but had returned with a hatred of communism. He was a left-wing writer pungently attacking the illusions of the left and he did it by aiming his fire at Britain's ally Stalin, while the second world war was still going on. In attacking Stalin, Orwell captured fundamental aspects of the way the world was evolving and struck a chord that resonates even more today. If there is one quality to catch, it is Orwell's unease. What struck him is how he keeps questioning his own position. It is the contrariness and the contradictions, the resolute lack of complacency, that animate the writing. No other writer could feel safe around him.
