The tribute to George Orwell carries on. Many journalist are reinforcing the importance of the warnings of Orwell nowadays. Let's pay attention to what they are saying and fighting against abuse of power, authoritarian regimes and anything that undermine truth, democracy, human rights and justice. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/1984-george-orwell/590638/. The second was published at https://qrius.com/george-orwell-1984-classic/. The third was published at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-65856526
No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell's 1984. The vocabulary of the all-powerful party that rules the state Oceania with the ideologia of Ingsoc - doublethink, memory hole, unperson, thoughtcrime, newspeak, thought police, room 101, big brother - they have all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It is almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or pervesions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know? It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-schools students. Orwell's novel was paired with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager than the bleak sadism of 1984. The 1984's pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith's attachment to nature, the smell of fresh coffee, the sound of proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. The novel is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell's main target wasn't just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies."The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don't let it happen. It depends on you." Orwell said. Things haven't turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it is as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. What does the novel mean for us? To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," Orwell wrote. In the world of enlightened and progressive people, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It is not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink, which has grown worse in reaction to the far right-wing kind, creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice - a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink. Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, this pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Orwell wrote in 1946. "What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side." 1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold what is real and valuable. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull. George Orwell's classical works such as 1984 spoke of a dystopian society, totalitarian control of states and abuse of power. Their relevance in more modern times is no matter of surprise. 1984 provided us with a view of a society and of a future which is very bleak, a state where the government spies on its people round the clock, tells people what to do and what to think, and keeps people at the constant edge of their minds with the constant war propaganda. Orwell provided a well structured vision of this society, a mechanism for control and abuse of power. Societies as such do exist today, for example, in North Korea. However, Orwell's detailed vision fails, in the light of recent developments such as social media and political correctness. He wrote, "who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past", indicating towards the vitality of information in our lives and how its control can help control the world. Information today is more centralised than ever, with a private company Facebook more than 4 billion people receiving news but on the other hand, the very same platform has brought in the heavy democratisation of information in our daily lives. Social media is peak democracy first. A fierce free speech activist, Orwell understood free speech as the liberty to say things which even people didin't want to hear, a repository of a right reserved for the minority, the powerless and also, the controversial, a right necessary to conserve a society while also calling for change. Free speech for a democracy is like an oxygen for a human being. Orwell remains relevant more than ever, both as a political analyst and a philosopher. He strongly believed that power, exercised by the fascists and the idealists alike, would be subject to abuse. He was heavily obsessed with the malleable nature of power and all the hypocrisy that it revealed. His main lesson? Question everything and everyone. Richard Blair was speaking on the 120th anniversary of the writer's birth. He was adopted by Eric Blair, better known by his name of George Orwell. With Russia calling the war in Ukraine a "special military operation", many people see 1984 as more relevant than ever. Asked about how his father would react if he came back today, Mr. Blair said, "has it changed from the world of 1984 and Animal Farm? It is been the same for a millennia. I suppose it will be the same in another 100 years time". Professor Jean Seaton, official historian of the BBC, said Orwell was still incredibly important. " We live in a world with surveillance, facial recognition. 1984 is about the capacity of authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, to make you believe what is not true." he said.
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