Dorian Lynskey - Nothing but the truth: the legacy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
During a speech in July 2018, Trump said:
“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” A line
from Nineteen Eighty-Four went viral: “The party told you to
reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential
command.”
Extracts from The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynske
December 1948. A man sits at a typewriter, in bed, on a remote island, fighting to complete the book that means more to him than any other. He is terribly ill. The book will be finished and, a year or so later, so will the man. January 2017. Another man stands before a crowd, which is not as large as he would like, in Washington DC, taking the oath of office as the 45th president of the United States of America. His press secretary says that it was the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe”. Asked to justify such a preposterous lie, the president’s adviser describes the statement as “alternative facts”. Over the next four days, US sales of the dead man’s book will rocket by almost 10,000%, making it a No 1 bestseller.
When George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in the United Kingdom
on 8 June 1949, in the heart of the 20th century, one critic wondered how such
a timely book could possibly exert the same power over generations to come.
Thirty-five years later, when the present caught up with Orwell’s future and the
world was not the nightmare he had described, commentators again predicted that
its popularity would wane. Another 35 years have elapsed since then, and Nineteen
Eighty-Four remains the book we turn to when truth is mutilated, when
language is distorted, when power is abused, when we want to know how bad
things can get. It is still, in the words of Anthony Burgess, author of A
Clockwork Orange, “an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears”.
Nineteen
Eighty-Four has not just
sold tens of millions of copies – it has infiltrated the consciousness of
countless people who have never read it. The phrases and concepts that Orwell
minted have become essential fixtures of political language, still potent after
decades of use and misuse: newspeak, Big Brother, the thought police, Room 101,
the two minutes’ hate, doublethink, unperson, memory hole, telescreen, 2+2=5
and the ministry of truth. Its title came to define a calendar year, while the word Orwellian has turned the author’s own name into a
capacious synonym for everything he hated and feared... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/19/legacy-george-orwell-nineteen-eighty-foursee also
More posts on Orwell
The Broken Middle - on the 30th anniversary of 1984
