Orwell: 1984 meets 2017
What a week for Orwell. 1984 went up to Number 1 on the Amazon US bestsellers list all day, Number 3 on the UK equivalent, and social media are throwing Orwell in Trump’s alternative -truth face. (Yes, we’ve contributed enthusiastically via Trump’s favourite weapon of Twitter.) Theatres worldwide are clamouring to license a production asap and enquiries for film rights are flowing in (sorry folks, not available)… Orwell is a unique political hot potato when politics go really sour. Despite the fact that the book was published in 1950, and he was writing about the immediate post-war and early cold war world, his vision of a world warped by the destruction of truth via the destruction of language, and the brazen way the power-hungry obliterate facts themselves, has never been superceded. And here we have, in front of our eyes, a new US President playing out the power games of Big Brother. To a far lesser extent, but just as sinister, our own Prime Minister, when all the facts of a financial crisis in the NHS are obvious to the entire population, is blithely ignoring the facts in favour of a completely fallacious narrative. So the obvious question: what would Orwell think about all of this? Well, we know. It’s all there in his great essays, such as Politics and the English Language, as well in his dystopian 1984. Look on his warnings and Despair (to paraphrase Shelley’s Ozymandias)? No, get out there and shout about it. Americans do; they’re really good at protest. And they will have a lot to protest about for the next few years.