(WSWS) – Since first appearing in the popular lexicon, the term “Orwellian” has conjured up a vision of the prototypical “totalitarian state”: a one-party dictatorship that swarmed with secret police, spied on its own people, quashed dissent, made arbitrary arrests, tortured prisoners, waged perpetual war, rewrote history for mere expedience, impoverished its own working population, and rooted its political discourse in doublethink—a thought system defined as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

Many Americans would easily recognize this description of “Oceania,” the futuristic dystopia immortalized by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most influential English-language novels of the mid-twentieth century.

Whether many Americans recognize that this description applies to their own society as well is another matter. But since the theft of the 2000 election—a period marked by such events as the 9/11 attacks, the invasion of Iraq based on fictitious “WMD” (weapons of mass destruction), the torture scandals, and the 2008 financial crash—it’s a point that increasing numbers of Americans seem to be grasping. Read the rest of this entry »

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.” Read the rest of this entry »

How Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning’s digital future. Read the rest of this entry »

(Guardian) – Sixty years ago today George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and this evening, as though to mark the anniversary of Orwell’s last book, the former head of GCHQ, Sir David Pepper, slips from the shadows to tell the BBC’s Who’s Watching You programme that it has become necessary for the government to record all data from phone and internet traffic in the fight against terror. Read the rest of this entry »

(Telegraph) – Next week marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jeremy Paxman pays tribute to one of England’s greatest writers. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1946 Observer editor David Astor lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Here, Robert McCrum tells the compelling story of Orwell’s torturous stay on the island where the author, close to death and beset by creative demons, was engaged in a feverish race to finish the book Read the rest of this entry »