George Orwell

George Orwell was a British novelist, essayist, and social analyst. His writings, especially Animal Farm and 1984, had the effect of combating socialism, yet he was a committed socialist who never explicitly questioned socialism in the years immediately before his death at a comparatively young age. From the mid-1930s on, Orwell became increasingly preoccupied with the rise of totalitarianism. Orwell saw totalitarianism as a new slave state that would abolish capitalism, would be far worse than capitalism, and would not institute anything he would choose to call socialism.

Before he wrote 1984, Orwell worked for the British government during World War II as a propagandist at the BBC. (Perhaps seeing the propaganda industry up close led to his critical portrait in 1984.) ... On an ironic note, Orwell himself was under government surveillance while writing his novel warning about government surveillance. The British government was watching Orwell because they believed he held socialist opinions. This surveillance started after he published The Road to Wigan Pier, a true story about poverty and the lower class in England.

One doesn't have to read far into the works of George Orwell to discover that he had no understanding of economics whatsoever and was not personally a libertarian in the sense we have in mind when we use that word today. He was a permanently confused but authentically and radically antiauthoritarian democratic socialist. ... George Orwell presents us with yet another case of a writer who was not himself a libertarian as we understand the term today, but whose last two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, have earned him a place in the libertarian tradition.

In his second chapter [of Man versus the State], "The Coming Slavery," Spencer calls attention to the existence of what he calls "political momentum"—the tendency of State interventions and similar political measures to increase and accelerate in the direction in which they have already been set going ... It is more than a grim coincidence that Spencer was warning of the coming slavery in 1884, and that George Orwell, in our time, has predicted that the full consummation of this slavery will be reached in 1984, exactly one century later.

Eric Arthur Blair, known to the world as George Orwell (1903-1950), was a 'socialist' who found himself unable to long abide any actual socialist party or regime. ... Unlike most on the Left—who either embrace totalitarianism or simply evade the logic of their own position—Orwell's intellectual honesty compelled him to spend his life banging his head against his perceived moral dilemma. The products of that struggle include some powerful writing, notably his last work, 1984. ... as a critic and counter-puncher he was fearless. And as the permanent bad conscience of all decent leftists, he is irreplaceable.

As previous examples of pervasive Orwellian semantics and "doublethink”, Barnes trenchantly noted such slogans as: "Double prices and we double national income. ... Our great national debt is a blessing in disguise, because we owe it to ourselves. ... Cold war is peace. ... A 'free nation' is any nation–whether liberal and democratic, socialist, fascist, or anti-Kremlin communist–which will join the anti-Russian crusade. Aiding socialist nations of Europe under the Marshall Plan is a bold stroke to promote free enterprise abroad. ... Launching an atom bomb race will assure peace and security."

The nightmare world of constant video surveillance described by George Orwell in 1984 is one of the most compelling images of the 20th century. Big Brother is an icon of totalitarianism more familiar than real-world dictators. But policymakers who have forgotten Orwell's lessons are even now creating government databases containing information about private citizens. ... Our privacy is in danger because we have missed Orwell's point — 'Big Brother' is not the video camera in the department store. Big Brother is a huge government with unique police powers that can control every aspect of our lives.

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by such science fiction writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick. Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. ... Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). The best adaptation of Orwell's dark tale, this film visualizes the total loss of freedom in a world dominated by technology and its misuse, and the crushing inhumanity of an omniscient state. ... As George Orwell warned, 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.'

One wonders, to use an analogy, what would be the present status of science in general if there had been no more precise language there—if ... one were to find 600 or 263 possible answers offered to the problem of the sum of two and two, or the nature of oxygen? Nor can I quite accept the view of one renowned social scientist who recently opined that it is a good thing to have the meaning of words changing constantly—"progressing"—as though words were somehow like clothes which become soiled and need changing every now and then. Nineteen Eighty-four portrayed the consequences of that practice.

Kennedy finds parallels between the American propaganda effort and themes found in George Orwell's 1984.

The American experience in World War I ... darkly adumbrated the themes Orwell was to put at the center of his futuristic fantasy: overbearing concern for "correct" opinion, for expression, for language itself, and the creation of an enormous propaganda apparatus to nurture the desired state of mind and excoriate all dissenters. That American [propaganda's] creators genuinely believed it to be in the service of an altruistic cause, should not obscure these important facts.

Socialist author George Orwell: "In the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis [in The Road to Serfdom] there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often—at any rate it is not being said nearly often enough—that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitor never dreamed of."

Murray Rothbard, in 'Harry Elmer Barnes as Revisionist of the Cold War' (in Arthur A. Goddard (ed.), Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader ...), focused on Barnes' use of George Orwell's 1984 as a model for understanding the emergence of 'military state capitalism' in the United States. While this theme was raised in Barnes' Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, it was most extensively developed by him in an unpublished manuscript, 'How'Nineteen Eighty-Four' Trends Threaten Peace, Freedom and Prosperity.'

It's great to see that leftists and millennials and others are snapping up George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in a bid to make some sense of Trump's presidency. Because when they get deep into this dystopian tale—into the Newspeaking, sex-fearing, history-rewriting meat of it—they might realize that it describes their authoritarianism better than Trump's. I can picture their faces now: 'Guys ... is this novel about us?' ... Trump will be authoritarian, that's for sure. But his is likely to be a clumsy authoritarianism, oafish rather than Orwellian.

To be free to make decisions regarding our own lives and property, and to be able to enter into voluntary agreements with others is ... essential to an individually meaningful life. Having a daily supply of food and water is equally essential to our lives, but hardly sufficient for living well. I shall forever recall George Orwell's description of the institutionalized "tinny stew" fed to the humanoids in his 1984, as exemplary of the ways in which the state feeds – but does not nourish – its conscripts. How reminiscent is this of the cafeteria offerings in government schools, prisons, or military establishments?

It's important, when listening to the official shapers of opinion in the media, to ask ourselves what they really mean by the words they use. As Orwell pointed out in "Politics and the English Language," those in power use language to obscure meaning more often than to convey it ... If you're not careful, you may find yourself responding in just the way the users intend—allowing their words to conjure up in your mind homes, families, ... a whole way of life, threatened with invasion and destruction by a nameless, faceless enemy—in the words of Orwell's Two-Minute Hate, "the dark armies ... barbarians whose only honour is atrocity."

In his 1941 essay, England, Your England, George Orwell laid out some of the distinctive characteristics of the British national character, among them, that 'the liberty of the individual is still believed in,' and 'the most hateful of all names in the English ear is Nosey Parker.' One is struck, he wrote, by 'the privateness of English life.' Today, not so much. Driven by fears of Irish Republican Army terrorism, the British Home Office spent nearly 80 percent of its criminal justice budget in the 1990s on surveillance technology.

In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a regime that used war to keep its population too frightened to ask questions and in which the enemy could change without notice. Orwell may have exaggerated, but not by much. The United States sided with one Afghan faction against the Soviets ... in the 1980s, then switched when it replaced the Soviets as invaders in 2001 ... During the Soviet war ..., the U.S. government sided with the future Taliban and al-Qaeda ... After 9/11, the Taliban made various offers ..., but the Bush administration was uninterested.

Think of 1984, how the proles, the great mass of people who just go to work every day, and the whole aim of the government's propaganda effort ... is just to make sure they never pay any attention to what the government's doing ... The enemy changes. And no one ever acknowledges [it]. Because people have been so anesthetized that they don't ever look too closely ... Orwell's great insight was the use of language and the shrinking of the dictionary, so that you couldn't even think about some things because the words had disappeared from the lexicon. And so things were beyond—outside of our range.

As George Orwell reminded us, the corruption of language is essential to the success of all political systems. If we can delude ourselves that "war is peace," "freedom is slavery," and "love is hate," we can ease the sense of incongruity ... Look at how Orwell's message continues to play out in our thinking. The Air Force's "Strategic Air Command" motto, "peace is our profession," is straight out of 1984, just as "affirmative action" programs remind us of the amended principle of Animal Farm that while "all animals are equal, some are more equal than others."