Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

To have total power is to have power over truth and fact and history and to reach for it over dreams and thoughts and emotions. He continues, “From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.

Orwell

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Language reduction

He tried to set the record straight with a statement addressed to the head of the United Auto Workers in the United States that got published in Life magazine: “My novel Nineteen Eighty-four is not intended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labour party, but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable, and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism.

Life

The antithesis of transcendent might be rooted and grounded, and Orwell was attached to the ordinary joys and pleasures and the love of the things of this world and not the next.

Beliefs

“Our job,” Orwell declared in the Gandhi essay, “is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have.” He asked that roses be planted on his grave. When I checked, a few years ago, a scrappy red rose was blooming there.

Purpose

The Washington Post produced 754 results, including “an Orwellian corporate bureaucracy of censors”; “Orwellian tactics of information suppression”; “an Orwellian test for immigrants”; “Orwellian assaults on objective reality”; “Orwellian language to obscure evil”; even “Orwellian doublespeak,” in which the word doublespeak seems to come from Nineteen Eighty-Four’s neologism doublethink.

Speak

Orwell’s signal achievement was to name and describe as no one else had the way that totalitarianism was a threat not just to liberty and human rights but to language and consciousness, and he did it in so compelling a way that his last book casts a shadow—or a beacon’s light—into the present.

Totalitarian