Michael’s Reviews > Ministry Of Truth > Status Update

Old fear, no closer: ‘As early as 1949, Tribune had tied its review of Nineteen Eighty-four to a news item about the ominous implications of a new mechanical “brain” developed at Manchester University.’

‘All prophecies are fiction until they come true.’

‘But the equally left-wing Noam Chomsky maintained that Orwell sided with “the common man” against “repressive powers” so “the idea that his writings should be used for anti-communist ideology would have been horrifying to him. At least I find it horrifying.”’ It has some grounding in that Orwell would have found the creation of a new orthodoxy horrifying, but not because it is anti-communist.

I don't see how Noam Chomsky could have twisted the meaning of Nineteen Eighty-four to the point of implying it's pro-communist, but that's the calibre of mind we're confronting.

‘As Orwell wrote in “Notes on Nationalism,” “Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another.”’

‘When, in 1958, an East German judge sentenced a teenager to three years in prison for reading and discussing the book, he called Orwell “the most hated writer in the Soviet Union and the socialist states.”’

‘According to Polish writer Czesław Miłosz, “Because it [Nineteen Eighty-four] is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is only known to certain members of the Inner Party … The fact that there are writers in the West who understand the functioning of the unusually constructed machine of which they themselves are a part astounds them.”’

‘Yet not every critic grasped this essential fact. It was a book that pressed down hard on readers’ political nerves and revealed their biases.’

Orwell: ‘The law is no protection.’

Orwell: ‘The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion.’