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.”’

‘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.”’

The politically mixed adoptions and denunciations of Orwell.

‘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.’