George Orwell’s FREE SPEECH

Etched in stone outside the BBC’s headquarters in London, George Orwell’s quotation on the sanctity of free speech serves as a daily reminder to the hundreds of journalists who work for the Corporation.

But Left-wing activist and musician Billy Bragg has sparked fury by claiming the famous words – ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’ – make him ‘cringe’ and have nothing to do with liberty.

He says the quotation, which featured in the preface to Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm, is a ‘demand for licence’ and that young people now ‘prioritise accountability over free speech’.

Writing in The Guardian newspaper, Bragg, 62, added that the words, inscribed next to Orwell’s bronze statue outside New Broadcasting House, make him shudder every time he sees them.

Left-wing activist and musician Billy Bragg has sparked fury by claiming the famous words etched in stone outside the BBC’s headquarters in London – ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’ – make him ‘cringe’

‘It’s a snappy slogan that fits neatly into a tweet, but whenever I walk past this effigy of the English writer that I most admire, it makes me cringe,’ he said.

Lear, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Orwell

The Play’s the Thing: Orwell and Drama (Last of Three)

by Richard Lance Keeble of the ORWELL SOCIETY

19th September 2020

Drama at the BBC: The next act

Orwell’s work for the BBC is not to end in November 1943. For through his friendship with Rayner Heppenstall, a producer at the corporation, he goes on to write two fine dramatic adaptations – of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, for the Home Service on 29 March 1946 (CWGO XIII: 179-201). The second, too often neglected, is of Little Red Riding Hood (ibid: 345-354). Just like the earlier adaptation of Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ for the BBC’s Eastern Service, this reflects Orwell’s deep interest in the fairy story genre – which finds its most famous flowering in Animal Farm – A Fairy Story, in 1945. And Orwell is to adapt his famous satire on the Russian revolution for the BBC in 1947. Crick describes it as ‘very stilted’ (1980: 493) while Orwell told his friend, Mamaine Paget: ‘I had the feeling that they had spoilt it but one nearly always does with anything one writes for the air’ (Lynskey 2019: 157).

ORWELL’s fascination with the theatre and Shakespeare in particular culminates in two remarkable ways. This first is his essay, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, published in Polemic, in March 1947. It has been strangely missed, or its significance downplayed, by the biographers.

There is no mention of the essay at all in either Shelden (1991) or Meyers (2000) while D. J. Taylor (2003) and Bowker (2003) only comment on it en passant. Crick (op cit: 438, 520, 522) first focuses on Orwell’s critique of anarchism and pacifism; in the third reference he points out Orwell’s ‘tempered pessimism’; only in the second reference is there any mention of Shakespeare as he describes it as ‘a profound comparison of the didacticism of Tolstoy with the tolerant humanism of Shakespeare’.

From British Library’s blog on Tolstoy and Orwell

Orwell bases his critique of Tolstoy on an obscure pamphlet in which he has damned King Lear as ‘stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious’ etc. (1980 [1947]: 793). Tolstoy fails to consider Shakespeare as a poet. ‘Those who care most for Shakespeare value him in the first place for his use of language, the “verbal music” which even Bernard Shaw, another hostile critic, admits to be “irresistible”’ (ibid: 796). Tolstoy sees no justification for the presence of the Fool. But for Orwell it’s crucial. ‘He acts not only as a sort of chorus, making the central situation clearer by commenting on it more intelligently than the other characters, but as a foil to Lear’s frenzies. His jokes, riddles and scraps of rhyme, and his endless digs at Lear’s high-minded folly … are like a trickle of sanity running through the play….'

But Tolstoy’s essential ‘anti-human’ stance draws Orwell’s special venom. Indeed, what Tolstoy probably most dislikes about Shakespeare ‘is a sort of exuberance, a tendency to take – not so much a pleasure as simply an interest in the actual process of life’ (ibid). In other words, it’s a ‘quarrel between the religious and humanist attitudes towards life’.

An early English language edition of Tolstoy’s essay.

The plot of King Lear, Orwell argues, is essentially about renunciation. And this clearly resonates with Tolstoy’s own history. ‘In his old age he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights and made an attempt – a sincere attempt though it was not successful – to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant. … Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was not happy’ (ibid: 799, italics in the original). Indeed, one of the morals of the play is that ‘to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack’. Moreover, all of Shakespeare’s later tragedies ‘start out with the humanist assumption that life, although full of sorrow, is worth living and that Man is a noble animal – a belief which Tolstoy in his old age did not share’. Against Tolstoy’s ‘other-worldliness’, Orwell celebrates Shakespeare’s worldly vitality, his love of life which he conveys, above all, in the ‘music of language’.

Orwell next moves on to Tolstoy’s pacifism – criticising it, along with anarchism, for being intolerant. ‘For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone should be bullied into thinking likewise’ (ibid: 802).

In many respects, Orwell is presenting a very slanted view of Tolstoy. For instance, Peter Marshall offers a totally different picture of him in his monumental history of anarchism: ‘Although Tolstoy condemned the passions of greed, anger and lust as vigorously as any tub-thumping Puritan, he was no other-worldly moralist. He recommended the happiness which is to be found in a life close to nature, voluntary work, family, friendship and a painless death.’ Moreover, Tolstoy’s promotion of anarchistic pacifism stresses its impact on people’s well-being here and now. ‘He rejects the charge that without government there will be chaos or a foreign invasion. His experience of Cossack communities in the Urals had shown him that order and well-being are possible without the organized violence of government’ (Marshall 2008 [1992]: 370, 374).

Yet Orwell is using his picture of Tolstoy for essential rhetorical purposes – and as a foil against which he can deliver his wonderfully profound celebration of life – and the music of words of his hero, William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare not forgotten in Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Orwell’s last novel, the dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four (2000 [1949]), women are represented as both highly sexualised or the complete opposite – desexualised madonnas. In her essay, ‘Desire is Thoughtcrime’, Jenny Taylor highlights the novel’s ‘dichotomy between lust and utopian desire, between woman as Madonna and whore’ (1983: 28). Julia, the ‘girl from the Fiction Department’ – though perhaps also a Party spy engaged in a honeytrap operation – conducts a passionate, secret affair with Winston Smith. Yet in another crucial scene, Winston dreams of his mother, the good breast, as part of an Arcadian Golden age of plenitude. A girl comes towards him across the field. ‘With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside’ (op cit: 36). But her naked body arouses no desire in him. Rather ‘What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to an ancient time.’ And he concludes the scene triumphantly: ‘Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips’ (ibid).

This split in the representation of women, then, is highly problematic. Yet is it not significant that Orwell brings together the worlds of the unconscious, utopian desire and High Art with his final evocation of the name of Shakespeare?

Conclusions

Orwell’s love of the theatre begins in his childhood and remains constant throughout his life. It has been too often missed by biographers and Orwell scholars. Theatrical plot lines are dotted about – often wittily and imaginatively – A Clergyman’s Daughter. For instance, when Dorothy, while recovering from her breakdown, teaches at Mrs Creevy’s appalling school, Orwell has a great deal of fun describing the hoo-ha and parental protests that follow her class on Macbeth with its oh so controversial/shocking line ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripp’d’ (1976 [1935]: 387). ‘I do so adore Macbeth,’ he writes to his friend Eleanor Jaques, on 18 November 1932 and is keen to take her to see a production at the Old Vic (Orwell and Angus 1970, 1: 130-131).

Orwell does not particularly distinguish himself during his stint as drama critic (1940-1941) but many of his reviews capture his sense of humour, his love of bawdy, Max Miller-ish jokes and show him playing with ideas later to be taken up in longer essays. Then while working at the BBC, his drama interests inevitably spill over into his output. Along with all his often inventive and highly original arts feature programmes and political commentaries, he designs thirteen courses based on Calcutta and Bombay University syllabuses in English and American literature, science, medicine, agriculture and psychology and runs a series introducing drama and the mechanics of production, backed up with shortened versions of Indian plays. According to Peter Davison: ‘This had a direct effect in that two participants, Balraj and Damyanti Sahni, set up a travelling drama company in India on their return’ (1996: 117).

Interestingly, his fascination with fairy stories is reflected in two dramatic adaptions he writes for the BBC – of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ while his own version of Animal Farm is broadcast in 1947.

Moreover, the work of dramatists such as Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare is constantly reflected upon during his writing career (though D. H. Lawrence’s short stories and poems especially interest him rather than the plays). The Collected Works, edited by Peter Davison (1998), indicates more than 120 references to Shakespeare, 96 to Shaw, around 30 to Wilde and 11 to Chekhov. Even while fighting in the trenches alongside Republican militiamen during the Spanish civil war in 1937, Orwell is reported by his comrade, Douglas Moyle, to find time to read his favourite dramatist: ‘I was surprised to find him sitting quietly by himself, sheltering from the cold wind, reading a little volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He didn’t speak, and I realized he would rather be left alone’ (quoted in Wadhams 1984: 80).

From British Library’s blog on Olivier and Leigh’s Macbeth

Davison even suggests that the concept of ‘Doublethink’ (the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time) of Nineteen Eighty-Four could have been drawn from Macbeth. In this play, the Porter refers satirically to equivocation. Standing at the Door of Hell, the Porter asks who knocks: ‘Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven: O come in [to Hell] equivocator’ (Davison 1996: 132). An intriguing idea.

One thing is certain, however: for it’s the Bard’s sexiness and love of life that Orwell, the theatre man, celebrates so movingly and memorably in his essay ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’.

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English speakers: Grappling with the Grammar

 by Brian Bamford

SOME time ago my co-editor, partly-what jokingly, questioned my spelling and grammatical abilities, and I was reminded of this when more recently a commentator and meticulous Marxist complained in a P.S. 'You can at least take the trouble to spell my name correctly.'
 

The name, Charles Charalambous, had a French ring to it and, to be honest, I had some trouble getting it right.

 'FORGET GRAMMAR' & start 'acquiring a vocabulary'

As it happens I'm just reviewing a book entitled 'The Conspiracy of GOOD TASTE', and I was researching what the art critic Wyndham Lewis had had to say about vulgarity, slang and what he calls slum city English, as well as his thoughts on art and architecture.  On this very subject of the English language Lewis in his essay 'MEN WITHOUT ART' commenting on H.L. Mencken's treatise, The American Language, had cause to write:

'English is of all languages the simplest grammatically and the easiest to make into a Beach-la-mar* or pigin tongue.  Whether this fact, combined with its "extraordinary tendency to degenerate into slang of every kind," is against it, is of some importance for the future - for it will have less and less grammar, obviously, and more and cosmopolitan slang. - Mr Mencken is of the opinion that a language cannot be too simple - he is all for Beach-la-mar.  The path towards analysis and  the elimination of inflection, has been trod by English so thoroughly that, in its American form, it should today win the race for a universal volapuk.  Indeed, as Mr Mencken says, "the foreigner essaying it, indeed, finds his chief  difficulty, not in mastering its forms, but in grasping its lack of form.  He doesn't have to learn a new and complex grammar; what he has to do is forget grammar.  Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a vocabulary".'

I suppose that I became more aware of the limited forms of English grammar, my mother tongue, not at school but while living in Spain and trying to get my head around Castillian Spanish using a book entitle 'Colloquial Spanish', while at the same time working among people speaking Valenciano [a form of Catalan] in the 1960s, yet I hadn't realised that English has this special quality through its limited grammatical form which lends it a vitality and richness that adds to its universality.  Wyndham Lewis warns 'There is, it is true, the difficulty of the vowel sounds'  It seems that according to him 'Standard English possesses nineteen distinct vowel sounds: no other living European tongue except Portuguese', so Mr Mencken says, 'possesses so many'.  Modern Greek, it seems, 'can boast only five'.  The answer, according to Lewis, is the neutralised vowel, which he says 'supported by the slip-shod speech-habits of the native proletariat, makes steady progress' in America.  

Perhaps, it occurs to me, this formless grammar of English may explain why the Brexit lobby triumphed in the referendum.  Wyndham Lewis writes that:  'Watch your vowels should be our next national slogan!'  And he adds, 'The fatal grammatical easiness of English is responsible, however, for such problems as these, as much as the growing impressionability of the English nation, and the proletarianization, rather than the reverse of the American.'

Hitherto, while England was a powerful empire, run by an aristocratic caste, its influence on speech and even the psychology of the American ex-colonies was paramount.  Yet today, the tables have been turned and cultural domination has for long been coming from Hollywood and elsewhere across the pond.  Lewis foresaw this in 1934 saying:  'the cinema brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the "Americanising" process is far advanced, "done gones," "good guys" and 'buddies' spout upon the ips of cockney children as readily as those to the manner born of New York or Chicago: and no politically-powerful literate class any longer now, in our British 'Banker's Olympus,' to confer prestige upon an exact and intelligent selective speech.'

BREXIT, 'Airstrip One' & '1984'

Wyndham Lewis well understood the proletarianision of the anglo-saxon people in which he grasped, in the 1930s, that '...if America has come to England, there has been no reciprocal movement of England into the United States: indeed, with the new American nationalism, England is deliberately kept out: and all the great influence that England exerted formall - merely by being there and speaking the same tongue and sharing the same fundamental political principles - that is today a thing of the past.' 

It would seem that this process is now well developed and should progress further as we associate  ourselves more closely with the United States and Trump and his cultivation of American Nationalism.

Later than this in the 1940's George Orwell he portrayed England as 'airstrip one'.  Air  part of Oceania covers the entire continents of America and Oceania and the British Isles, the main location for the novel, in which they are referred to as ‘Airstrip One’.   Within the novel, London is the capitol of the province called Airstrip One, which is itself part of the nation of Oceania. Oceania is one of three world powers, and is composed of the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa.  In this novel unofficial language of Oceania is English (officially called Oldspeak), and the official language is Newspeak.

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*   C19: quasi-French, from bêche-de-mer (trepang, this being a major trading commodity in the SW Pacific; hence the name was applied to the trading language)

**  commenting on 'Air Strip One' one commentator writes:  'I'm pretty sure it's a satirical jab at the perceived takeover of Britain by the United States.  Just as in real life the US has filled Britain with its airbases, in the world of 1984 the entire country is seen as just a minor offshoot of US military power, a mere "airstrip" for the USAF to launch their warplanes from. We already know that the United States has taken over Britain; this is stated explicitly at the very start of Chapter III (War is Peace) of Emmanuel Goldstein's magnum opus:'

George Orwell's Politics on libcom: Socialism

by Brian Bamford

A FEW days ago someone put a thread on the anarchist website libcom* entitled 'The Orwell quotes right-wingers never mention'.  It tries to show the breadth of George Orwell's ideas goes beyond his books '1984' and 'Animal Farm', in so far as they are perceived as attacks on state socialism and revolution.  The thread correctly attempts to show that Orwell was in fact a socialist who participated in a revolution in Spain.  There is a mountain of evidence that demonstrates this in his essays and letters, not to mention his book 'Homage to Catalonia', which Noam Chomsky describes as his best book.

In an essay reviewing Charles Dickens book Tale of Two Cities on the French revolution, Orwell chastises him for his exaggerations:

'The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors; Dickens's impulse is to exaggerate them — and from a historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated.  Even the Reign of Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it appear.  Though he quotes no figures, he gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke compared with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody knives and the tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind a special sinister vision which he has succeeded in passing on to generations of readers.  Thanks to Dickens, the very word ‘tumbril’ has a murderous sound; one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-cart.  To this day, to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads.  It is a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part in creating this impression.'

Now the approach of the libcom thread is sound in that it tries to stress the authentic Orwell, who clearly favoured a form of socialism, and who sides with the working class based on his experiences in Spain.

Sitting in the trenches in Aragon in 1937 at the time of what some call the Spanish Revolution, Orwell wrote:
'...those first three or four months that I spent in the line...formed a kind of interregnum in my life, quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything that is to come, they taught me things that I could not have learned in any other way.

'... I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality.  In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it.  There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the the mental atmosphere was one of Socialism.  Many of the normal motives of civilized life - snobbishness, money-grubbing fear of the boss, etc. - had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone one as his master; ' (Homage to Catalonia; pages 101 and 102 of the Penguin edition)

It seems to me that Orwell's time on the Aragon front brought about a transformation in his thinking that led to him shifting to a belief in the possibility of socialism.  And yet, equally it established in his mind a mental state which also blended with what he had to say in his own critique of Dickens when describes him thus:  ' [as] the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry - in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.' 

Those who despise Orwell today would have us drop this liberal aspect of both Orwell and Dickens, and have us embrace a form of modern totalitarianism which seeks to stiffle what Orwell calls the free intelligence of the old fashioned 19th century liberal.

Read more:  

https://libcom.org/

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Say No To Hate Crime Revisited

by Les May

A couple of days ago it was mooted that misandry, defined as ‘hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against men’, should be regarded as a ‘hate crime’.  A letter in the ‘i’ newspaper (18/10/18) shows why this is not a good idea. The author wrote:

‘If misogyny becomes a hate crime then misandry should too.   If you have one you should have the other.   Misandry is widespread and commonplace in society and men’s issues – which are serious and pressing, even life threatening – are generally overlooked.  They are certainly not given the sort of attention that women’s issues typically receive.  If the law is changed to make misandry a hate crime then perhaps men’s issues will move towards the centre ground, enter public discourse, and be given the attention they deserve.’

Contempt for men is a staple fare for many female columnists, particularly in the print media, along with bias and downright lies.  Criminalising it will not suddenly bring issues affecting men to the fore.

The reason for men being treated in this way is simply that too few of the men in the media, who could use their position to challenge it, have the balls to take on the women who write this stuff.  They’re afraid that if they do the ‘sisterhood’ will turn its ire on them.  Much better to buy into the idea that women are an oppressed group, by calling yourself a feminist.

When men organise to draw attention to things that affect them deeply the likelihood that they will get any positive publicity is slender. Have you even heard of the group ‘Families Need Fathers’?  Take a look at the recent press release from the group at https://fnf.org.uk/ .  Did you read about it in the press or see it on BBC TV? I think not.

There are plenty of men in the media who could change this, but who don’t.  The same goes for MPs.   The number of men who have lost contact with one or more of their children as a result of intransigence by an ex-partner is in the hundreds of thousands.  No one speaks for them.

If you are inclined to be sceptical about my comments about bias by female columnists how about this?

‘The concept of misandry is dangerously vague in comparison to the reality of misogyny.  I predict that if misandry is taken forward as a hate crime, it will be used to curb discussions of male violence and female oppression’, and ‘It’s already too easy for men to cry foul every time a woman says or does anything they don’t like.’

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/17/misandry-hate-crime-abusive-men-law

Whilst labelling misogyny as a hate crime was the only game in town our brave women columnists were all for it.   Now that there’s a possibility that they might find themselves on the receiving end of an accusation of hate crime on the grounds of misandry there’s what is called in the feminist lexicon ‘a backlash’.

If they succeed in killing off the whole idea they will be doing everyone a favour. The police have enough to do without being given the job of investigating what Orwell in his book 1984 called ‘thought crime’. 

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REVIEW: Close to the Original

 Richard Blair attended a performance of Nineteen Eighty-Four at the Tower Theatre in London and has provided us with this report on the latest adaptation of his father’s masterpiece.

“this was an excellent production” (Richard Blair)

Nineteen Eighty-Four close to the original –

and with audience participation

ON Saturday March 3, I attended (along with a sell-out audience of 70 people) this wonderful production of Nineteen Eighty-Four at the Theatro Technis theatre in Camden. The play was adapted by Matthew Dunster and produced by Angharad Ormond with a cast of 15 amateurs.

The audience (proles) were greeted on entering the foyer by the cast dressed in blue overalls, Ingsoc armbands and dead-pan faces. Having been interrogated to identify ourselves, we then had to swear allegiance to Big Brother, with hand over heart and stern commands for “silence” when we were out of order. After that we were escorted in groups to our seats. The overall reaction from the “proles” was a mixture of amusement and nervous bewilderment, but all was taken as part of the “experience”. Once the play started, we were invited to stand and sing the party’s National Anthem!
Nineteen Eighty Four is a notoriously difficult play to put on without it becoming very long and tedious, so the producer has to come up with ideas that keep the audience focused and the story-line clear. Did this particular introduction work or was it all a gimmick? I tend to feel the audience probably enjoyed being involved in a completely new experience – given that probably 90 per cent may well have already read the book.

Once under way it settled down to what was an excellent, straight forward production that told the story of Winston and Julia, being faithful to the original. There was quite a long emphasis on the love making, which Orwell was a little more perfunctory about, and the torture scenes were pretty brutal. The cast delivered their lines convincingly with some long passages from O’Brien (Martin South), Winston (Paul Graves) Julia (Chloe Ledger) and Symes (Kevin Furness). That is not to say that the rest of the cast were in no way less impressive.

In conclusion, this was an excellent production, well executed by a well-rehearsed cast. The success of this play is clear given the more or less 100 per cent attendances for the first week and bookings looked no less impressive for the following week.

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The Tower Theatre performing at Theatro Technis, Camden until March 10, 2018.

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Uploaded March 4, 2018

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Richard Blair on Legacy of George Orwell

In February 1937, an idealistic and ungainly Englishman in his thirties traveled to Spain to take his place in the trenches at the Aragón front to defend the Republic. His name was Eric Arthur Blair, remembered by history as George Orwell. This month, 80 years after the start of that adventure, Richard Blair, the writer’s only son, now a 72-year-old retired agricultural engineer, visited Huesca to take part in the opening of a major exhibition about his father.

TALKING to EL PAÍS during his brief stopover in Madrid on his way back to London, Richard Blair evoked the figure of Orwell and commented on the relevance of his legacy and the enormous interest in his final novel, 1984, which has become an international best-seller since Donald Trump became US president.
“It’s true that in recent weeks, with the references in the United States to ‘alternative facts’ [cited by Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s top advisors], there has been increased interest in his book. But my father has never gone out of fashion.” The book was not so much a prophecy as a fable about Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism, says Blair, although as he points out, some details from the novel that once seemed like science fiction have been part of our everyday life for some time, such as security cameras that watch our movements, or what some companies know about us from our internet activity, or how we use our credit cards. “Society has evolved toward what he saw. The world is becoming Orwellian,” he says.
Blair is patron of the Orwell society, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to spreading knowledge about the life and work of the writer, as well as debate about ideas, and that remains scrupulously neutral about politics. Which might explain why he is so careful in choosing his words when talking about Trump.
“I think that there is a lot of tension and compression in the White House right now. It is true that Trump is attacking the press, but he is a complete enigma, they are all maneuvering and learning to live with each other,” he says.
Nevertheless, he says he cannot help but be happy at the hike in sales of his father’s books, particularly as he inherited the publishing rights (“which expire in 2020,” he points out). But he recognizes concerns that this has been due to the public finding parallels between the current situation and the dystopia Orwell described.
Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted Richard in 1944. Ten months later, Eileen died on the operating table. Some of the friends of the tuberculous-stricken writer suggested that he give up custody of the child but he ruled out the possibility. The relationship between Orwell and his adopted son became closer when the two of them moved to the Scottish island of Jura, chosen because it was a healthier location for Orwell to overcome his illness and where it was so cold that “if you move six feet away from the fireplace, you freeze.”
Blair’s memories from those days are of a loving father who made wooden toys, who had a strange sense of humor, and whose parenting style had none of the political correctness of modern upbringings. On one occasion he allowed the three-year-old Richard to smoke from a pipe filled with tobacco collected from his cigarette butts. The result, aside from a vomiting fit, was that the child saw himself temporarily vaccinated against the vice of smoking.
It was on Jura that Orwell finished 1984, writing in his room during the day and spending the evenings with the child. One of their favorite activities was fishing, especially for the lobsters that filled out a diet otherwise made frugal by post-war rationing. One weekend in August 1947, however, on a journey back from a weekend of relaxation on the west side of Jura, their boat sank and they almost drowned. Blair says Orwell’s health suffered as a result. David Astor, owner of The Observer newspaper, which published the writer’s work, asked to be allowed import the newly discovered antibiotic streptomycin from the United States, with which he was treated between December 1947 and July 1948 in a hospital near Glasgow. But his efforts were in vain: Orwell developed an allergy to the medication. “His nails fell out and blisters appeared on his lips,” Richard recalls. The writer died in January 1950 at age of 46, when his son was about to celebrate his sixth birthday.
What is the most important lesson that Orwell taught us? For journalists, says Blair, there are many. “To be honest. The most important things are facts which can be corroborated, not reality as you want it to be. Journalists today do not have time to check facts, and errors are perpetuated and multiplied on the internet until they become true.” The writer’s son also recalls Orwell’s six rules for clear writing from his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print; Never use a long word where a short one will do; If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out; Never use the passive where you can use the active; Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent; Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.”
Blair finished up with his father’s definition of liberty: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Blair is particularly concerned about the lack of dialogue in contemporary society. “All people do is shout at one another, without actually listening.” And he is surprised to see young people who, instead of speaking face to face, spend all day staring into their smartphones. “Even couples in restaurants! Are they communicating with each other via text messages?!” he jokes. And what would Orwell make of the 21st century, the era of the internet, great scientific advances and post-truth?
“Ah, now that’s the million-dollar question. But it’s impossible to get into anyone’s head. Nor to come up with the answer by reading his books. If he were still alive he would be 113, and would have had a lot of new influences… There’s no point in speculating.” As such, we don’t know, and we can’t know. But he does go as far as to assume one thing: whatever his thoughts, they would be characterized by common sense.

Best Selling Book: George Orwell's '1984'

FOLLOWING President Donald Trump's inauguration, George Orwell's '1984' is the best-selling book on Amazon.com.

Today, on the MailOnline Johne Broich wrote: 

'The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.'

George Orwell set his story as a dystopian fantasy on England, a place in the novel he called 'Air Strip ONE' situated on a continent named 'Oceania'.

The language promoted in the novel '1984' by the official hierarchy of the regime under Big Brother was know as 'Newspeak'.

It is now being suggested that the surge in sales of the book has something to do with the current political situation with rise of Trump and the victory of Brexit.

In the New York Times yesterday Professor Stefan Collini, a professor of interlectual history and an expert on Orwell at the University of Cambridge, said that readers see a natural parallel between the book and the way Mr. Trump and his staff have distorted facts.

Pro. Collini said:  'Everyone remembers "1984" as containing various parodies of official distortions.  That kind of unreality is what people feel reminded of, and that's why they keep coming back.'