Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “George Orwell”
In 1937 George Orwell said that coal mining was the ‘metabolism’ of western civilisation. What he meant by this striking metaphor was that coal was the catalyst for an earlier industrial revolution, just as enzymes act as the life-sustaining catalyst within the cells of living organisms to maintain life. If Orwell were alive today however he would have good cause …
In spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of the totalitarian superstate and how it exercises power and control over its residents, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley shared a fundamental conviction. They both argued that the established democracies of the West were moving quickly toward a historical moment when they would willingly relinquish the noble promises and ideals of …
“Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s a shell game intended to keep us focused on and distracted by all of the politically expedient things that are being said—about militarized police, surveillance, and government corruption—while the government …
Over the year, I realized that the term ‘left’ is not exclusive to a political ideology, but a mode of thinking championed mostly by self-tailored ‘leftist’ western intellectuals. I grew to dislike it with intensity. But that has not always been the case. My father was a communist, or so he called himself. He read the translated work of great …
In spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of the totalitarian superstate and how it exercised power and control over its residents, George Orwell and Aldus Huxley shared a fundamental conviction. They both argued that the established democracies of the West were moving quickly toward an historical moment when they would willingly relinquish the noble promises and ideals of …
I have spent most of my working life writing about countries where communal or nationalist differences determine and, on occasion, convulse the political landscape. My first experience of this was at Queen’s University Belfast, where I was writing a PhD on the Irish Home Rulers in Ulster pre-Irish independence, during the worst years of the troubles in Northern Ireland between …
Close to three quarters of a century ago—all of 13 years before William Golding’sLord of the Flies came out, just 4 years before George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and just months before Pearl Harbor—Arthur Koestler’s dystopic novel, Darkness at Noon, was published in England. The author would end badly: he’s remembered as the mini-Lamarckian, para-normalist contributor to an Encyclopedia for Sexual Knowledge, and as a vice president of the Voluntary …
“…if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.”(1984, George Orwell) The New Scientist has the stunning story (2/28/15, “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links,” by Hal Hodson): “THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free ‘news’ stories spread like wildfire. Google …
