Category: 1984

COVID-1984

Commentary In the Xi Jinping empire, the Wuhan virus (COVID-19) has undergone a three-year mutation. Instead of the Omicron with which all mankind is to coexist, it is COVID-1984—a kind of high-tech dictatorship never seen before, the monstrous spawn of the virus and internet technologies. The Xi empire has finally achieved a “communist health code…


John Robson: Let’s Leave Literary Pomposity to the Deer Flies

Commentary The Canadian dream of paradise surely includes a book on the dock in the dog days of summer. Or possibly on the screened-in cottage porch given the Canadian deer fly’s dream of tearing out a ragged chunk of your meat, inspiring the further Canadian dream of a dragonfly’s jaws piercing the absconding miscreant with…


3 Inspirations for George Orwell’s ‘1984’

Commentary George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. British literary critic V. S. Pritchett could have been speaking for many in his review for the New Statesman: “I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing;” wrote Pritchett after “Nineteen…


Biden Administration Tops Orwell with ‘Disinformation Governance Board’

Commentary Communism comes in various stripes. The Soviets had their version, the Chinese have theirs—these days quaintly called “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The North Koreans have “Juche!” The Cambodian Khmer Rouge had theirs (thankfully short-lived) and the Cubans a pretty traditional Marxist-Leninist state with the creepy addition—they have long embedded secret police in the neighborhoods…


San Francisco in 2024

Before the world changed with the onset of COVID-19, San Francisco was dealing with real problems, like throwing widely used terms “down the memory hole.” This was done, and continues today, in order to create and control a new alternate reality that desperately tries to conceal the failings of progressive political policies. “Don’t you see…


‘Reality Is What I Say It Is’

“We sit squarely in the middle of an absurdist drama,” says Walter Kirn. In this episode of American Thought Leaders, host Jan Jekielek and author and journalist Walter Kirn discuss lockdowns, mandates, and the frightening possibility of a union between Orwellian tyranny and the soft totalitarianism of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Jan Jekielek: People keep…


Communist China: A Real Life ‘1984’ Nightmare

Commentary Recent events in China, such as Beijing’s treatment of a tennis star and its COVID-19 cover-up, show that the country resembles the dystopian society of “1984.” The book “1984” has reached the stage in popular culture where it’s quoted a great deal. The author, George Orwell, depicts a scary future where an authoritarian government…


How ‘1984’ Has Become a How-to Manual

Commentary In “The Principles of Newspeak,” the appendix to “1984,” George Orwell reports that it was expected that Newspeak “would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.” It’s 2021 now.  How are we doing? The purpose of Newspeak, remember, was to alter reality in order to…


With ‘Birthing People’ We Approach a ‘Brave New World’

Commentary I am writing on May 9, Mothers’ Day in the United States. I used to look askance at the holiday, not because I have anything against mothers—on the contrary—but because it always seemed like a Hallmark Holiday, something manufactured by corporate interests and glazed in a sugar of sentimentality from which one could free…