July 13, 2019
Nineteen Eighty-Four at 70: What Orwell Got Right
By Nicholas J. Kaster
This summer, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four turns 70 years old, and that anniversary has prompted a surfeit of articles analyzing the book and its continuing relevance to our age.
There is no doubt that the book is one of the most consequential political novels ever written and ought to be on the reading list of every conservative -- not because Orwell was himself a conservative (he remained a man of the Left until his death), nor because the dystopian world that Orwell described turned out to be prophetic.
“The image of a boot stamping across the human face," in Orwell's memorable phrase, is an accurate depiction of present-day North Korea or China, but is not really an apt description of the U.S. or Western Europe, societies that have fallen into the kind of soft despotism described by Alexis de Tocqueville, but well short of the dystopian nightmare foreseen in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Read more:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/emnineteen_eightyfourem_at_70_what_orwell_got_right.html#ixzz5tYxoTmTQ
