Category: Orwell
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The Ultimate Orwellianism
The ultimate Orwellianism is to refer to the terminally benighted as 'woke.'
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Orwell’s 1984 at 70
Here
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Kathy Griffin’s Orwellianism
The aggressor is the victim.
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George Orwell on Julian Green
A footnote in Paul Tournier's The Meaning of Persons sent me to Julian Green, Personal Record 1928-1939. Here is George Orwell's review in Time and Tide, 13 April 1940: Julian Green's diaries, which ten years ago or even five years ago might have seemed comparatively commonplace, are at this moment of the greatest interest. What…
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George Orwell on the Renegade ‘Liberal’
The more things change, the more they remain the same. Here is the great Orwell from 1945 in The Freedom of the Press: One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to…
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Max Scheler, George Orwell, Ressentiment, and the Left
Max Scheler describes a form of ressentiment that leads to "indiscriminate criticism without any positive aims." (Ressentiment, ed. Coser, Schocken 1972, p. 51) Although Scheler was writing in theyears before the First World War, his description put me in mind of contemporary liberals and leftists, especially when they are out of power. He continues: This…
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Of Ether, Lead, and Misattribution
Those of us who pursue the ethereal should never forget that it is blood, iron, and lead that secure the spaces of tranquillity wherein we flourish. I found the following in a gun forum: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” It…
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A Fine Essay on George Orwell
By Robert Gray, in The Spectator, here. Excerpts: Orwell, then, presented Catholics as either stupid or blinkered, dishonest or self-deceived. Yet he was very far from denying the need for religion. In his opinion socialists were quite wrong to assume that when basic material needs had been supplied, spiritual concerns would wither away. ‘The truth,’…
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Is a Fascist a Fascist When Pulling Up His Pants?
George Orwell's humanity is on display in the following passage from "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943), reprinted in A Collection of Essays (Harvest, 1981), pp. 193-194: Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three…
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This Sex Business
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Harvest 1956), p. 102: This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can't cut it right out, or at least be like the animals — minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the…
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George Orwell’s Adaptation of 1 Corinthians 13
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have…
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George Orwell on Good Writing
George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an essay all should read. As timely now as it was sixty two years ago, it is available in several anthologies and on-line here. Orwell lays down the following rules for good writing. 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you…