Nineteen Eighty-Four at 70: What Orwell Got Right

By Nicholas J. Kaster July 13, 2019

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..............

Orwell tells us that:

“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable, at least insofar as thought is dependent on words.”

On the college campuses, the progressives have adopted a form of Newspeak with the identical goal -- to get rid of heretical thoughts. Thus, students are protected by “safe spaces,” works of art that might cause discomfort are preceded by “trigger warnings,” and prohibited statements are referred to as “microagressions,” and “hate speech.” Make the latter phrase a compound word (hatespeech) and it has an unmistakably Orwellian cadence.............. To Read More