Severino called the 2016 Obama Justice Department guidance that schools should treat transgender students according to their “gender identity” an Orwellian rewriting of the scientific fact of two sexes, now codified in Trump’s “restoring biological truth” executive order. Biden-era directives telling government employees to address co-workers with their preferred pronouns meant forcing “people to repeat a lie with their own lips,” he said. It reminded him of the end of “1984,” when the book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, beaten into submission, adopts the lies of the Party. Smith “began to write down the thoughts that came into his head,” Orwell wrote. “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.” “TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE.”
So it has come to this. All seem to agree we might be slouching toward “1984,” but not on who is most Orwellian. Orwell was indeed prophetic. Including, it seems, about his own legacy. He once wrote about another English writer whose politics have been wrestled over, Charles Dickens. In a 1939 essay, he lauded Dickens as a writer guided by morality and “always on the side of the underdog.” As if writing about the icon he would become, Orwell noted: “Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives.”
This has long been Orwell’s posthumous fate. “He fills a hole for anyone who wants to establish any kind of intellectual pedigree,” says John Rodden, a retired professor who has written extensively on Orwell. It is unlikely Orwell, as a writer of precision, would have approved of being slotted into every hole equally and simultaneously. But perhaps Orwell’s well-turned words have found their moment.
Credit...Photo illustration by Alex MertoWe Are All Living in George Orwell’s World Now
He is easy to quote, but what would the iconoclastic British socialist really have thought about politics today?
Credit...Photo illustration by Alex Merto
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第一冊
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many Americans out of the field
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