Many years ago I read Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell. I read it in one long gulp.
I read it with a feeling that it would be the most significant book I would ever encounter.
I read quickly, absorbing much of it, internalising, alert to bits and pieces.
In January 2017 when I heard Trump claim he had ‘three times as many people as Obama’ and when the photographs proved he was a liar, one of his flunkies used the term ‘Alternate Facts’.
I knew then, we had entered the dystopian world of Nineteen Eighty Four.
I went back to reread this book, to see what I had missed.
I often go back and read books again. I think my frame of mind sometime changes.
I usually devour a book, and may miss inferences
It’s been said that Orwell wasn’t wrong in his predictions, just early.
That is my belief. He assumed it would take less than forty years but it has taken about seventy.
Well, the title was based on the last years of when the book was written being reversed. So it perhaps wasn’t meant to be an exact prediction!
Orwell had worked for the propaganda department at the BBC before WWII .. so he had been exposed to this aspect.
It’s still a pretty scary book. It’s perhaps even scarier now than when it was released.