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IPFS News Link • Political Theory

3 Real-Life Inspirations for George Orwell's 1984

• https://fee.org, Jon Miltimore

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

British literary critic V. S. Pritchett could have been speaking for many in his review for the New Statesman:

"I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing;" wrote Pritchett after Nineteen Eighty-Four's publication; "and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down."

More than 70 years after its 1948 publication, Orwell's masterpiece routinely tops Amazon's list of overall best selling books. (In January 2017, Penguin Random House ordered 75,000 new copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four following a 9,500% spike in sales, according to The New York Times.)

Today it's not unusual to find influencers on both the right and the left invoke Orwell's book to decry the actions taken against them or to attack political opponents. In 2021, conservative US Senator Josh Hawely said Simon & Schuster's decision to cancel his book deal "could not be more Orwellian," while left-leaning media consistently claimed that former President Donald Trump was Big Brother personified.

Some parallels to Nineteen Eighty-Four we see today are downright chilling, while others seem silly. The question is, how does one separate breathless hyperbole from genuine threats?

To answer this, it's helpful to look at the inspirations for Orwell's book, a terrifying allegory detailing one man's attempt to stay sane in a totalitarian state that tortures the truth—and people—to control society.

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