Free Republic

I’ve quoted it many times; but until last week, I’d never actually sat down and read George Orwell’s 1984. Now I want to share my thoughts on this literary masterpiece. Calling a novel from the past “amazing in its relevance” is pretty cliché; but still true. First published in 1949, the vast majority of 1984’s frightening predictions have come true in some way. Much of it has described the trajectory of the Western world. But the book gives an almost-certain window into what life is like in North Korea. I also cannot recommend it enough for any Christian interested in...

The media’s ministry of “truth” strains to sanitize spying on Trump.The English author George Orwell wrote that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” But even Orwell couldn’t have imagined the propagandistic whoppers that American journalists would mouth in their frenzied attempt to sanitize Obama’s spying on Trump. Again and again, Obama’s ministry of propaganda, with its branch offices from CNN to the New York Times to the Washington Post, solemnly instruct Americans that “unmasking is not spying.” That is about as convincing as the...

"When you think about threats to democracy, threats to personal liberty, '1984' is one of those key texts that you refer to," said UCLA Film and Television Archive programmer Paul Malcolm. On April 4, independent theaters across the country will screen 1984, the dystopian drama based on the best-selling 1949 novel by British author George Orwell.

<p>Although America’s political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly — Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (1945) and “1984” (1949), Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.</p>

If Orwell were alive today, he'd be more concerned with the world's genuine dictatorships than with the Trump administration. On April 4, almost 90 art-house movie theaters across the country will show 1984, the British film starring John Hurt, as a form of protest against President Trump's stated desire to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. The theaters say they "strongly believe in supporting the [NEA] and see any attempt to scuttle that program as an attack on free speech and creative expression through entertainment." The George Orwell novel on which the film is based, you'll recall, is the...

Dozens of cinemas across the United States are planning to screen the film adaption of George Orwell’s 1984 in protest of reports that President Donald Trump is allegedly considering cuts to arts funding.

NEW YORK (AP) -- After incorrect or unprovable statements made by Republican President Donald Trump and some White House aides, one truth is undeniable: Sales of George Orwell's "1984" are soaring. First published in 1949, Orwell's classic dystopian tale of a society in which facts are distorted and suppressed in a cloud of "newspeak" topped the best-seller list of Amazon.com as of Tuesday evening. The sales bump comes after the Trump administration's assertions his inauguration had record attendance and his unfounded allegation that millions of illegal votes were cast against him last fall.

TRIBUNE 1944 Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’ One of the social survey organizations in America recently asked this question of a hundred different people, and got answers ranging from ‘pure democracy’ to ‘pure diabolism’. In this country if you ask the average thinking person to define Fascism, he usually answers by pointing to the German and Italian régimes. But this is very unsatisfactory, because even the major Fascist states differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology. It is not easy, for instance, to fit Germany...

A SCHOOLBOY has been put through Britain’s strictest de-radicalisation programme after he expressed his beliefs “Muslim women should not be allowed to wear the burka”. The white schoolboy was dragged in and ordered to spend time with an imam and visit a mosque after he made comments in school about Muslims “trying to take over the country”, according to local reports. Channel is part of the counter-terror Prevent scheme, which aims to curb recruitment by Islamic terrorists and is used in the most serious cases of radicalisation, targeting “individuals at risk of being drawn into violent extremism”. The organisation said...

Donald Trump is a domestic terrorist; only his form of terror doesn’t boil down to blowing things up. He’s the 70-year-old toddler who knows nearly nothing, hurls insults, has simplistic solutions for complex problems and is quick to throw a tantrum. Also, in case you didn’t know it, this toddler is mean to girls and is a bit of a bigot. It isn’t so much that he is a strict disciple of radical ideology, but rather that he is devoid of fixed principles, willing to do anything and everything to gain fame, fortune and power. He has an endless, consuming...

America, Hillary Clinton wants control of your children. The Democratic presidential nominee sent a collective chill down the spine of many parents in a disturbing Twitter post on Thursday.

Whoever coined the phrase, “The devil you know is better than the one you don’t,” OBVIOUSLY never met Hillary Clinton. There is a reason she is called Hitlery not only in private, but often in print as well at times. There is no situation on earth that the Devil we know with Hitlery, is EVER better than ANYONE, let alone Donald Trump. How many people has Trump killed again? Oh yes, zero. First of all, there's her never-ending killing spree of her political opposition. On August 6th, when I wrote, Clinton Adds +5 to Body Count in 6 Weeks, a...

Back in March we talked about the decision by the Library of Congress to stop using “offensive terms” like illegal alien to refer to, er… illegal aliens. Shortly thereafter, Republicans in Congress moved to attach language to the pending appropriations bill which would require the Library of Congress to stick to terminology as it exists in current federal law. But since it hasn’t passed yet, the Library is moving forward with the changes and keeping up the debate in the media. (New York Times) “There is no other way to put this: the library has bowed to the political pressure...

George Orwell's 1984 had three slogans that were repeated constantly.  They were counter factual, they showed that people were repeatedly told and were expected to believe the most outrageous, anti-rational, contradictory lies in order to inculcate obedience. The same is true in the United States of today.  Political Correctness is what we are expected to believe without any rational examination.  We are expected to believe direct contradictions as a matter of public policy.  The irrational assumptions of that policy may not be challenged. We are constantly lied to and expected to accept the lies. I posit that Orwell's three...

If people are not prepared to reveal their identities – don’t publish Ending the plague of anonymity on the Internet seems closer to fruition following moves this week by the UN Security Council. Re-affirming its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security the President of the Security Council re-iterated:

Anyone questioning the sustainability and rightness of The New Normal is immediately attacked by the mainstream-media defenders of the crumbling status quo. Not only is everything that broke in 2008 fixed, everything's going great globally, and anyone who dares question this narrative in a tin-foil hat conspiracy nut or simply an annoyingly doom-and-gloomer who recalcitrantly refuses to accept the positive glories of official statistics: low unemployment, rising valuations of stock market Unicorns, etc. But the New Normal is anything but normal; all the readings of artificial life-support and manipulation are off the charts. If the New Normal were indeed a...

In many ways, Donald Trump's political talking points are Orwellian at best. His constant insistence that the U.S. is not "winning" is being repeated with such pneumatic regularity that voters believe it. Or if they don't yet, they may soon. Whether we are getting killed on trade or being flooded with illegal immigrants, Donald Trump has been making arguments that were, in part, true thirty years ago, but most certainly not today. The "INGSOC" slogans in Orwell's epic dystopian novel, "1984": "War is Peace" "Freedom is Slavery" "Ignorance is Strength" Would fit nicely among Trump's litany of incongruous phrases: "The...

Drudge link -- can't post article.

Doing research on this topic, I found about a story entitled "In Germany, Muslims grow apart" by Peter Schneider; New York Times; December 4, 2005. It apparently contained the following text: But tolerance of Muslim immigrants began to change in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Parallel to the declarations of "unconditional solidarity" with Americans by the German majority, rallies of another sort were taking place in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Bottle rockets were set off from building courtyards, a poor man's fireworks: two rockets here, three rockets there. Altogether, hundreds of rockets were shooting skyward in celebration, just as most...

‘We demand that Mudd Goes Madd is no longer used’ A decision by Pomona College’s student government not to fund a party called “Mudd Goes Madd” because it’s name and theme allegedly insult and hurt those with mental health struggles was recently mocked nationally. Pomona is part of Claremont Colleges, a consortium of five private undergraduate liberal arts colleges. The “Mudd Goes Madd” party was hosted by Harvey Mudd College, a science-based school in the consortium, and the theme was a play on a bunch of mad scientists from Mudd, or “Madd” scientists. The New York Post, National Review and...