Most people of my generation are well aware that George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel “1984” was a treatise on totalitarian socialism or, as Orwell put it, “oligarchical collectivism.” In the novel, the all-powerful State was the sole arbiter of reality, even to the stunning degree that cold, hard facts relating to just about anything could be summarily denied. If the State said that two plus two equals five, then two plus two became five. Sadly, this is what we are seeing develop in the Western world at present, even more insidiously than in Orwell’s time, when this writer and many...