Free Republic

JULIA: A Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984. By Sandra Newman. Mariner Books. 400 pages. $30. It’s hard to imagine a bleaker world than that of Orwell’s 1984. In Airstrip One, Oceania, everyone’s movements are tracked and monitored. Free thought is illegal, no one can be trusted and the words one says are never private. Big Brother is always watching. And the protagonist, Winston Smith, is tricked, tortured and ultimately broken by a system that controls everything and has squashed so much humanity in the process. Since its publication in 1949, the book has been read as both an expression of...

OTTOWA, ON — In a country-wide broadcast this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denied ever forcing COVID-19 vaccinations on Canadian citizens and also reminded the general public that Canada has always been at war with Eurasia. "Ingsoc…I mean…the Liberal Party, would like to remind Canadian residents that just as we have never had peace with Euraisia, I also never ever told the public they had to be vaccinated or lose their jobs," Trudeau announced over Canada's network of in-home telescreens. "Let this serve as a reminder that anyone found in disagreement with this proclamation will be remitted immediately to the...

Children raised in an atmosphere of fear become adults who prioritize security over liberty.The good news is that "only" a minority of younger American adults favor Big Brother-style surveillance of our home life. The bad news is that we're discussing this because it's a disturbingly large share supporting such a totalitarian intrusion. Worse, the idea seems to be gaining acceptance. We either need to get a handle on what's going on here, or else potentially suffer lives monitored by unblinking eyes of the state, imposed by popular demand. The Rattler is a weekly newsletter from J.D. Tuccille. If you care...

Get the latest from Brian Lilley straight to your inbox Saying 2+2=4 is an example of covert white supremacy, according to a group of influential math teachers in Ontario. Questioning them on their assertion simply means you are an anti-trans, anti-immigrant person who doesn’t like anyone who isn’t white. Welcome to another day in Ontario’s public education system. This latest round of insanity started when Toronto-based writer Ari Blaff published an article in the New York-based National Review. Blaff noted a workshop provided by math teacher Jason To, which dealt with overt and covert white supremacy in math. A slide...

Once again, politicians use popular fears to push for open-ended power.Even if you believe that governments should be in the business of banning things such as popular communications tools, the details of the effort to eject TikTok from the United States should give you pause. Predictably, politicians are using fears that the popular social media service is spying on behalf of the Chinese government to propose broad legislation that threatens to affect much more than one app. The Rattler is a weekly newsletter from J.D. Tuccille. If you care about government overreach and tangible threats to everyday liberty, this is...

Since George Orwell published his landmark political fable 1984, each generation has found ample reason to make reference to the grim near-future envisioned by the novel. Whether Orwell had some prophetic vision or was simply a very astute reader of the institutions of his day—all still with us in mutated form—hardly matters. His book set the tone for the next 60 plus years of dystopian fiction and film. Orwell’s own political activities—his stint as a colonial policeman or his denunciation of several colleagues and friends to British intelligence—may render him suspect in some quarters. But his nightmarish fictional projections of...

For anyone interested in the politics of left and right -- and in political journalism as it is practiced at the highest level -- George Orwell's works are indispensable. This week, in the year marking the 110th anniversary of his birth, we present a personal list of his five greatest essays. The winner and still champ, Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" stands as the finest deconstruction of slovenly writing since Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Orwell's essay, published in 1946 in Cyril Connolly's literary review Horizon, is not as sarcastic or funny as Twain's, but unlike Twain, Orwell...

George Orwell, author and lifelong socialist, entered into a tax avoidance scheme on his deathbed as money began to flood in from the success of his final two books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was seeking to escape the full weight of the Labour government's punishing surtax regime as all his royalties arrived in a short period and he feared leaving his widow and six-year-old son with a gigantic bill for death duties. After Orwell died, his accountants underplayed the copyright value of those two great works, which between them have sold millions of copies in dozens of languages,...

When Evelyn Waugh died, only a bold man would have bet on his reputation. 1966 was the apotheosis of "Swinging London," but Waugh, while a Londoner born and bred, was the antithesis of swinging. Waugh was, in modern parlance, a snob, a racist, and a sexist. He was a self-styled "craftsman" who loathed proletarian culture. He was a political reactionary, and a lonely and anguished opponent of the Second Vatican Council that was soon to render unrecognizable his beloved Catholic Church. He was a man of the past. Of course anyone who had bet on Waugh then could easily retire...