To Orwell Today,

Here's a photo that I'd like to share with you in case you have not seen it yet.

I don't know where this was taken but apparently someone has a great idea.

Cheers,
R J

Greetings R J,

Thanks for the photo of that placard expressing the true sentiment: 1984 WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL.

I've seen a different version and have it on a shelf near my desk.

1984 IS  a blueprint for world tyranny, laying bare its structure and exposing its components. But Orwell wrote it as a warning to we the people -- to we the future -- so that we could rise up and prevent it -- "If there was hope, it lies in the proles".

All the best,
Jackie Jura

WHY ORWELL WROTE 1984 "...Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity. "...I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing...."

The Proles ... "If only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength." If there was hope, it must lie in the proles because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.... They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it?...