Comments on: If liberty means anything at all

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 15:45:35 +0000

Patty, I have long been of the opinion that the almost universal introduction of 1984 to students as an assigned reading in secondary school, long before most of them have developed the necessary life experience or political awareness to be able correlate the contents of the book with the outside world in any but the most facile manner, serves as little more than a sort of ideological inoculation against Orwell’s ideas.

Typically, there is also little discussion of the book as a direct critique of Stalin’s regime, robbing the book of its context and of one of the best examples of a real-world society that approached the totalitarianism of the fictional Oceania.

By: Patty O.

Patty O. — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 13:23:47 +0000

It strikes me as exceedingly odd that Orwell is admired and respected across the political spectrum, that everyone is aware of his warnings regarding authoritarianism, that everyone shares his fears, and yet we live in a world where it seems nobody has ever heeded his warnings.

By: Graham

Graham — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 12:02:03 +0000

I’m not entirely convinced that Churchill, or even Orwell, would have meant the same thing by “democracy” as is meant when Hillary Clinton uses the word.