One of the highest honors I ever received was when the Post & Email placed the photo of George Orwell in the article they did on the Citizen Wells blog on May 25, 2010. I am also honored to present the following on George Orwell and 1984.

From The Complete works of George Orwell.

“Eric Blair was born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, in the then British colony of India, where his father, Richard, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida, brought him to England at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again until 1912. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie and a younger sister named Avril. With his characteristic humour, he would later describe his family’s background as “lower-upper-middle class.” “

“In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great critical and popular success. The royalties from Animal Farm provided Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life. From 1945 Orwell was the Observer’s war correspondent and later contributed regularly to the Manchester Evening News. He was a close friend of the Observer’s editor/owner, David Astor and his ideas had a strong influence on Astor’s editorial policies. In 1949 his best-known work, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. He wrote the novel during his stay on the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland.”

“During most of his career Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books of reportage such as Homage to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil War), Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), and The Road to Wigan Pier (which described the living conditions of poor miners in northern England). According to Newsweek, Orwell “was the finest journalist of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt.”

Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is considered an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell’s prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism. Orwell denied that Animal Farm was a reference to Stalinism. Orwell had returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist, but he remained to the end a man of the left and, in his own words, a ‘democratic socialist’.

Orwell is also known for his insights about the political implications of the use of language. In the essay “Politics and the English Language”, he decries the effects of cliche, bureaucratic euphemism, and academic jargon on literary styles, and ultimately on thought itself. Orwell’s concern over the power of language to shape reality is also reflected in his invention of Newspeak, the official language of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is a variant of English in which vocabulary is strictly limited by government fiat. The goal is to make it increasingly difficult to express ideas that contradict the official line – with the final aim of making it impossible even to conceive such ideas. (cf. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). A number of words and phrases that Orwell coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the standard vocabularly, such as “memory hole,” “Big Brother,” “Room 101,” “doublethink,” “thought police,” and “newspeak.” ”

“We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.”

THANK GOD FOR THE LIFE OF GEORGE ORWELL.

Read more:

http://citizenwells.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/george-orwell-birthday-june-25-2012-eric-blair-george-orwell-org-malware-attack-hacker-compromises-orwell-site-big-brother-is-alive/

It is fitting that WND just presented the following:

“EX-SPY CHIEF: OBAMA THRIVES ON ‘DISINFORMATION'”
“The highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the West, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is at it again.

A quarter century ago, in his international bestseller “Red Horizons,” Pacepa exposed the massive crimes and corruption of his former boss, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, giving the dictator a nervous breakdown and inspiring him to send assassination squads to the U.S. to find his former spy chief and kill him. They failed. On Christmas Day 1989, Ceausescu was executed by his own people at the end of a trial whose accusations came almost word-for-word out of “Red Horizons.”

After courageously defecting to the United States, which he now proudly calls home, Pacepa became a major asset to the Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to deal with the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. The CIA has praised Pacepa’s cooperation for providing “an important and unique contribution to the United States,” and President Ronald Reagan (seen below holding Pacepa’s “Red Horizons”) reportedly referred to it as “my bible for dealing with dictators.””
“In “Disinformation,” Pacepa and Rychlak reveal that the Soviet Union’s immense intelligence apparatus, unlike other nations’ spy establishments, was not primarily focused on spying and gathering intel on other nations. Instead, reveal the authors, the communist bloc intelligence services, including the Russian KGB and the Romanian DIE headed by Pacepa, were much more preoccupied with rewriting history, with manufacturing lies, deception and false documents, with turning one religion against another, with defaming the noblest people and glorifying the worst, and – perhaps most importantly – with planting an endless barrage of false, perverse, anti-American disinformation into the liberal Western news media.”
“By its very nature, a disinformation campaign can work only if the seemingly independent Western press accepts intentionally fabricated lies and presents them to the public as truth. Thus, Pacepa and Rychlak also document how the U.S. “mainstream media’s” enduring sympathy for all things liberal-left has made it vulnerable to – indeed, the prime carrier of – civilization-transforming campaigns of lying, defamation and historical revisionism that turn reality on its head.”

Read more:

http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/ex-spy-chief-obama-thrives-on-disinformation/