George Orwell’s novel “1984” is suddenly a best seller. With lying by government officials a daily occurrence, with “alternative facts” espoused by the Trump administration, the novel has risen to the top of the sales chart among bestsellers on Amazon. The book industry uses Amazon as a sales barometer.
Commentators refer to Newspeak. They describe the language of Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway as Orwellian. Time to go back to the original. We have a president who scapegoats others to distract from his actions. We even have the defeated Hillary playing the part of Goldstein.
“Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In the case of Trump and his Tru Believers we are seeing all the phenomena of what happens when a belief system begins to function like an immune system that must protect a core belief from all disconfirmation by the evidence of the senses and bona fide information.
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The journalists were all independent so I guess the corporate media wasn’t concerned. Considering that Trump condemned CNN for its critical writings I wonder what it will take for the media to realize the bad situation they are facing.
………………..
Headline: Their own community is under attack, yet major outlets remain decidedly pro-police.
By Adam Johnson / AlterNet
January 25, 2017
During Friday’s inauguration protests, more than 200 people were arrested and charged with felony rioting, a crime that carries up to 10 years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Among those facing a decade in prison were at least seven journalists covering the protest, rounded up by D.C. metro police due to their proximity to the unrest.
Though Washington D.C. is no stranger to mass arrests–having settled millions in lawsuits after arresting over 400 during 2002 anti-World Bank protests–the shockingly stiff penalties being leveled are, according to multiple reports, with few precedents. According to The Washington Post:
Longtime D.C. defense lawyer Heather Pinckney said that in the 15 years she has practiced, she does not remember seeing demonstrators charged with felonies. Typically, she said, protesters are charged with misdemeanors or given citations and sent home.
The journalists in question include Alex Rubenstein of RT, Evan Engel of Vocativ, independent photojournalist Shay Horse, Story of America producer Jack Keller, livestreamers Matt Hopard and Alexei Wood, and an unnamed freelancer. All face up to ten years in prison and a $25,000 fine for felony rioting.
While foreign and new media outlets such as The Guardian, Buzzfeed, City Lab, Daily Beast, and Huffington Post have reported specifically on the arrests of journalists (as has traditional outlet US News) most major media outlets in the United States have remained surprisingly silent…
http://www.alternet.org/activism/trump-bans-freedom-press#.WIoA9xOE6Jk.email
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It was on the front page of the NY Times no fear of Trump from the Times because he only reads supermarket tabloids.
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http://georgeorwell.org
Complete writing and biographic information can be had, gratis, here.
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Who is John Gault? Who cares? No one is buying Atlas Shrugged.
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This is part of the reason why Common Core related Big Data collection was such a bad idea. Who has the data now?
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“We even have the defeated Hillary playing the part of Goldstein.”
Some of the Hillary haters will like that analogy. O’Brien ultimately tells Winston that the opposition was a fiction invented by the Party, and Goldstein the Party’s puppet. On the other hand, O’Brien is also a proven liar. (No puppet, no puppet, you’re the puppet.)
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From Moyers yesterday
http://billmoyers.com/story/orwell-hitler-trump/
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That was Robert Kuttner. Well done.
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I have a nice story to tell, and perhaps it’s a bit of therapy on my part. During my second to last year at a small upstate NY public school, some of my French students were reading Atlas Shrugged in English class and were having trouble understanding it. They came to me and asked if I would read it with them and help them make sense of this difficult text. I was delighted. I couldn’t wait to get home, buy the book online, and start reading. We met for lively discussions and we collected scholarly articles and other materials to help us understand. They saw their own teacher researching, questioning, and struggling to understand this book along WITH them, many times not knowing all the answers. I had no multiple choice tests. Students would come in with their notes and articles they found that they thought would help our discussions. The next year, these students and some of their friends asked if they could have a book group with me and two other teachers (their favorites!) to discuss books they were interested in. They would decide what books to read (with our help) and we would discuss. For a year, we met at 6:30 am and we discussed The Odyssey, Fahrenheit 451, Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Hamlet, and others. The three of us teachers were UNPAID advisers to this group. We had so much fun and these kids were directing and participating in their own learning and doing it for the JOY of learning, not for a grade or points. I wasn’t evaluated on any rubric. It was also the first year I ever took students to Paris, and that was such a great experience for all of us. Unfortunately, I lost my job at the end of the year because the district decided to eliminate the French program. This was the best and worst year of my life. I wouldn’t trade the experience of my book club (or my France trip) for anything, and that was the most wonderful experience of my teaching career that I ever had. I still think of those students and how fantastic they were, and how much joy they brought me. What does this have to do with this post? Well, it just got me thinking that maybe I get too cynical sometimes. Maybe people really are interested in reading and learning and exploring literature as a reflection of life. Hopefully, for every student who tells me s/he pays 12 hours of video games during free time, there is another student who wants to read and question and think. If only schools could give them more of these unstructured and ungraded opportunities to do so. And UNBIND teachers from a rubric which destroys autonomy, passion and creativity! 🙂
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Wonderful story with a sad ending for you. I’m sure these students learned lessons that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. It’s a nice lesson that what teacher’s really need is passion for what they do and the autonomy they should have to fulfill it.
If I may be so presumptuous, another book I’d recommend, the one that comes to mind for me these days, is the Erich Maria Remarque novel that has been translated into English as “Flotsam.” The German title actually translated into “Love Thy Neighbor,” which is what I wish the translators would have chosen.
As I wrote in my Goodreads review, the novel “is set in the mid-30s and follows three main characters who are stateless exiles driven out of their homes in Nazi Germany…Remarque’s novels tell stories of common people who live through major episodes of German history. In this story one gets an intimate understanding about the day-to-day struggles exiles had to face. They are unwanted in the countries they move to and unable to return to their homes. These are stories behind the statistics and machinations of politicians on the world stage leading up to World War II.
“It is the story of enduring love that has to survive through barbaric circumstances.” What I failed to note in the review is that the love goes beyond that of man and woman to the love of friends, family, and strangers as well as how all these have to endure despite the irrational hate all around them that is driven by impulses from irrational hate and self-preservation instincts. Lots of parallels to today’s world and lessons about what we might become without even noticing it.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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1984 was assigned reading in my 11th grade English class and it introduced me to the horrors of totalitarianism. . I recognize the danger in Trump in part because I read this novel What if I hadn’t read it or anything like it? I would be ignorant of the future Trump is steering us toward.
This is the question all teachers must ask: aren’t there books and ideas that ALL citizens must be exposed to? And is our current system ensuring this type of exposure? I’d say no. Common Core is agnostic about particular titles; it implies that the only thing that matters is building up mental muscles. Whether kids read Orwell (or other critical information) is left to chance. Isn’t this a recipe for disaster? Is it part of the recipe for our current disaster?
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Good question. OTOH, I read both 1984 and Brave New World when I was thirteen, and I’m glad no grownup made me read them. The same with The Catcher in the Rye, which I read a few years later. All three were kept off the curriculum due to the sexy parts, but 1984, along with Catcher, was enormously popular with us teenagers.
I’ll let Catcher pass for now, but if not as many people are reading the two dystopias, I’m at least glad that some people are trying to remedy their ignorance of Orwell’s great book.
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Had more people taken time to read Sinclair Lewis’s IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE sometime in the last decade, much of this might have been prevented. Honestly, I find this obsession with 1984 less than helpful, whereas Lewis’s novel not only all but described how we got here but does so in a way that will more likely engage regular people a good deal better than Mr. Orwell does.
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I was just going to ask: is there also a spike in sales of It Can’t Happen Here? That book is more closely tied to what might plausibly happen in the real world. It was out of print for a while but was returned to print after the 2004 election.
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Most of the “post-Trump reading lists” I’ve seen are all focused on 1984, although some think to include It Can’t Happen Here and Brave New World. The first and last are fine as an intellectual exercise, but too often they never get beyond that. I think it’s also vital people read things like Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, which spells out the Republican agenda. If you don’t know what the enemy has planned, you can’t devise a defense.
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http://wsautter.com/
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How many people believe that the press should not report the news (“keep it’s mouth shut.”)? It would be very scary if people really believe Steve Bannon’s cry that the press is the opposition.
I do believe the media is corporate owned and didn’t do a good job of reporting political issues and instead focused on Trump’s latest crazy outburst. It is Trump who has now been humiliated. He’s learned that there are many people who don’t like him and hIs fragile personality can’t take it.
………………….
BREAKING NEWS…NYT
President Trump’s strategist Stephen Bannon attacked the media as the “opposition” and said it should “keep its mouth shut”
Thursday, January 26, 2017 3:08 PM EST
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief White House strategist, laced into the American press during an interview on Wednesday evening, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.
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How is Trump (Bannon) reacting to this?
38 Stunning Photos From Women’s Marches Around The World
This weekend will go down in history books as one of solidarity, sisterhood and mass resistance. Around the world, on seven different continen…
Read the entire article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/37-stunning-photos-from-womens-marches-around-the-world_us_58811ee7e4b096b4a23090f8
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According to this past Wednesday’s story in Time, these dystopian classics are enjoying a “Trump bump.” They are:
1984
Animal Farm
It Can’t Happen Here
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451
http://time.com/money/4648774/trump-1984-dystopian-novel-sales-brave-new-world/
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In the case of Trump and his True Believers we are seeing the full array of phenomena that arise when a belief system begins to function like an immune system — its job becomes to protect a core belief from any and all contradiction by the evidence of the senses and bona fide information. Every thought in the web of belief must be warped to insulate the belief that must be believed.
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Didn’t you say the same thing at the top of the thread?
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I made some efforts in the direction of clarity and sentence structure.
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oic, yeah, they won’t let you edit 😦
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