George Orwell Archives - Tennessee Star

Commentary: The Left’s 1960s ‘Animal Farm’ Dream is America’s 2021 Nightmare

February 9, 2021February 8, 2021 Admin

George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945, in the closing weeks of the Pacific War. Even then, most naïve supporters of the wartime Soviet-British-American alliance were no longer in denial about the contours of Moscow’s impending postwar communist aggression.

The short, allegorical novel’s human-like farm animals replay the transition of supposedly 1917 revolutionary Bolsheviks into cynical 1930s Stalinists. Thereby, they remind us that leftist totalitarianism inevitably becomes far worse than the supposed parasitical capitalists they once toppled.

Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: Donald Trump, Counterrevolutionary

November 3, 2020November 2, 2020 Admin

by Victor Davis Hanson Until Donald Trump’s arrival, the globalist revolution was almost solidified and institutionalized – with the United States increasingly its greatest and most “woke” advocate. We know its bipartisan establishment contours. China would inherit the world in 20 or 30 years. The self-appointed task of American…

Commentary: The Worship of Power Over Truth

July 20, 2020July 19, 2020 Admin

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about “purity spirals.” That’s what the journalist Gavin Haynes calls the familiar “moral feeding frenzy” that occurs whenever ideology triumphs over truth. The French Revolution provides vivid historical examples, as did Mao’s cultural revolution in the 1960s. Those caught in a purity spiral, I observed, invariably find themselves embarked on an endless search for enemies, “a concerted effort to divide the world between the tiny coterie of the blessed and the madding crowd of the damned. The game, Haynes notes, ‘is always one of purer-than-thou.’”

Commentary: The Tortoise and the Hare of Modernity Reconsidered

December 28, 2019December 30, 2019 Admin

ot to be overly paradoxical about it, but the names Donald Trump, Adam Schiff, and Jerry Nadler will not appear in this essay. Like you, I am weary of that shrill and unproductive static. Let us, then, take a brief holiday and consider a different sort of problem, a problem that stands behind—admittedly pretty far behind—that static I mentioned and which we might do well to think about. Let us, for lack of a better phrase, call it “Modernity and Its Discontents.”

Commentary: The Banality of Google’s Wokeness

July 23, 2019July 22, 2019 Admin

by Emina Melonic Although many people don’t see it or refuse to acknowledge it, we are living in a mangled version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. There are technological and morally dubious (at best!) forces that control the flow of information we see and can release into the…

Commentary: The Fight Being Waged on the Academic Battlefield

November 25, 2018November 25, 2018 Admin

By Garland Tucker The violent events in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 have fueled a deep-seated leftist desire to re-write American history. Demands to topple statues, remove portraits, rename buildings, and repudiate founders—all in an effort to cleanse any objectionable reality from our history—have reached a fever pitch. The parallel…

Letter to the Editor: Haslam’s ‘Tax Cut Act of 2017’ Straight Out of Orwell’s 1984

April 12, 2017April 12, 2017 Admin

Dear Tennessee Star, In George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984, the unfortunate character Winston is battling desperately to grasp objective truth. Meanwhile the power mongers ruling the Ministry of Truth tell him, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Orwell thought he was writing satire; too bad he…

Adaptation of ‘1984’ is headed to Broadway

February 3, 2017February 5, 2017 Tennessee Star Staff

2017 has so far been a pretty big year for “1984.” After a jump in sales prompted the publisher of the George Orwell novel to order a 75,000 copy reprint, a stage adaptation of “1984” is headed to Broadway. Orwell’s 1949 novel presents a dystopian future in which a fascist…