Every Day Is Orwell Day

George Orwell's '1984' was published on London on this day in 1949. It was published in New York five days later. The book was an immediate best seller. George Orwell died seven months later. The following quotes by the author were taken from a then-new foreword to the book written by Robert Harris on the sixtieth anniversary of that publication, as published in 2009.  

'All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or "the classless society", or "the Kingdom of Heaven on earth", are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way to power...  .'.

'The new "managerial" societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia and America.'.

'These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will be unable to conquer one another completely.'. 

Here is the whole of the foreword.

The Push-Me-Pull-Me of Journalism

In which even the most inclusive communities are both more pushed 
and pulled in more different direction than they can ever account for. 

Machine Gun Ettiquette

'We may find in the long run
that tinned food is a deadlier weapon
than the machine gun'-George Orwell.

Quoted from 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937).
What he meant was.....

1-The Great War (1914-18) would be have been impossible
without tinned processed food being sent to the troops
at the front by every participating government.

2-The mechanization that makes armaments easier to produce,
and wars easier to fight, when applied to food production,
will reduce the varieties of fruit and veg that are grown
to those with least flavour which also keep/travel best,
the easier to go to war on the once sensitive human palate.

3-When 'marketed well', food processed with chemicals
and false flavourings will prove themselves to be more popular
and more poisonous than fresh fruit and veg in the longer term. 

Might Can Learn How It Is Wrong

and still  find impossible to discover what is right.

Pigs And Humans; An Orwellian Comparison

George Orwell wrote,
somewhat reductively,

'Advertising is the sound of a stick
rattling inside a swill bucket'.

Sadly, his quote demeans
the sensitivity of pigs.
Though it is accurate
about the vast expanse
of human passivity.