Posts tagged “george orwell”

UK transition to Orwellian state now complete

20,000 families in the United Kingdom are about to receive a forced installation of technology that all free people have feared since Eric Arthur Blair first published his prescient pre-history, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1949. These “problem families” will be subjected to 24-hour surveillance, in their own homes, via telescreens. No, I’m not kidding.

Evidently, there are already some 2,000 families that have gone through these “Family Intervention Projects” so far. I had no idea things were so bad in the UK. Britain’s “children’s secretary”, Ed Balls, is the overseer of this £400 million ($668 million) plan to curb “anti-social” behavior. Clearly, he is just acting like an older sibling for those children whose family issues put them in need of a Big Brother.

Simply recounting this news seems to defy all laws of irony and creative license. I cannot imagine anyone reading Nineteen Eighty-Four and thinking of it as a guidebook, but it is evidently just that in the Balls household. How appalling!

Alas, poor Britain! I knew them, Horatio; a nation of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; they have borne me on their back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those ideals that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your minds now?

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Quotable: Eric Arthur Blair

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength…Eric Arthur Blair
AKA George Orwell (from 1984)

It is George Orwell’s birthday today and his words have never rung truer. He would have been 106.

Thanks for the reminder, @tmorello!

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