13-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
George Orwell's Great Legacy
Dominic Green's fine op-ed 'Orwell's Tweets and Podcast Would Be Great' (op-ed, May 8) is a more-faceted portrait than most of the ubiquitous sketches elsewhere. He is quite right in seeing George Orwell's closeness to Evelyn Waugh. Yet it's more likely that the 'two plus two makes five' business in '1984' was cribbed not from Dostoevsky but from a Soviet propaganda poster, whose point was that worker enthusiasm for the five-year plan added an extra digit. Orwell's seeing this and all denial of objective reality as a prerequisite to totalitarianism is his great legacy and explains his growth in popularity today.
David Lebedoff
