Latest news with #MinistryofTruth
Miami Herald
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
New '1984' foreword includes warning about ‘problematic' characters
The 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell's novel 1984, which coined the term 'thoughtcrime' to describe the act of having thoughts that question the ruling party's ideology, has become an ironic lightning rod in debates over alleged trigger warnings and the role of historical context in classic literature. The introduction to the new edition, endorsed by Orwell's estate and written by the American author Dolen Perkins-Valdezm, is at the center of the storm, drawing fire from conservative commentators as well as public intellectuals, and prompting a wide spectrum of reaction from academics who study Orwell's work. Perkins-Valdez opens the introduction with a self-reflective exercise: imagining what it would be like to read 1984 for the first time today. She writes that 'a sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity,' noting the complete absence of Black characters. She also describes her pause at the protagonist Winston Smith's 'despicable' misogyny, but ultimately chooses to continue reading, writing: 'I know the difference between a flawed character and a flawed story.' 'I'm enjoying the novel on its own terms, not as a classic but as a good story; that is, until Winston reveals himself to be a problematic character,' she writes. 'For example, we learn of him: 'He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones.' Whoa, wait a minute, Orwell.' That framing was enough to provoke sharp critique from novelist and essayist Walter Kirn on the podcast America This Week, co-hosted with journalist Matt Taibbi. Kirn characterized the foreword as a kind of ideological overreach. 'Thank you for your trigger warning for 1984,' he said. 'It is the most 1984ish thing I've ever f***ing read.' Later in the episode, which debuted on June 1, Kirn blasted what he saw as an imposed 'permission structure' by publishers and academic elites. 'It's a sort of Ministry of Truthism,' he said, referring to the Ministry of Truth that features prominently in the dystopian novel. 'They're giving you a little guidebook to say, 'Here's how you're supposed to feel when you read this.'' Conservative commentator such as Ed Morrissey described the foreword as part of 'an attempt to rob [Orwell's work] of meaning by denigrating it as 'problematic.'' Morrissey argued that trigger warnings on literary classics serve to 'distract readers at the start from its purpose with red herrings over issues of taste.' But not all responses aligned with that view. Academic rebuttal Peter Brian Rose-Barry, a philosophy professor at Saginaw Valley State University and author of George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality, disputed the entire premise. 'There just isn't [a trigger warning],' he told Newsweek in an email after examining the edition. 'She never accuses Orwell of thoughtcrime. She never calls for censorship or cancelling Orwell.' In Rose-Barry's view, the foreword is neither invasive nor ideological, but reflective. 'Perkins-Valdez suggests in her introduction that 'love and artistic beauty can act as healing forces in a totalitarian state,'' he noted. 'Now, I find that deeply suspect... but I'd use this introduction to generate a discussion in my class.' Taibbi and Kirn, by contrast, took issue with that exact line during the podcast. 'Love heals? In 1984?' Taibbi asked. 'The whole thing ends with Winston broken, saying he loves Big Brother,' the symbol of the totalitarian state at the heart of the book. Kirn laughed and added, 'It's the kind of revisionist uplift you get from a book club discussion after someone just watched The Handmaid's Tale.' Perkins-Valdez, a Black writer, Harvard graduate and professor of literature at American University, also noted the novel's lack of racial representation: 'That sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity at all.' Kirn responded to that sentiment on the show by pointing out that Orwell was writing about midcentury Britain: 'When Orwell wrote the book, Black people made up maybe one percent of the population. It's like expecting white characters in every Nigerian novel.' Richard Keeble, former chair of the Orwell Society, argued that critiques of Orwell's treatment of race and gender have long been part of academic discourse. 'Questioning Orwell's representation of Blacks in 1984 can usefully lead us to consider the evolution of his ideas on race generally,' he told Newsweek. 'Yet Orwell struggled throughout his life, and not with complete success, to exorcise what Edward Said called 'Orientalism.'' Keeble added, 'Trigger warnings and interpretative forewords... join the rich firmament of Orwellian scholarship-being themselves open to critique and analysis.' Cultural overreach While critics like Kirn view Perkins-Valdez's new foreword as a symptom of virtue signaling run amok, others see it as part of a long-standing literary dialogue. Laura Beers, a historian at American University and author of Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century, acknowledged that such reactions reflect deeper political divides. But she defended the legitimacy of approaching Orwell through modern ethical and social lenses. 'What makes 1984 such a great novel is that it was written to transcend a specific historical context,' she told Newsweek. 'Although it has frequently been appropriated by the right as a critique of 'socialism,' it was never meant to be solely a critique of Stalin's Russia.' 'Rather,' she added, 'it was a commentary on how absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the risk to all societies, including democracies like Britain and the United States, of the unchecked concentration of power.' Beers also addressed the role of interpretive material in shaping the reading experience. 'Obviously, yes, in that 'interpretive forewords' give a reader an initial context in which to situate the texts that they are reading,' she said. 'That said, such forewords are more often a reflection on the attitudes and biases of their own time.' While the foreword has prompted the familiar battle lines playing out across the Trump-era culture wars, Beers sees the conversation itself as in keeping with Orwell's legacy. 'By attempting to place Orwell's work in conversation with changing values and historical understandings in the decades since he was writing,' she said, 'scholars like Perkins-Valdez are exercising the very freedom to express uncomfortable and difficult opinions that Orwell explicitly championed.' Related Articles Gabbard Links 'Ministry of Truth' to Obama Speech, Calls Biden 'Front Man'Tulsi Gabbard Compares Biden Admin to Dictatorship Over 'Ministry of Truth'Joe Biden's Disinformation Board Likened to Orwell's 'Ministry of Truth'Memory Holes, Mobs and Speaker Pelosi | Opinion 2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
Newsweek
2 days ago
- Politics
- Newsweek
New '1984' Foreword Includes Warning About 'Problematic' Characters
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell's novel 1984, which coined the term "thoughtcrime" to describe the act of having thoughts that question the ruling party's ideology, has become an ironic lightning rod in debates over alleged trigger warnings and the role of historical context in classic literature. The introduction to the new edition, endorsed by Orwell's estate and written by the American author Dolen Perkins-Valdezm, is at the center of the storm, drawing fire from conservative commentators as well as public intellectuals, and prompting a wide spectrum of reaction from academics who study Orwell's work. Perkins-Valdez opens the introduction with a self-reflective exercise: imagining what it would be like to read 1984 for the first time today. She writes that "a sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity," noting the complete absence of Black characters. She also describes her pause at the protagonist Winston Smith's "despicable" misogyny, but ultimately chooses to continue reading, writing: "I know the difference between a flawed character and a flawed story." "I'm enjoying the novel on its own terms, not as a classic but as a good story; that is, until Winston reveals himself to be a problematic character," she writes. "For example, we learn of him: 'He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones.' Whoa, wait a minute, Orwell." That framing was enough to provoke sharp critique from novelist and essayist Walter Kirn on the podcast America This Week, co-hosted with journalist Matt Taibbi. Kirn characterized the foreword as a kind of ideological overreach. "Thank you for your trigger warning for 1984," he said. "It is the most 1984ish thing I've ever f***ing read." In which you will learn that the current leading paperback version of 1984, its official Orwell-estate-approved 75th anniversary edition, includes a 1984-ish trigger-warning introduction calling the novel's hero "problematic" because of his "misogyny." I am not making this up. — Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) June 2, 2025 Later in the episode, which debuted on June 1, Kirn blasted what he saw as an imposed "permission structure" by publishers and academic elites. "It's a sort of Ministry of Truthism," he said, referring to the Ministry of Truth that features prominently in the dystopian novel. "They're giving you a little guidebook to say, 'Here's how you're supposed to feel when you read this.'" Conservative commentator such as Ed Morrissey described the foreword as part of "an attempt to rob [Orwell's work] of meaning by denigrating it as 'problematic.'" Morrissey argued that trigger warnings on literary classics serve to "distract readers at the start from its purpose with red herrings over issues of taste." But not all responses aligned with that view. Academic Rebuttal Peter Brian Rose-Barry, a philosophy professor at Saginaw Valley State University and author of George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality, disputed the entire premise. "There just isn't [a trigger warning]," he told Newsweek in an email after examining the edition. "She never accuses Orwell of thoughtcrime. She never calls for censorship or cancelling Orwell." In Rose-Barry's view, the foreword is neither invasive nor ideological, but reflective. "Perkins-Valdez suggests in her introduction that 'love and artistic beauty can act as healing forces in a totalitarian state,'" he noted. "Now, I find that deeply suspect... but I'd use this introduction to generate a discussion in my class." Taibbi and Kirn, by contrast, took issue with that exact line during the podcast. "Love heals? In 1984?" Taibbi asked. "The whole thing ends with Winston broken, saying he loves Big Brother," the symbol of the totalitarian state at the heart of the book. Kirn laughed and added, "It's the kind of revisionist uplift you get from a book club discussion after someone just watched The Handmaid's Tale." Photographs of Eric Blair, whose pen name was George Orwell, from his Metropolitan Police file, c.1940. Photographs of Eric Blair, whose pen name was George Orwell, from his Metropolitan Police file, c.1940. The National Archives UK Perkins-Valdez, a Black writer, Harvard graduate and professor of literature at American University, also noted the novel's lack of racial representation: "That sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity at all." Kirn responded to that sentiment on the show by pointing out that Orwell was writing about midcentury Britain: "When Orwell wrote the book, Black people made up maybe one percent of the population. It's like expecting white characters in every Nigerian novel." Richard Keeble, former chair of the Orwell Society, argued that critiques of Orwell's treatment of race and gender have long been part of academic discourse. "Questioning Orwell's representation of Blacks in 1984 can usefully lead us to consider the evolution of his ideas on race generally," he told Newsweek. "Yet Orwell struggled throughout his life, and not with complete success, to exorcise what Edward Said called 'Orientalism.'" Keeble added, "Trigger warnings and interpretative forewords... join the rich firmament of Orwellian scholarship—being themselves open to critique and analysis." Cultural Overreach The 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell's 1984 has become a lightning rod in debates over alleged wokeness, censorship and the role of historical context in reading classic literature. The 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell's 1984 has become a lightning rod in debates over alleged wokeness, censorship and the role of historical context in reading classic literature. Newsweek / Penguin Random House While critics like Kirn view Perkins-Valdez's new foreword as a symptom of virtue signaling run amok, others see it as part of a long-standing literary dialogue. Laura Beers, a historian at American University and author of Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century, acknowledged that such reactions reflect deeper political divides. But she defended the legitimacy of approaching Orwell through modern ethical and social lenses. "What makes 1984 such a great novel is that it was written to transcend a specific historical context," she told Newsweek. "Although it has frequently been appropriated by the right as a critique of 'socialism,' it was never meant to be solely a critique of Stalin's Russia." Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Courtesy American University "Rather," she added, "it was a commentary on how absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the risk to all societies, including democracies like Britain and the United States, of the unchecked concentration of power." Beers also addressed the role of interpretive material in shaping the reading experience. "Obviously, yes, in that 'interpretive forewords' give a reader an initial context in which to situate the texts that they are reading," she said. "That said, such forewords are more often a reflection on the attitudes and biases of their own time." While the foreword has prompted the familiar battle lines playing out across the Trump-era culture wars, Beers sees the conversation itself as in keeping with Orwell's legacy. "By attempting to place Orwell's work in conversation with changing values and historical understandings in the decades since he was writing," she said, "scholars like Perkins-Valdez are exercising the very freedom to express uncomfortable and difficult opinions that Orwell explicitly championed."
Irish Examiner
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Examiner
Suzanne Harrington: 'We are all witnesses to genocide in Gaza — it's livestreaming in our pockets'
What's the difference between Slobodan Milosevic, the Butcher of the Balkans, and Benjamin Netanyahu? So far, only a body count, although Netanyahu is fast catching up. Look, I don't want to be writing this, and you probably don't want to be reading it. Didn't we think we'd left genocide behind in the last century? Evolved a bit? Can't we just focus on the Eurovision instead of Gaza? Welcome to the prevailing mood in the UK. All last week here, there were commemorations of the 80th anniversary of 1945, celebrating the bravery of now-ancient service people, and the liberation of the death camps. The commemorations dominated the radio news every hour. Poppies and fly-overs and pomp, the prevailing message 'never again.' Never again? It was Slobodan Milosevic who popularised the term ethnic cleansing as a nicer way of saying genocide – there's something almost reassuring about it, implying a bit of a spring zhuzh, of getting into the grimy corners and making a place clean and shiny again. Getting rid of an infestation. An Israeli screenwriter, an individual called Gil Kopatz, likened sending food to starving Gazans as 'feeding sharks', adding that what the state of Israel is doing 'is not genocide, it's pesticide, and it's essential to do it'. Meanwhile, images of children being deliberately starved to death are popping up on our feeds. We see footage of a ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza – basic food - being bombed by drones. Images of children being deliberately starved to death are popping up on our feeds. Picture: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images In the UK, the media spin has moved from Orwell's Ministry of Truth into actual Lewis Carroll territory: 'Palestinians Are Facing Starvation' as though the unfortunate victims of a natural disaster. They've had 100,000 tons of bombs dropped on them – five times the power of what annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago. The UK media persists in calling this a 'war', as though civilians starving amid the rubble of their former homes are equal to the IDF war machine. Never again? With this genocide, unlike the one 80 years ago, we cannot pretend we don't know about it. It is livestreaming in our pockets. The UK is arming Israel, while barely pretending to condemn it, amid an omerta of deafening silence and sickening media spin. Gideon Sa'ar, the Israeli foreign minister – the one who called Simon Harris anti-Semitic 'based on the delegitimisation and dehumanisation of Israel' – had a 'private' visit to London last month where he 'privately' met the UK foreign secretary. What did they 'privately' talk about? 20,000 murdered children? We are all witnesses. We are all seeing this happening in real time. The feeling of helplessness is overwhelming — seeing it in full colour and being unable to do anything. Starving people crying out with empty food pots, small children running behind water trucks, all those white-wrapped bodies. Never again? Yes, we can do tiny things — go on marches, donate to emergency funds for Palestine, wear a keffiyeh, share Michael Rosen's poem Don't Mention The Children. At least in Ireland, our government and media are not gaslighting us, unlike in the UK, whose leaders would like us to sit down and shut up, to watch the Eurovision and forget about Palestine. To think of Palestinians as not quite human. Here we are, bang in the middle of never again.
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
As Trump rewrites even America's history, institutions have two choices – submit or find ways to resist
It has come to this: we are now in Ministry of Truth territory. In Washington DC, the Smithsonian Institution, the US's ensemble of 21 great national museums, last week became the subject of an executive order by President Donald Trump. 'Distorted narratives' are to be rooted out. There will be no more of the 'corrosive ideology' that has fostered a 'sense of national shame'. The institution has, reads the order, 'come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology' that portrays 'American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive'. The vice-president, JD Vance, is, by virtue of his office, on the museum's board. He is charged by Trump to 'prohibit expenditure' on programmes that 'divide Americans based on race'. He is to remove 'improper ideology'. The order is titled 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History'. George Orwell lived too soon. The move is deeply shocking, but predictable. After Trump's insertion of himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center and his railing against the supposed wokeness of the national performing arts venue, the federally funded Smithsonian was bound to be next in line. Those who imagined the Kennedy Center was a one-off, attracting the president's ire for personal reasons, were deluding themselves about the scale of Trump's ideological ambition. Picked out for opprobrium in the executive order are the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum for celebrating transgender women (the museum, it should be pointed out, has yet to be built); the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and an exhibition titled The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the American Art Museum. I visited the Museum of African American History for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It is a vast book of a museum, heavy with text. It was full, when I visited, of mostly Black families seeking out an encounter with a narrative that has long been a footnote to, or erased completely from, the main national story. You could spend days absorbing the web of stories that the museum offers, beginning in its basements with the transatlantic slave trade, where one of the most moving objects is, unexpectedly and profoundly, a piece of iron ballast that took the place of a human body after a ship's cargo of enslaved people had been disgorged on the triangular route between Africa, the Americas and Europe. The whole strikes a fascinating balance between an unflinching gaze on systems of oppression, and a sense of Black achievement and cultural richness that has nevertheless effloresced. Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the museum, gave a talk at the House of Lords in 2011 about the institution, which was still in the planning, and would open five years later. I can still recall how moving it was to hear about the difficulties of making a museum – a place where a story is told through objects – from communities traditionally poor in material things. The institution had put out a call for loans and donations. Precious, carefully treasured objects – a bonnet embroidered by someone's enslaved grandmother, for example – were arriving into the new collection. Fast forward to the present, and Bunch is in charge of the entire Smithsonian Institution. This is a man who believes, as he told Queen's University Belfast last year, that history can be used to 'understand the tensions that have divided us. And those tensions are really where the learning is where the growth is, where the opportunities to transform are.' That compassionate vision of the past, as a means through which the citizens of the present can better understand each other, is completely opposed to the monolithically triumphalist spirit of Trump's executive order, in which history is reduced to 'our Nation's unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness'. How much easier it is, to sink into this pillowy, comforting notion of glorious progress than to grapple with the kind of knotty, often upsetting and confronting history that the Museum of African American History offers its visitors. But it makes me wonder: can the museum survive this government? I visited, too, the American Art Museum, whose show The Shape of Power is targeted in the executive order as emblematic of the Smithsonian's decline into 'divisive, race-centered ideology'. The exhibition, which was years in the careful making, points out what is surely obvious, once it has been given a moment's thought: that race is not an inherent and prepolitical category, but rather a constructed set of ideologies that served (and still serve) a set of economic and political interests. (One way to tell that race is a socially constructed category, in fact, is by looking to the Greeks and the Romans – the people who established, in the minds of many on the US right, 'western civilisation'. They were xenophobic in their own way, and enslavement was a fact of their societies. But as is obvious from their literature, whiteness and Blackness were for them simply not operative categories.) The exhibition is an eye- and mind-opening look at how race ideology has translated into and been reinforced, or deconstructed, by sculpture – that peculiarly lifelike and thus 'truthful'-seeming artform. The catalogue quotes Toni Morrison, who once wrote that 'I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World.' Such intellectual adventuring is not what is wanted by the White House now. Trump's world is more like Viktor Orbán's, under whose government the school history curriculum has been rewritten to glorify Hungary, or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey, where the novelist Elif Shafak, as she recalled in a Guardian Live event last week, was prosecuted for 'insulting Turkishness', her lawyer obliged to defend in court the views of her fictional characters. The Smithsonian and all who work there have an unenviable choice, one that has already been put before other great or formerly great institutions such as Columbia University: to comply with Trump's dark demands; or to find ways to defy them. Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian's chief culture writer
