[happygrl]

Bump for the truth at last !

[Billthedrill]

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is dying out of the world.

While that concept has certainly been marginalized by those for whom it is incovenient or unstylish, it'll survive. At some point you can't deconstruct and reason away that rock you just dropped on your foot. Something like that happened to the Soviet Union - I'd love to hear Orwell's observations of his final vindication circa 1990, if only he could have lived to see that.

[dighton]

Pretty quiet around here.

FReep this Churchyard poll: Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, or Full many a gem of purest ray serene.

[tet68]

Bump to read after work.

[tet68]

Excellent read.(Finally got in from work)

Bump II.

[beckett]

The most glorious compliment he was ever paid is in The Captive Mind, the great little book published in 1953 by Czeslaw Milosz after he had left for the West. He describes how he and other Party functionaries in Poland had been bowled over by Nineteen Eighty-four:

Because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well ... Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life. In other words, as Hitchens says, only a couple of years after Orwell’s death,

his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party.

Has any other writer ever known such posthumous vindication?

Fabulous anecdote. Orwell's stature grows and grows.

[denydenydeny]

All you ever need to know about the politics of Hollywood is that they've made films about John Reed and Rosa Luxemburg and Lillian Hellman; counting allegories, they've made the story of the Hollywood Communists dozens of times.

They've never made a film about Orwell, whose life was more dramatic than any of them.