Orwellian

`` But however we go, whatever our doom, it will not take the Orwellian shape ''.

Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff makes frequent reference to both Big Brother and other Orwellian traits in his Russian Reversal jokes.

In 2011, media analyst and political activist Mark Dice published a non-fiction book titled Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare Come True which analyses the parallels between elements of the storyline in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and current government programs, technology, and cultural trends.

... a closer look cyberpunk authors reveals that they nearly always portray future societies in which governments have become wimpy and pathetic ... Popular science fiction tales by Gibson, Williams, Cadigan and others do depict Orwellian accumulations of power in the next century, but nearly always clutched in the secretive hands of a wealthy or corporate elite.

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky note in their book that Orwellian Doublespeak is an important component of the manipulation of the English language in American media, through a process called ‘ dichotomization ’; a component of media propaganda involving ‘ deeply embedded double standards in the reporting of news ’.

Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian — descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices — has entered the vernacular with several of his neologisms, such as doublethink, thoughtcrime, and thought police.

The adjective Orwellian connotes an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past.

Eysenck left Nazi Germany to live in Britain, and was not shy in attacking Stalinist ' communism ' ( which he regarded as representative of communist ideology ), noting the anti-Semitic prejudices of the Russian government, the luxurious lifestyles of the USSR's leaders despite their talk about equality and the poverty of their people, and the Orwellian " doublethink " of East Germany's naming itself the German Democratic Republic despite being " one of the most undemocratic regimes in the world today.

Conversely, in the bleak Orwellian world of " The High Ones "— where the Soviets have won the Third World War and gained control of the whole world — the dissidents still have some hope, precisely because space flight has not been abandoned.

* Islam's Dark Side – The Orwellian State of Sudan, The Economist, 24 June 1995.

Popular examples include the allegory Orwellian series The Prisoner, The Avengers and Randall and Hopkirk ( Deceased ), all produced for ITV.

* Vincent Barnett, " Understanding Stalinism: The ' Orwellian Discrepancy ' and the ' Rational Choice Dictator '," Europe-Asia Studies, vol.

Cited as " one of the great set-ups of genre drama ", the opening sequence establishes the Orwellian and postmodern themes of the series ; its high production values have led the opening sequence to be described as more like film than television.

** At the beginning of Ice Cube's music video for the song, " Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It ", from his 2007 album Raw Footage, a line of text states that " By the year 2020, no child will be left behind " which is followed by an Orwellian classroom setting designed as a segue into the song's sarcastic theme of blame-shifting and anti-gansta rap propaganda during the waning days of the presidency of George W. Bush.

Because of the impact of this book, " Orwellian " is a common term used to describe mass surveillance technologies.

* Students for an Orwellian Society

" Orwellian " describes the situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society.

The adjective Orwellian refers to these behaviours of The Party, especially when the Party is the State:

The most common sense of Orwellian is that of the all-controlling " Big Brother " state, used to negatively describe a situation in which a Big Brother authority figure — in concert with " thought police " — constantly monitors the population to detect betrayal via " improper " thoughts.

Orwellian also describes oppressive political ideas and the use of euphemistic political language in public discourse to camouflage morally outrageous ideas and actions.

In this latter sense, the term is often used as a means of attacking an opponent in political debate, by branding his or her policies as Orwellian.

When used like this in political rhetoric if it is not sincere, it is interesting to note as it can be a case of a hypocritical Orwellian strategist denouncing Orwellian strategies.

The loose definition of the term and the often poor correlation between the real-life situations people describe as Orwellian and his own dystopian fiction leave the use of the adjective at best inexact and frequently politically inaccurate.

According to Scottish linguist Deborah Cameron, " the classic Orwellian argument for finding this usage objectionable would be that