Orwell

"Just three years ago, as we were offered exclusive rights to George Orwell’s whole body of work by Universal Pictures, we asked ourselves: why George Orwell? Why now? Today we know. He has seen it all. Analyzed it all. Warned us all. It seems even ironic that all want to claim him today. When at the time, I asked two of my most respected and famous writer friends about Orwell, their answers revealed both excitement and muted irritation, which I didn’t anticipate. It made me even more curious. He is praised as a predictor of doomsday. Vilified as a traitor to the socialist cause. Demonized as a colonizer. Used as a shield by neocon opportunists. Followed as a prophet by those seeking blind faith. Yet, he stands alone, prickly and defiant. A visionary. An anarchist in disguise. A hardheaded reporter with a soft heart. A fiction-maker who reveals the world as it really is. Orwell. His name has become a potent adjective – "Orwellian" - to signal authoritarian mechanisms and morphing aspects of our contemporary world: surveillance, censorship, political corruption, fake news, class struggles, the seductions of power, doublethink, algorithms, drones, permanent wars, distraction as the conspicuous mode of modern repression. In our current uncertainty, it is the right time, almost a century later, to confront myth with reality, in light of today’s clear and present danger, where 2+2 is definitively = 5."