Tag: 1984

Wokery beyond parody as university slaps a TRIGGER warning on George Orwell’s 1984 as it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’

As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.

Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book.

Published in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian story – set in a totalitarian state which persecutes individual thinking – gave the world phrases such as ‘Big Brother’, ‘Newspeak’ and ‘thought police’.

Its plot centres on Winston Smith, a government employee who is arrested and tortured over an illicit love affair, but it also makes powerful points about what can happen to a society that doesn’t cherish academic freedoms or its own history.

Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’.

In addition to Orwell’s book, academics identify several works in the module that have the potential to be ‘offensive and upsetting’ including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.

Keep reading

Orwell’s 1984 As Manual For The Woke

On learning that Twitter sanctioned Rep. Jim Banks for daring to refer to Assistant Secretary of Health R. Levine as a man (and that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also referred, but without sanction, to Dr. Levine as a man) I turned, for insight on this peculiar assault on the concept of objective reality, to a classic novel on the nature of totalitarianism:  1984, by George Orwell.  Here are, I believe, relevant passages from the novel, from a torture scene, with torture applied to Winston Smith by O’Brien.

O’Brien to Winston Smith, undergoing torture: 

“Who controls the present, controls the past…” Signet Classic (paper), p.248

This is what Critical Race Theory is all about.

O’Brien to Winston Smith, undergoing torture, on the nature of reality:

“Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see  something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external.  Reality exists in the human mind,  and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”  Ibid, at p. 249

The Party says R. Levine is a woman; therefore, he is a woman.

Keep reading