The Ministry of Truth
Page 41
“Really I’m a very one-track person”—Robert Hilburn, “Bowie Finds His Voice!,” Melody Maker, September 14, 1974.
“media artist”—Cameron Crowe, Playboy Interview, Playboy, September 1976.
“a very medieval, firm-handed”—Crowe, “Ground Control to Davy Jones.”
“You’ve got to have an extreme right front”—Anthony O’Grady, “Dictatorship: The Next Step?,” NME, August 23, 1975.
“my whole life would be transformed”—Buckley, p. 231.
“a theatrical observation”—Quoted in ibid., p. 253.
“a formidable vigilante group” and “We are not Fascists”—Daily Express, February 1, 1974.
“committed to a left-wing programme”—“Firm Action for a Fair Britain,” Conservative Party general election manifesto, February 1974.
“scrubbing our minds clean”—Andy Beckett, Pinochet in Piccadilly (Faber & Faber, 2003), p. 173.
“more open-minded”—Quoted in ibid., p. 84.
“All right”—Quoted in ibid., p. 85.
“the only outcome”—Quoted in Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (Allen Lane, 2012), p. 129.
“Today, because of the strikes”—Maugham, pp. 31–32.
“the Communist Trojan horse” and “Perhaps the country might choose”—Quoted in Beckett, p. 196.
“the militants of the neo-Marxist left”—Lord Chalfont, “Could Britain Be Heading for a Military Takeover?,” London Times, August 5, 1974.
“apprehensive patriots”—Dorril and Ramsay, p. 265.
“Although I don’t for a moment”—Benn diaries, August 22, 1974, in Against the Tide, p. 220.
“What is certain”—London Times, May 8, 1975.
“looking at the faces of the Junta”—Benn diaries, January 20, 1976, in Against the Tide, p. 501.
One leaked dossier—See Dorril and Ramsay, p. 258.
“all these fears of bureaucracy”—Philip Whitehead, The Writing on the Wall: Britain in the Seventies (Michael Joseph, Ltd., 1985), p. 216.
“you do not pit Hamlet”—Robert Moss, The Collapse of Democracy (Temple Smith, 1975), p. 277.
“It is a cold world”—Ibid., p. 35.
“cold war liberal”—Haseler, p. 10.
“all the gobbledegook”—Ibid., p. 199.
“a national-socialist member”—Rhodes Boyson (ed.), 1985: An Escape from Orwell’s 1984: A Conservative Path to Freedom (Churchill Press, 1975), p. ix.
“It’s much more frightening”—Radio Times, September 19, 1977.
“It is a satire”—Howard Brenton, Plays: One (Methuen, 1986), p. 108.
“The Justice Department Is Watching You”—2000 AD, Prog 1984, May 31, 2016.
“I think progress is the biggest enemy on Earth”—Troyer interview, March 1977.
“no one creates utopias anymore”—Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000 (Vintage, 2002), p. 117.
“improbable tyranny”—Burgess, p. 102.
“everything seemed ready”—Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché, p. 116.
“Novels don’t care”—Ibid., p. 120.
“Look, you know what happened to Winston”—The Jam, “Standards,” This Is the Modern World (Polydor, 1977).
“Now it’s 1984”—Dead Kennedys, “California Über Alles” (Optional Music, 1979).
“It’s 1984!”—The Clash, “1977” (CBS, 1977).
CHAPTER 12: ORWELLMANIA
“Orwell was floating around”—Jack Mathews, The Battle for Brazil (Applause, 1998), p. 45.
“Information Purification Directives” etc.—“1984” (Chiat/Day, 1983).
“thunderclap”—Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Little, Brown, 2011), p. 162.
“kick[ing] around phrases”—Steve Hayden, “ ‘1984’: As Good As It Gets,” Adweek, January 30, 2011.
“They said it would be irresponsible”—Adelia Cellini, “1984: 20 Years On,” Macworld, January 2004.
“people in bar rooms” and “No commercial”—Nancy Millman, “Apple ‘1984’ Spot: A Love/Hate Story,” Advertising Age, January 30, 1984.
“Will Big Blue dominate”—Isaacson, p. 169.
“a B-grade interpretation”—Millman.
“THERE IS ONLY ONE YEAR LEFT!”—Nat Hentoff, “The New Age of No Privacy,” Village Voice, February 1, 1983.
“casting its appraising eye”—Village Voice, February 1, 1983.
“almost as much impact”—Geoffrey Stokes, “The History of the Future,” Village Voice, February 1, 1983.
“Orwell’s decade”—Günter Grass, Headbirths, or The Germans Are Dying Out (Secker & Warburg, 1982), p. 67.
“If you don’t have an opinion”—Michael Robertson, “Orwell’s 1984—Prophecy or Paranoia?,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1983.
“black plague”—Quoted in Leopold Labedz, “Will George Orwell Survive 1984?,” Encounter, June 1984.
“We can’t control everything.”—John Ezard, “Big Brother Looks Ready for Big Business in 1984,” Guardian, December 28, 1983.
“the Ministry of Nightlife”—The New Show (NBC, 1984).
“WAR IS PEACE”—Reprinted in Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, p. 234.
TV Guide figured—TV Guide, January 18, 1984.
“Big Brother meets the band with the Big Balls”—Musician, March 1983.
“The Orwell/Animal Farms/1984”—Quoted in Ezard.
“Can we be allowed to forget”—James Cameron, “All Together Now,” Guardian, January 3, 1984.
“a kind of Orwellian nightmare”—Spectator, January 7, 1984.
“the already hackneyed analogies”—Hansard, HC, January, 25, 1984, vol. 52, col. 1001.
“thinking about all the George Orwell jokes”—Reprinted in Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, p. 235.
“As a forecaster”—The Futurist, December 1983.
“proved wrong”—Isaac Asimov, “It’s Up to the Scientists . . . to Refute Orwell’s 1984,” Science Digest, August 1979.
“According to Orwell”—Reprinted in Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, p. 257.
“a dirty little scoundrel”—Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy,” CW XVI, 2481, p. 237.
“Big Brother’s screaming”—Oingo Boingo, “Wake Up (It’s 1984)” (A&M, 1983).
“I never read Orwell’s book”—New York Times, January 1, 1984. 234 “I believe”—Cathy Booth, “1984—The Year of the Book,” UPI, January 1, 1984.
“I do not believe”—Orwell’s Statement on Nineteen Eighty-Four, CW XX, 3636, p. 136.
“I am not in the prediction business”—Robertson.
“never has any single man”—George Steiner, “Killing Time,” New Yorker, December 12, 1983.
“I’ve fucked up my life”—David Plante, Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three (Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1983), p. 99.
“spouted Orwell like a fountain”—Variety, April 25, 1984.
“the Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey”—Photoplay, December 1984.
“We had to guarantee” and following quotes—Author interview with Michael Radford.
“You know, this really is frightening”—Fiona Kieni, “John Hurt on Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Metro Magazine, no. 65, 1984.
“We were lumbered”—Guardian, October 11, 1984.
“general knowledge that was in the atmosphere”—Terry Gilliam, Charles Alverson & Bob McCabe, Brazil: The Evolution of the 54th Best British Film Ever Made (Orion, 2001), p. 12.
“Brazil came specifically”—Salman Rushdie, “An Interview with Terry Gilliam,” Believer, March 2003.
“The Ministry needs terrorists”—Gilliam, Alverson and McCabe, p. 157.
“purges and vaporisations”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 48.
“somewhere in the twentieth century”—Brazil (dir. Terry Gilliam, 1985).
“We used a lot of the same locations”—Interview with Radford.
“1985”�
�Mathews, p. 93.
“a stoned, slapstick 1984”—Quoted in ibid., p. 144.
“To me, the heart of Brazil”—Rushdie, “An Interview with Terry Gilliam.”
“Quite obviously they tend to stimulate”—Orwell, “Personal Notes on Scientifiction,” Leader Magazine, July 21, 1945, CW XVII, 2705, p. 220.
“a super state type of hero”—“Are Comics Fascist?,” Time, October 22, 1945.
“people who don’t switch off the news”—Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (DC, 1990), p. 5.
Moore’s long list of influences—Alan Moore, “Behind the Painted Smile,” Warrior #17, March 1, 1984, reprinted in ibid., p. 267.
“nightmarish future England”—Ibid., p. 108.
“it would take something”—Ibid., p. 6.
“the wariness”—Margaret Atwood, “What The Handmaid’s Tale Means in the Age of Trump,” New York Times, March 10, 2017.
“silently at odds”—Atwood, Curious Pursuits, p. 335.
“speculative fiction”—Ingersoll (ed.), p. 161.
“There is more than one kind of freedom”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Vintage, 1996), p. 34.
“I would not include anything”—Margaret Atwood, “Haunted by The Handmaid’s Tale,” Guardian, January 21, 2012.
“normal intercourse”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 319.
“a political act”—Ibid., p. 133.
“a refugee from the past”—Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, p. 239.
“Let’s say it’s an antiprediction”—Atwood, New York Times.
“I understood him up to a point”—Time, November 28, 1983.
“one of the most disgusting books”—Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left (Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), p. 81.
“Normally, to speculate”—Norman Podhoretz, “If Orwell Were Alive Today,” Harper’s, January 1983.
“the sort of well-heeled power worshiper”—Christopher Hitchens and Norman Podhoretz, Harper’s, February 1983.
National Review—See Robert C. de Camara, “Homage to Orwell,” National Review, May 13, 1983; E. L. Doctorow, “On the Brink of 1984,” Playboy, February 1983.
Tribune published—See Tribune, January 6, 13, 20, 27, 1984.
“a year of hope”—Guardian, December 31, 1983.
“tomb-robbers”—Neil Kinnock, “Shadow of the Thought Police,” London Times, December 31, 1983.
“we would have been taken so far”—The Sun, January 2, 1984.
“ideological overkill”—Paul Johnson, Spectator.
“a grim warning”—Quoted in Michael Glenny, “Orwell’s 1984 Through Soviet Eyes,” Index on Censorship, vol. 13, no. 4, August 1984.
“a fully realistic picture”—Quoted in Labedz.
“anti-Soviet agitation”—Glenny.
“No one has ever lived in Lilliput”—Guardian, January 8, 1984.
“How did he know?”—Timothy Garton Ash, “Orwell for Our Time,” Observer, May 6, 2001.
“probably the single Western author”—Quoted in Thomas Cushman and John Rodden (eds.), George Orwell Into the Twenty-First Century (Paradigm, 2004), p. 274.
“He was the first person”—Glenny.
“When I read the story”—Milan Šimečka, “A Czech Winston Smith,” Index on Censorship, vol. 13, no. 1, February 1984.
“The struggle of man against power”—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 3.
“an undifferentiated block of horrors”—Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, p. 255.
“In their talk of forty horrible years”—Ibid., p. 256.
“Amalrik is long dead”—Natan Sharansky, press conference, January 29, 1996.
“a ritualistic code”—Milovan Djilas, “The Disintegration of Leninist Totalitarianism,” in Irving Howe (ed.), 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century (Harper & Row, 1984), p. 140.
“it must show that power”—Françoise Thom, Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism, trans. Ken Connelly (Claridge Press, 1989), p. 118.
“His inner world consisted”—Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Granta, 2018), p. 65.
“She took it for granted”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 159.
“Our society is deeply ill”—Quoted in Gessen, p. 86.
“For Orwell the problem”—Labedz.
“The worst kind of Big Brother”—Bob Brewin, “Worldlink 2029,” Village Voice, February 1, 1983.
mechanical “brain”—Tribune, June 17, 1949, CW XX, 3649, p. 139.
“smash the old canard”—David Burnham, “The Computer, the Consumer and Privacy,” New York Times, March 4, 1984.
“If Big Brother could just get”—Walter Cronkite, “Orwell’s “1984”—Nearing?,” New York Times, June 5, 1983. “the complaisance, the eagerness”—John Corry, “TV: 1984 Revisited,” New York Times, June 7, 1983.
CHAPTER 13: OCEANIA 2.0
“The stubbornness of reality”—Quoted in Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale University Press, 1982), p. 255.
“Orwell feared”—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (Methuen, 1987), p. viii.
“In the Huxleyan prophecy”—Ibid., p. 160.
“I loved living in a world”—Andrew Smith, Totally Wired: On the Trail of the Great Dotcom Swindle (Simon & Schuster, 2012), p. 295.
“dilution and cheapening”—Estate of Orwell v. CBS, 00-c-5034 (ND Ill).
“asleep or awake”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 29.
“Orwell understood the difference”—Bernard Crick, “Big Brother Belittled,” Guardian, August 19, 2000.
“The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four ended in 1989”—Garton Ash.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four is about power out of control”—Independent, March 1, 2003.
“Oceania (the US and Britain)”—Guardian, December 31, 2002.
“Orwellian euphemisms”—David Fricke, “Bitter Prophet,” Rolling Stone, June 26, 2003.
“The war is waged”—Fahrenheit 9/11 (dir. Michael Moore, 2004).
“there is a war on”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 60.
“the reality-based community”—Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.
As a popular slogan put it—Daniel Kurtzman, “Learning to Love Big Brother/ George W. Bush Channels George Orwell,” SFgate.com, July 28, 2002.
“ ‘Orwell’ has been used”—Scott Lucas, Orwell (Haus, 2003), p. 138.
“Shakespeare doesn’t have the moral authority”—John Rodden, Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell’s Literary Siblings (University of Texas Press, 2006), p. 159.
“V was designed to warn”—Mihir Bhanage, “Never thought V would become a symbol of global rebellion,” TNN, March 1, 2017.
“Orwell imagined a huge change”—Philip Roth, “The Story Behind ‘The Plot Against America,’ ” New York Times, September 19, 2004.
“Any time there’s a new invention”—Author interview with Charlie Brooker for Empire, London, July 7, 2016.
“not the advancement of science”—Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, p. 8.
“The Ministry didn’t do this to us”—Fahrenheit 451 (HBO, 2018).
“Maybe Apple’s ‘1984’ ad” and “wasn’t a rupture”—Rebecca Solnit, “Poison Apples,” Harper’s, December 2014. “SECRETS ARE LIES”—Dave Eggers, The Circle (Penguin, 2014), p. 303.
“a new and glorious openness”—Ibid., p. 491.
“What happens to us”—Margaret Atwood, “When Privacy Is Theft,” New York Review of Books, November 21, 2013.
“warned us of the danger”—Edward Snowden, Alternative Christmas Message, Channel 4, December 25, 2013.
As President Obama—Press conference, California, June 7, 2013.
“very Orwellian”—All In With Chris Hayes, MSNBC, June 10, 2013.
“So, Are
We Living in 1984?”—Newyorker.com, June 11, 2013.
“So George Orwell was wrong”—Tilman Baumgaertel, “ ‘I am a communication artist’: Interview with Nam June Paik,” Rhizome.org, February 5, 2001.
“completely, irredeemably, outrageously wrong”—Peter Huber, Orwell’s Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest (Free Press, 1994), p. 235.
“the proles do the watching”—Ibid., p. 228.
“a development that promises”—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with an introduction by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin, 2003), p. xxv.
“We have entered the age”—Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, p. xxi.
“from Lisbon to Vladivostok”—Quoted in Snyder, p. 82.
“If the state so wishes”—Quoted in Gessen, p. 249.
“show business and propaganda”—Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia (Faber & Faber, 2015), p. 7.
“the very language and categories”—Ibid., p. 77.
“Versionland”—Guardian, September 15, 2018.
“They don’t require belief ”—Anne Applebaum, “A Warning from Europe: The Worst is Yet to Come,” The Atlantic, October 2018.
“the hottest literary property in town”—Hollywood Reporter online, April 3, 2017.
“the clock is already striking thirteen”—Variety.com, March 21, 2017.
“It went from zero” and following quotes—Author interview with Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, London, July 5, 2018.
“how do you begin to talk about?”—Icke and Macmillan, p. 17.
“How do we know the Party fell?”—Ibid., p. 95.
“What year is it?”—Ibid., p. 80.
“The people are not going to revolt”—Ibid., p. 89.
“I think dad would’ve been amused”—Daily Record, February 26, 2017.
“a continuous frenzy”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 220.
“something cruel”—Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, March 24, 1944, CW XVI, 2441, p. 133.
“may quit relying”—Robertson.
“crying hysterically”—Orwell, CW IX, p. 14.
“The People Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe”—Nicholas Thompson and Issie Lapowsky, “How Russian Trolls Used Meme Warfare to Divide America,” Wired.com, December 17, 2018.
“I believe the biggest risk”—Andrew Marantz, “Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet,” New Yorker, March 19, 2018.