The US Does 1984 With A Zombie Oligarch Twist

I will be producing an essay a month for paying subscribers, that covers more fundamental issues, available at the beginning of each month; this is the first of them. I plan to cover the internal dynamics of China, Europe, Russia, Iran and India together with pieces on their foreign policy strategies. Then at the 1st anniversary of the Trump administration take stock of the US domestic and geopolitical positions.

The truth about the book “1984” is that its author George Orwell had never been to the Soviet Union and in fact based much of his novel on the places where he worked - the BBC and the British Ministry of Information. Many speculate that “Big Brother” is in fact based upon the then Minister of Information, Bill Bracken, who his employees (the author reported to him) referred to as B.B., with the Ministry of Information being the basis for the “Ministry of Truth”. The character “Winston Smith” is of course based on Orwell himself, who spent WW2 being resentful against the extensive censorship regime within which he worked. The only political repressive and authoritarian regime that Orwell had any knowledge of was in fact his own Britain. His own deep aversion to rats also found its way onto the pages of his work.

Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) was born in 1903 into a wealthy British family in India (a great-great grandfather had owned slave plantations in Jamaica). His father oversaw the production of opium in India for sale in China. His French mother was the daughter of a man that had speculative investments in the colonies. His mother moved back to England in 1904 with the children, while his father remained in India. Blair went to private boarding schools, finishing with Eton which he left at the age of 18, after which he took a posting with the Imperial Police in Burma; where he served for six years. His own written words display a significant amount of racism and lack of empathy for the local population, over which he lorded in relatively senior positions at a young age. After leaving the Imperial Police, he became a writer, which included slumming it in the working class neighbourhoods of London and Paris while supported by his family when necessary, after which he lived in his parent’s house from 1929 to 1934 while also teaching at a private school. After that he spent a year in London, before his travels in the English north that lead to The Road To Wigan Pier.