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Read other letters about this article
Good article.
George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was intended as a warning of how the world would develop if certain current trends of 1948 persisted.
In the nightmarish world of Nineteen Eighty-Four government officials of Minitru (The Ministry of Truth) were tasked with constantly consigning history to the "memory hole" and replacing it with "official versions".
While Orwell got most of it right, what he didn't foresee would be that media corporations would actually do the government's dirty work for profit. (No doubt this omission was largely because his own personal experience lay in working for the propaganda department of the BBC in World War II.)
However there is little doubt that we are living in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four and that the propaganda system is so powerful that the majority of the proles don't even notice that it exists. Not only that, but they are prepared to pay a substantial part of their income for bigger, better TVs, cable, satellite etc. to better deliver the propaganda to their homes and families.
Oh, well, democracy was a bold experiment, but the odds were always against it lasting long.
