George orwell deathbed interview

More than 60 years after his death and the close­ly pre­ced­ing pub­li­ca­tion of his best-known nov­el 1984, we look to George Orwell as a kind of prophet of the ills of cor­po­ratism, social­ism, author­i­tar­i­an­ism, total­i­tar­i­an­ism — any pow­er­ful ‑ism, essen­tial­ly, in which we can find nasty, free­dom-destroy­ing impli­ca­tions.

The BBC doc­u­men­tary Orwell: A Life in Pic­tures, which we fea­tured a few years back, makes a point of high­light­ing Orwell’s “warn­ing” to what he saw as a fast corporatizing/socializing/authoriatarianizing/totalitarianizing world.

In the film’s final dra­ma­tized scene above (watch the com­plete film here), the re-cre­at­ed Orwell him­self makes the fol­low­ing omi­nous pre­dic­tion:

Allow­ing for the book, after all, being a par­o­dy, some­thing like 1984 could actu­al­ly hap­pen.

This is the direc­tion the world i