In 2022, in the months after Russia’s President Putin announced his “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine, George Orwell’s 1984 rocketed up the charts to become the top-selling e-book in Russia—and no wonder! The verbal gymnastics employed to avoid calling the Ukraine war a “war” did indeed seem pretty Orwellian.
Two years later, the 75th-anniversary edition of 1984 currently ranks 10th on Amazon.com’s list of most-ordered Classic Literature & Fiction books, while Animal Farm (written four years before 1984) is right behind in 16th place. This is no surprise to Laura Beers, professor of British history and Orwell scholar at American University in Washington, DC. As she explains, “We are living in an Orwellian moment.”
But she doesn’t necessarily mean what you probably think she means.
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