Reading Classic Literature? That Can Make You an Enemy of The People.

Here’s the ultimate irony. One of the greatest works of fiction of the twentieth century was Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. In his novel, Orwell portrayed a dystopian society ruled by Big Brother. Among the features of that society was a “memory hole” where all unapproved books and newspapers were fed into a furnace and destroyed forever. Political opponents of Big Brother were simply made to disappear by burning all references to the individual in question.

The question for us is whether Nineteen Eighty-Four is really fiction or a highly prophetic and accurate look at a future that has now come to pass. As described in this article, the latter interpretation seems nearer the truth.

The article describes a new program run by the UK government to identify so-called “terrorists” who should be put under surveillance by the state. One might expect that an anti-terrorist program would involve tracking weapons, bomb-making materials or perhaps recruiting efforts for foreign terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS. No.

This effort, called the Prevent program, identifies certain books as “red flags” pointing toward potential terrorist mindsets. Of course, one of the books that marks you as a terrorist is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Other books on the list include the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad and works by C. S. Lewis including The Chronicles of Narnia. (N.B., Tolkien and Lewis were both devout Catholics).

So, we’ve come full circle. A book that warns about a fascist society of total surveillance that bans books ends up getting put on a watch list for surveillance by a fascist society.

Let’s not pick on the UK either. The same kinds of witch hunts are taking place in the U.S. every day.

My advice is if you have hard copies of books, save them as long as you can. It’s easier to erase digital records than hard copies.

A group of “sensitivity readers” in the UK are now re-writing the original James Bond novels by Ian Fleming. I have numerous copies of the original Bond series, including a number of first editions. I’m keeping them safe. The critics, censors, and government surveillance types can go pound sand.

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