Last week, as the UK was still reeling from violent riots in England and Northern Ireland , Elon Musk retweeted a post featuring a picture of George Orwell on his social media site X. The image had the caption: ‘Boy did I call it or what?’ Musk added an emoji of an arrow hitting a bullseye. It was the latest incident that the great journalist, essayist and novelist had been invoked by the South Africa-born billionaire to make a point about the direction of modern society.
Professor Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Foundation and official historian for Orwell’s old employer the BBC , was incandescent. ‘What you’re looking at is the terrible ripping out of context and complexity and nuance of Orwell’s work,’ she told Metro . For years, Professor Seaton has watched as the writer is adopted as a hero by controversial right-wing figures who see him as a champion for uninhibited free speech – seemingly based entirely on his most famous work, Nineteen Eighty-Four .
She said: ‘Orwell would never have said, “You can say anything you want,” if it produces real riots.’ It’s a ‘fundamental misreading’ of the book, she argued, that has led to a dramatic oversimplification of the world he was trying to warn people about: not any large government, but totalitarian government. ð ̄ https://t.
co/A0KZtLbnF6 ‘What they’re getting wrong about Nineteen Eighty-Four is that they’re using it against ‘the state’ and Orwell was using it against a tyranni.