August 17th 2024.
Elon Musk has a habit of mentioning George Orwell in his posts on social media. Just last week, while the UK was still recovering from the violent riots that took place in England and Northern Ireland, Musk shared a post on his social media platform, X. The post featured a picture of George Orwell and had a caption that read, "Boy did I call it or what?" Musk even added an emoji of an arrow hitting a bullseye. This was not the first time that the legendary journalist, essayist, and novelist had been referenced by the South Africa-born billionaire to illustrate his thoughts on the current state of society.
Professor Jean Seaton, the director of the Orwell Foundation and the official historian for Orwell's former employer, the BBC, was quite upset about this. She expressed her frustration to Metro, saying, "What you're witnessing is the awful act of taking Orwell's work out of context and simplifying it to fit one's own views." She has observed for many years how Orwell is idolized by controversial right-wing figures who see him as a champion of free speech. This, however, is solely based on his most famous work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. According to her, it is a "fundamental misinterpretation" of the book, which has led to a gross oversimplification of the world that Orwell was trying to warn us about. She clarifies that Orwell's target was not any large government, but rather totalitarian governments.
In one of his tweets, Musk's "What Would Orwell Think" t-shirt, purchased with pride, was seen. However, he isn't the only one who has invoked the author's name to drive a point home. When X removed Donald Trump's account in the aftermath of the January 6th riots at the US Capitol in 2021, his son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted, "We are living in Orwell's 1984. Free speech no longer exists in America." But Professor Seaton, who is also a media history professor at the University of Westminster, argues that "George Orwell is not a free speech fundamentalist. He is a fundamentalist of reality." She points to a famous passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the protagonist, Winston, defines freedom as "the freedom to say that two plus two make four." In her view, this means that those in power cannot deny indisputable facts, rather than holding opinions to the same standard.
Contrary to the belief that Orwell was right-wing, he once stated that everything he wrote after 1936 was "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." In his books, such as Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia, and his essays, like The Lion and the Unicorn, he vehemently opposes the politics of both the far left and the far right, advocating for a more moderate wing of the left. Professor Seaton, who is in charge of the highly regarded Orwell Prizes for political writing, has a simple solution for those who may misinterpret Orwell's message. "The best remedy for that is to read Orwell's works," she asserts. "People can use writers for their own purposes, but they must read and understand their words."
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