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.
‘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 tyrannical state,’ Professor Seaton said.
‘He wasn’t using it against ‘the state’, any state. I think that’s the fundamental difference.’
She added: ‘The real joke is, have we got an Orwell who could take on the personal power exercised by one man over the world’s communications – Musk?’
It’s not just Musk – the proud owner of a ‘What Would Orwell Think’ T-shirt – who has summoned the author’s name to make a point.
After X removed Donald Trump’s account due to his role in the January 6 US Capitol riots in 2021, his son, Donald Trump Jr, wrote: ‘We are living Orwell’s 1984. Free-speech no longer exists in America.’
But Professor Seaton, who teaches media history at the University of Westminster, argued: ‘George Orwell is not a free speech fundamentalist. He’s a reality fundamentalist.’
She pointed to one of the most famous passages in the dystopian masterpiece, in which the main character Winston defines freedom as ‘the freedom to say that two plus two make four’.
In her view, that means those in power can’t deny incontrovertible facts – not that opinions should be held to the same standard.
Far from being right-wing himself, Orwell once said that everything he wrote after 1936 was ‘written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it’.
In books like Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia, as well as essays like The Lion and the Unicorn, he argues strongly against the politics of both the far left and the far right and in support of a less radical wing of the left.
Professor Seaton, whose organisation hands out the prestigious annual Orwell Prizes for political writing, said the solution for those in danger of misinterpreting him is simple.
‘The best antidote for that is to read Orwell himself,’ she said.
‘People can use writers in ways they do, but you have to read.’
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