Crossword clues for orwellian
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1950 (first attested in Mary McCarthy), from English author George Orwell (pseudonym of Eric Blair, 1903-1950), especially in reference to his novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four." Ironically, it has come to be used in reference to the totalitarian systems he satirized.It is as if George Orwell had conceived the nightmare instead of analyzed it, helped to create it instead of helping to dispel its euphemistic thrall. [Clive James]
Wikipedia
"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past, including the " unperson"—a person whose past existence is expunged from the public record and memory, practised by modern repressive governments. Often, this includes the circumstances depicted in his novels, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four but political double-speak is criticized throughout his work, such as in Politics and the English Language.
Nineteen Eighty-Four uses themes from life in the Soviet Union and wartime life in Great Britain as sources for many of its motifs.
Orwell's ideas about personal freedom and state authority developed when he was a British colonial administrator in Burma. He was fascinated by the effect of colonialism on the individual, requiring acceptance of the idea that the colonialist exists only for the good of the colonised.
There has also been a great deal of discourse on the possibility that Orwell galvanised his ideas of oppression during his experience, and his subsequent writings in the English press, in Spain. Orwell was a member of the Catalan Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) militia and suffered suppression and escaped arrest by the Comintern faction working within the Second Spanish Republic. Following his escape he made a strong case for defending the Spanish revolution from the Communists there, and the misinformation in the press at home. During this period he formed strong ideas about the reportage of events, and their context in his own ideas of imperialism and democracy.
This often brought him into conflict with literary peers such as W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender.
Usage examples of "orwellian".
Ministry of Everything, its sixteen-story clock tower rising in Orwellian fashion above the decaying city around it.
Iraqis have learned to adapt and survive in this Orwellian nightmare, but they live their lives on a tightrope, knowing that the slightest misstep could plunge them into a vat of acid--figuratively or literally.
Even without any contribution, Stuart Ressler was somewhere in the permanent files, many times, in immense Orwellian lists.
Nathanial Delaney, the new kid in school who finds himself quickly siding with a handful of other outsiders against the Orwellian excesses that have taken hold of the rest of their peers -- as well as most of the adults and figures of authority in Cheshunt.
It was his conviction that the United States was becoming part of the Third World and that their grandchildren would inhabit a mildly poisoned earth and endure lives of back-breaking drudgery under an increasingly Orwellian government.
John Murdoch wants, at first, only to comprehend and escape the Orwellian horrors of his nightlocked city, and find an elusive lost paradise called Shell Beach.
I asked myself, that the Orwellian message stated in the opening paragraph of this review was buried in the script of X-Men, that some capybara-skin-booted, Hugo-Boss-clad producer had this much clever self-consciousness?
One was a map of east Germany, or the German Democratic Republic, the rather Orwellian name its rulers prefer.
Things may be deleted for a variety of reasons, but nothing is totally lost in an Orwellian memory hole.
Quigley, former Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Bill Clinton's mentor, grasped the Orwellian implications of this over 30 years ago.
This ceaseless boosterism, in the service of order, health, prosperity, and the Singaporean way, quickly induces a species of low-key Orwellian dread.