The BBC are taking liberties as they hijack George Orwell and try to present him as if all the things he represented are the same values and beliefs that inspires and motivates the BBC.
They are not.
What Orwell represents and fought for is the exact opposite of the highly fabricated news output that the BBC shapes and constructs in order not to provide us with genuine information but to alter our perceptions, views and behaviour so that they fall into line as near as possible with the BBC’s own or at least make stepping outside the BBC’s self-approved narrative a dangerous action as you soon find yourself labelled a right-wing, Facist, racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist little Englander. Your career will be over as you suddenly become ‘tainted’.
All of which makes the following the most ridiculous and ironic thing you may have heard in a while….
No longer ‘too left-wing’ for the BBC: George Orwell to stand outside original ‘Ministry of Truth’
He was the great scourge of faceless bureaucracy, political propaganda, doublethink, waffle and pretentious language.
So it seems apt that George Orwell should be honoured with a statute outside the headquarters of the BBC.
The work, expected to be unveiled next year, will show the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – whose real name was Eric Blair – looming over the entrance to the building where he once toiled fruitlessly, deep in thought, a cigarette in one hand.
A quotation carved into the wall next to him will offer timely advice to contemporary BBC staff reading: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
The BBC think it their job to make sure people don’t hear what they need to hear…you won’t get the truth about immigration from the BBC, you won’t get the truth about Islam from the BBC, you won’t get the truth about the EU from the BBC, you won’t get the truth about Israel from the BBC and you won’t get the truth about Jeremy Corbyn from the BBC.
Perhaps the quote carved into the wall should be altered slightly to reflect the true state of BBC ‘journalism’…
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what the BBC does not want them to hear.”
And that’s why sites like this exist…as the BBC might say itself…….
The bronze would be a powerful reminder of the role of the citizen journalist in “holding the BBC to account”.
The BBC’s aim is to make us truly love it and truly believe that it is the ministry of truth. Only then will it’s task be done. Orwell would have loathed the place for what it has become.
It has been said before that the BBC thinks 1984 is an instruction manual, not a warning of an undesirable future.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” So the BBC will be at liberty to tell us lies.
Orwell started as an imperial policeman in Burma and moved to the left. In the Spanish civil war he fought with a left wing militia, the anarchist leaning POUM and was wounded. He along with many others in this group were driven out of Spain in fear for their lives by the Soviet NKVD and the Spanish Communists, other POUMists were shot by people ostensibly on their own, left wing, republican side.
He made a similar journey in his writing as perhaps Melanie Philips another ex leftist who saw through what the authoritarian left is really about.
1984, Animal Farm are profoundly anti Communist books, homage to Catalonia and Keep the aspidistra flying contain writing that shows how his thinking and politics were developing.
He developed a detestation of both fascism and communism, seeing them as two sides of a coin of totalitarianism.
I think he ended up an English libertarian and escaped to Jura to work and raise his son.
The BBC s use of the quote is amusing, their current mission appears to be to assist the powerful, to tell the licence payers what they don’t want to hear, and know to be untrue. I don’t think this was ever Orwells intention.
This can be interpreted as a middle finger in the face of Orwell and his fans.
Quite frankly I’m amazed that they show Orwell with a cigarette! Has Action on Smoking and Health been made aware of this?! It could lead impressionable youngsters to think that smoking is cool etc etc etc
O/T – the Telegraph article shows Orwell’s grave in Sutton Courtenay, Oxon. If you are an Orwell fan it is well worth a visit, particulary in summer or autumn. A very beautiful part of England. Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, is buried in the same churchyard.
No, there isn’t a security camera outside of Orwell’s house, but there are many in the area as the article points out
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/george-orwell-big-brother-is-watching-your-house-7086271.html
Claiming Orwell as one of their own is either a bold Orwellian move in itself or a demonstration of wilful deluded ignorance of epic proportion. Such a statue is a a warning and accusation to the BBC not an endorsement, still not surprising coming from an organisation that can make 85 mangled bodies on the streets of Nice disappear and then consign the whole story to the traffic accident folder.
Ignorance or arrogance? I know what I think it is.
Orwell based Room 101 on his time at the BBC. The BBC made Room 101 into a crap comedy show. Says it all.
‘Everything faded into mist. The past was erased. The erasure was fogotten. The lie became the truth.’ Winston Smith’s diary, 1984.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Like most quotes of substance, this can be interpreted in different ways according to your standpoint.
Effectively, the BBC, most media and other progressive outlets DO believe that we do not understand what is in our own best interest. They believe that the Patriotism and Nationhood that underpin much of our lives is incompatible with the new world order of which the strait jacket liberal fascism of the EU so exemplifies . They believe that to maintain a definitive Christian culture flies in the face of their world melting pot. They believe in many more things. Most importantly – they believe that we are wrong and they are right and that it is their duty as forward seeing progressives to tell us so. Even if this means proscribing half truths and misrepresentations dressed up as facts contaminating much of their information (news) offerings.
This is what they believe.
‘A half truth is a whole lie’. ~Yiddish Proverb
To be fair, the BBC seem to have got some of what Orwell was saying.
After all-as he says liberty must entail the right to say things-show things and make things too-that people might not want to hear.
And the BBC do that.
WE don`t want to hear any of what follows-but the BBC say they`d be betraying Orwell if they did NOT tell us all this…
1. We must stay in the EU.
2. We must all vote Labour or Green, anything but Tory…and DEFINITELY not UKIP.
3. We must spend money we don`t have to invest in the BBC or wind turbines.
4. Climate Change is scarier that Islam.
5. Israel and the USA are Big Satan and his little brother…but Islam is just grand.
6. We must have a second referendum
7. Hillary Clintons the gal…and we`re not to bother her coronation with old tropes and nit-picking
8. Trump and Farage are evil
9. You must want a higher fee for the TV License, seeing as the BBC is so good, impartial and all.
10. Our job is to moan, lie, chivvy, cheat, seek restorative justice and compo, back criminals and migrants,…you`ll not be needing news until you sign up and buy into the Big Liberal Lies as evidenced by the BBC 24/7
11. Sport is God…and you`d better emote for charity as we stuff it down your uncaring throat.
See?…none of want to hear any of this-but the BBC insist on it all…and on our paying for them to refine and to drill the message into our thick heads.
Orwellian indeed.
The most appropriate aphorism to be applied to the BBC is from Lenin not Orwell, A lie told often enough becomes the truth.. I am sure that Orwell would be in full agreement that it should be applied to the 21st century BBC. It is disgraceful that the corporation should erect a statue to this fierce defender of free speech when they spend our money denying us that very same right.This is grotesque example of doublespeak and doublethink.
EXCELLENT article on George Orwell and the Big Brother Corporation in today’s Mail. Not sure if it’s available online, but worth buying just for that.
Here’s a link to the excellent article on George Orwell and Big Brother Corporation from today’s DM.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3735530/As-BBC-plans-statue-Orwell-loathed-broadcaster-become.html
Sample:
The quote to be inscribed on the wall of the BBC beside Orwell’s statue comes from the preface to Animal Farm: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
But that book’s great preface also contains some other penetrating observations: ‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban…
‘At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.
‘Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing…’
Such damning sentiments could hardly better describe the BBC’s approach to mass immigration in the past 15 years.
Its outlook was broadly that anyone in public life who even raised the subject for debate, much less dared to say that it was damaging for Britain, was dismissed as racist.
To the metropolitan executive classes, those who feared for our social fabric and for the future of schools and hospitals were simply Little Englanders without the brains to appreciate the multi- farious benefits of diversity.
The same could be said of the Beeb’s view of Eurosceptics, whom it seemed to dismiss as xenophobic idiots. Yet as the Brexit vote showed, anti-EU sentiment is shared by the majority of Britons.
The irony, of course, is that the powerful BBC, with its staggering annual TV licence revenue of £3.7 billion, is one of the worst offenders in the imposition of ‘groupthink’.
Recently BBC Radio 5’s Up All Night show was presented by Dotun Adebayo (pictured), who told a caller that appalling revelations about Muslim Pakistani grooming gangs were false
Another quote the BBC might find useful for the wall behind Orwell statue,
“Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait”.
In “Keep the Aspdistra Flying” first published 1936.
embolden,
I read it when I was about 16 and sort of got the message. Must re-read it !
As you might have guessed, I’m re-reading it now.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a very underestimated book. Perhaps because it so effectively lays bare the hypocrisy behind London Left bien pensants. The interactions with Ravelston (the Hampstead leftist) are brilliantly done.
I don’t think the current literary and media set would want to spend too much time discussing it….too close to home, even after all these years!
embolden,
I think Orwell is as much relevant today as he ever was. I bet he he is not taught in english literature classes today in British schools ! I re-read Animal Farm and 1984 about 3 years ago. Genius. The day may come when these books are banned in Europe.