Word: totalitarianisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...readers, Orwell is known chiefly through last year's Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was mortally ill with tuberculosis when he wrote it. But Orwell's mind had never been more lucid. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the grimmest, the most logically imagined and credible preview of the totalitarian state in print.* It is not so much a satire as a portent. The 18th Century's great Dean Swift, whom Orwell admired and to whom he has been compared, is at best a distant literary cousin. Gulliver's Travels discursively, and sometimes vindictively, pilloried comparatively commonplace human failings...
...traditions and perpetrated by its own rules, yet given a recognized status by a higher authority, must be an unconscious agent for the spread of ideas hostile to all forms of tyranny. No authoritarian state, past, present or future could tolerate for long such foci of anti-totalitarian infection...