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George orwell why i write essay5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() So here we are in all the consciousness, subconsciousness and unconsciousness of the 2020s. At root, a slogan’s a war cry, whether it’s take back control, make America great again, kauf nicht beim Juden, it’s the real thing, I’m lovin’ it, just do it. The word slogan derives from Scottish Gaelic, from the words sluagh and ghairm, meaning war and cry. Though some are more powerful than others, all slogans are powerful. It also gave me an acute consciousness of the working of power in language. I see now how it equipped me at the age of 14 with a way to register not just that power will corrupt but how it will. I was a much earlier reader of Animal Farm, 40 years earlier, in a class in Inverness High School in the Highlands of Scotland, where it was on the excellent school curriculum. I was a latecomer to reading 1984, and when I found out that some of its original possible titles were The Last Man in Europe and The Last European I shook my head at the synchronicity, because I finally read it for the first time in 2016, in the initial shock of the EU referendum which, by proffering what looked like a future, shunted this country back into its past. « Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past. » This is one of your most famous examples of sloganeering, straight out of the totalitarian state, Oceania, in your great novel 1984. ![]()
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