Sublime

As George Orwell pointed out in “Politics and the English Language,” an essay written in 1946 but often cited during the wars in Cambodia, Vietnam and Iraq, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

The Daily Mail, with its tales of red revolution financed by Moscow, was even more wildly wrong than usual.

It’s the surprise part that Orwell couldn’t predict. He was looking in the wrong direction. Total surveillance. The privatisation of the private.

Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free inside his own mind and distil or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will be too stupid to recognise them?

There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.