Now right-wing, anti-‘woke’ doublethink has come for George Orwell

Have you heard that the writer who invented the Thought Police has fallen victim to modern-day thought-policing? Perhaps not, if you don’t follow anti-“woke,” right-wing media, but in their telling, George Orwell is headed for the memory hole.

Anna Funder, a biographer of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, recently called Orwell “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent” at a literary festival in Cheltenham, England. This comment was received by the Daily Mail, the Gateway Pundit and the Daily Caller, among others, as heralding Orwell’s imminent demise — “The Left Is Seriously Trying to Cancel George Orwell Now,” as the Daily Caller put it.

On social media, people went further, putting the cancellation in the past tense. One tweet — “They cancelled George Orwell lol” — garnered an “Uh what” response from Elon Musk.

A similar furor resulted when my recent novel was announced in 2021, described by the publisher as a “feminist” retelling of Orwell’s classic “1984.” The very idea of such a book was called “Orwellian” and compared to the erasure and falsification of history in “1984.”

The tone of these reactions was invariably knowing: Of course, the woke were always coming for Orwell; we predicted it all along. They marvel at the irony. As the Daily Caller concluded in its piece on Funder’s remark, “If only someone had written a book warning about this sort of thing.”

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