(3 of 3)
Therein lies Orwell's lasting power. He holds out hope that ordinary citizens may see through systems and rhetoric, may speak and write the truth to each other, and demand the truth from their leaders. It takes little skill to imagine the furious response Orwell would have provoked on both sides of the DMZ, or what he would have said about the windy self-righteousness of the U.N., or about the excesses of Peking, Moscow, Paris and Washington. The need for an Orwell is more acute now than it was a generation ago. But the tonic power of his writings is still available to anyone who has, or appreciates, an independent mind. It is not necessarily 1984 that his writings concern; it could as well be 1975. ∙Stefan Kanfer
* Other writers have propelled words into the public consciousness; Orwell has done so with a figure. The 1974 World Food Conference in Rome was expected to produce a ten-year projection. Instead an eleven-year study was offered, presumably to avoid the horrific overtones of 1984.