Orwell's Revenge - Peter Huber  ## Metadata - Author: **Peter Huber** - Full Title: Orwell's Revenge - Category: #books ## Highlights - April 4, 1984 . . . To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—Greetings! George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jnmwwbrmrfsb5p55a6r2vwn4)) - The second transcendent political reality in 1984 is the “mutability of the past.” There is no such thing as honest history any more; what is done can always be undone. Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite old newspaper articles so that every Party prediction is vindicated. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jnmxb0vyb5xs53zg5skd5pe6)) - The third key political theme in 1984 is doublethink. Doublethink is a “vast system of mental cheating,” the “power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” To engage in doublethink is to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jnmxknvcpm0jk81mq27nb3c7)) - Each of the three chapters is titled after one of the three slogans of the Party Winston avidly reads “War Is Peace” and “Ignorance Is Strength.” But he never does get to read the third chapter, “Freedom Is Slavery.” Still, the two he gets through make up quite a long tract in the middle of 1984. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jnmxrkgcecavbk1jxev8xmh5))