Authored by Bert Olivier via The Brownstone Institute, To some readers it may seem like a rhetorical question to ask whether the narrative of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (or 1984), first published in Britain in 1949, has somehow left its pages and settled, like an ominous miasma, over the contours of social reality. Yet, closer inspection – which means avoiding compromised mainstream news outlets – discloses a disquieting state of affairs. Everywhere we look in Western countries, from the United Kingdom, through Europe to America (and even India, whose ‘Orwellian digital ID system’ was lavishly praised by British...