“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever”
— O’Brien, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”
George Orwell didn’t get everything right. Contrary to popular myth, he often got things wrong. In “Old George’s Almanac” (Tribune, December 1945) for instance, he predicted that the US and Soviet Russia would do a postwar deal at Britain’s expense, that the Americans would suffer a postwar depression, that Germany would fall into banditry, and that Asia would turn xenophobic. He started the war thinking the British people wouldn’t fight and ended it expecting a collapse in the birth rate. He once argued that you could show your solidarity with people by killing them.
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