"A glance at the 'Movers and Shakers' page of Amazon shows there's been an unusual reaction to the current NSA spying scandal: sales of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are up 9,538 per cent.
"It was somewhat ironic that the news of the NSA's systematic slurping of phone records and the subsequent revelations about the PRISM spying system were revealed in the same week as the 64th anniversary of the publication of Orwell's dark masterpiece. Now it seems people are buying it up either to learn about what could be, or simply because recent events reminded them to read the classic.
"There are certainly parallels with the current situation to be found
in the book, although we don't yet have clocks that strike thirteen.
Certainly Orwell's imagined telescreen that monitors the populace in
their living room could be seen as potentially very similar to
Microsoft's Xbox One, which comes with a Kinect system that can monitor your heartbeat.
"One might also draw parallels with the tale of a state locked in
perpetual war. The US military has officially been in combat for over
half of the years since the book was first published in 1949 (Korea
1950-53, Vietnam 1959-1975, Grenada 1983, Panama 1989-90, Kuwait 1991,
Bosnia 1995, and Afghanistan ongoing since 2001) and that's not
including 'police actions' and 'wars' against drugs and terror."Read the rest of the article HERE.
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