Make Orwell Fiction Again - Recon Eye

It is a wish that George Orwell’s dystopias would go back to being just novels. Mass surveillance, propaganda that rewrites the past and language bent until it means its opposite were meant as warnings in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. The phrase asks for a world where those books once again read as fiction rather than as a description of the news.

A large, grainy white eye with an amber iris and a black cross in place of the pupil, framed by the words Make Orwell Fiction Again in white and amber capitals. The staring eye recalls the ever-present gaze of Big Brother, while the cross suggests a target sight or a crossed-out watcher, depending on how you read it.

Published in June 1949, Orwell’s novel follows Winston Smith, a clerk at the Ministry of Truth in the totalitarian superstate Oceania, whose job is to rewrite historical records to match the Party’s current line. His secret love affair and rebellion end in arrest and torture in Room 101. The book is a study of how total power controls not only behaviour but truth, memory and thought itself.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four the slogan appears on posters everywhere, under the face of the Party’s leader, and telescreens in every home both broadcast and watch. Big Brother may not even exist as a person; he is the face of a system of constant surveillance. Today the phrase describes any intrusive monitoring by states or institutions.

Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at once and accept both, as in the Party slogans War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Newspeak is the Party’s engineered language, designed to shrink vocabulary until rebellious thoughts become literally unthinkable. Orwell explains it in an appendix to the novel.

Orwellian describes situations, policies or language that resemble the world of Orwell’s novels – pervasive surveillance, official lies, euphemisms that disguise their real meaning and the rewriting of history. Orwell himself examined political euphemism in his essay Politics and the English Language (1946).

Yes. In his essay Why I Write (1946) Orwell says that every line of serious work he had written since 1936 was written against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as he understood it. He fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, wrote Homage to Catalonia (1938), and his novels attack totalitarianism of every colour, including its Stalinist form in Animal Farm (1945).

The panopticon is a prison design proposed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in letters published in 1791 – a ring of cells around a central watchtower, so that inmates never know whether they are being observed and therefore behave as if they always are. Michel Foucault made it a symbol of modern disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish (1975), a close cousin of Orwell’s telescreen.

Eric Arthur Blair. He was born in 1903 in Motihari, British India, and died in London in 1950. He adopted the pen name George Orwell for his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), taking George from England’s patron saint and Orwell from a river in Suffolk.

For readers of Orwell and Huxley, students of politics, philosophy and literature, privacy advocates, librarians and anyone who has ever covered their laptop camera. It is available as a unisex classic T-shirt, women’s T-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker.