Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ Rediscovering Orwell： Introducing an Illustrated Edition of 1984

00:00:00.000 Shame on you, you sensorious thug! 0.99

00:00:30.880 What's the most important book you've ever read? 0.99

00:00:34.540 Well, I think for many people they'd say the Bible.

00:00:36.780 It's not just a religious text, it's a work of literature, it's the archetypes of our culture.

00:00:41.940 Maybe another name you would suggest are the collective works of William Shakespeare.

00:00:46.040 But if you're interested in politics and freedom, I put it to you that one of the most important books ever written

00:00:54.240 was by George Orwell, called 1984, so powerful that to this day the word Orwellian means a totalitarian regime

00:01:05.140 where civil liberties are being stamped out by the state.

00:01:08.640 It's an amazing book, published in the 1940s, and to this day you can find the book, but it's cramped.

00:01:16.680 The writing is cramped.

00:01:18.060 It's very hard to find an illustrated version of the book, but how do you get young people to pick up 1984 and read it?

00:01:26.980 Well, I guess you could be inspired by Bibles. 0.94

00:01:30.020 There's a lot of children's illustrated Bibles out there.

00:01:32.960 How do you make the book more accessible, not just to grown-ups, but to teenagers too?

00:01:38.440 I think more than ever they need to read 1984.

00:01:43.340 And so Rebel News has teamed up with a great artist, and we've done something we've never done before.

00:01:50.320 I'm very excited about it.

00:01:51.640 We'll talk to you about it today.

00:01:53.440 We have taken the first Canadian edition of Orwell's 1984.

00:01:59.520 We have laid the book out in a beautiful, breathable typeface to make it easier to read than the cramped text of the original from the 1940s.

00:02:09.580 And most importantly, Paul Revoche, a world-class illustrator, has done 30 original drawings inspired by the book's story to make the thing come alive, to fire the imagination, and to get the next generation to read this.

00:02:29.140 I first read 1984 when I was in high school.

00:02:32.460 I read it again in university.

00:02:33.740 I've read it again as an adult.

00:02:34.980 Well, this book is not just a classic.

00:02:39.580 It's as fresh as today's headlines.

00:02:41.440 And for the course of the next 15 minutes, I'm delighted to be here in the studio with the man who made this book come alive, the artist Paul Revoche.

00:02:49.480 Paul, great to see you.

00:02:50.460 Likewise, isn't it?

00:02:51.280 Great to be here.

00:02:52.000 You probably know this book as well as any Orwell scholar now because you've spent so much time with it, not just laying it out so beautifully, but then coming up with the list of 30 illustrations reflecting the book.

00:03:08.280 But how has reacquainting yourself with the book 1984 changed your way of thinking?

00:03:14.940 Well, it's given me great insight into the book.

00:03:18.160 And like you, I read it initially in high school and it made a great impression on me.

00:03:23.520 It was very gripping.

00:03:25.180 And I had reread it a couple of times through the years.

00:03:27.680 But I guess I got the most out of it having to work on this project, which is in having to set up all the different illustrations, the spacing of them, choosing the moments to illustrate, I had to really kind of go through it with a fine tooth comb.

00:03:43.700 So you're exactly right.

00:03:45.100 You get to know it in a deeper way.

00:03:46.800 And I guess as we talk, we could get into some of this.

00:03:49.760 But personally, for me, what I found is it's not only what it is on the surface, which is a gripping suspense thriller.

00:03:56.880 There's also a romance story.

00:03:59.320 But there's a very deep commentary on, which is the surface of that commentary is what people usually pick up on, in my opinion, the more dramatic elements, which are completely valid.

00:04:08.780 But there's also a very much deeper analysis, which is still relevant for today.

00:04:14.340 So in the book within the book, which, you know, it's in the story, the main character, Winston Smith, he's given a forbidden book, which is produced by the Brotherhood, which purports to explain the true story of the inside of this totalitarian world.

00:04:32.440 So to round this out, when you read this carefully, you see that Orwell is not only explaining what might come, but in my opinion, what's already here.

00:04:42.940 Even back when he wrote it in 1949, but much more so as we see revealed today, particularly with the last three years.

00:04:50.580 There's so many things in that book written more than 70 years ago that he had a kind of prophecy, like in every home, a telescreen pumping out propaganda from the dictatorship, but at the same time, spying on it.

00:05:06.700 Exactly.

00:05:07.020 And, you know, in the 40s and 50s, that must have sounded absurd.

00:05:10.500 But what's that other than our own computers and our phones?

00:05:14.340 Yeah, I mean, it's eerie the level to which Orwell predicted the world of today.

00:05:19.780 Now, he didn't completely predict it, which is interesting.

00:05:21.960 A lot of writers and people who analyze this stuff, they contrast it with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which was more sort of concentrated on biology and also a different approach.

00:05:33.380 We could get into that, whereas Orwell was talking about more the rigid sort of Soviet totalitarianism.

00:05:39.620 So in the book, it's kind of a little bit retro, although still very relevant.

00:05:44.600 The retro part is the machinery.

00:05:47.340 In other words, Orwell didn't predict digital things, nanotechnology, you know, biotechnology, computers, the Internet, all that stuff.

00:05:55.400 So he has the protagonist, Winston Smith, who works in the Ministry of Truth, which is really the Ministry of Lies and Propaganda.

00:06:04.800 He has him working on something called the Speak Right Machine.

00:06:08.100 And it's a machine where he speaks into the microphone.

00:06:11.420 We'll show it in one of the illustrations.

00:06:12.960 And it instantly kind of copies down what he's saying.

00:06:17.660 And what he's doing is, on the fly, they're altering the present and the past and even the future because he's re-editing newspapers.

00:06:26.540 So the book is all based on sort of newspaper level from the past of delivering information.

00:06:32.100 Having said that, everything else that he did, it's completely relevant to our digital age because we see the same things happening.

00:06:38.360 Yeah, I mean, in the novel, his job, and what a crazy job, was to take newspaper articles from the archives.

00:06:46.720 And if his country was at war with a new enemy, they would make it so it was always thus.

00:06:52.360 So he would go back to old newspapers, cut out the story that was inconvenient, paste in the latest version, and then file it.

00:07:01.080 And then maybe he would come back to it and do the reverse another day.

00:07:03.920 And so, yes, there was the cutting and the gluing and the taping, but really, other than the technology, that's exactly what's being done now with deleting things on the internet, rewriting books.

00:07:15.160 Oh, yes.

00:07:15.600 And so, although some of his technology, he couldn't have imagined it, the underlying concept of destroying the past so you control the present and you can shape the future.

00:07:27.260 What is that other than tearing down our statues, cancelling historical figures, renaming edifices that were built after heroes of the past?

00:07:38.180 Everything he said is happening more now than it even happened in the 1940s.

00:07:42.820 Exactly.

00:07:43.520 And in the book, there's an underlying, it's very gripping, there's underlying sort of tension and fear.

00:07:49.480 And you can see how that's produced in the story because people are unsure of their cultural ground.

00:07:57.180 It's like the cultural common glue that held everybody together from the past, that everybody agreed upon, which even if they were left or right, Democrat, Republican, whatever, liberal, conservative in Canada, people had a common understanding.

00:08:09.560 And you can see in the book, what they've done is, I should say, what they've shown is that this method of constantly erasing and re-editing the past, it undermines everybody's commonality and confidence.

00:08:23.200 So nobody is going to deviate from the narrative.

00:08:26.540 They're going to only stick to what's exactly on the page.

00:08:29.200 Otherwise, they will be unpersoned.

00:08:31.700 They will be guilty of thought crime.

00:08:33.020 Unpersoned, that's a book.

00:08:34.740 Thought crime, unpersoned, newspeak.

00:08:37.060 Those are words coined by Holwell in this book.

00:08:39.800 We use them all the time.

00:08:40.880 We do.

00:08:41.320 Yes.

00:08:41.840 Yes, yes.

00:08:42.600 It's incredible.

00:08:43.460 In just a minute, I want to start tucking into some of those 30 images you make.

00:08:47.820 But there's just one more thing I want to talk about because it is so 2023, but he wrote it more than 70 years ago.

00:08:55.060 And that is newspeak.

00:08:58.040 Changing the language to make it smaller and smaller so you can't think outside the lines.

00:09:04.220 Exactly.

00:09:04.540 Getting rid of any colorful words.

00:09:07.600 So it was just good and ungood.

00:09:10.640 And double plus ungood.

00:09:12.260 And so you were, I mean, if you have good, ungood, double plus good, double plus ungood.

00:09:17.660 So you just have the one root and then you just flip it back and forth and more or less.

00:09:21.840 You've eliminated thousands of words and with it, the ability to think.

00:09:27.680 And there's this wonderful passage where he says, you know, the Declaration of Independence or philosophical documents like that.

00:09:35.140 You could not express them in newspeak.

00:09:37.840 They would just be swallowed up by the word crime think.

00:09:40.900 And we have thought crimes today, they're usually more feelings crimes, hate crimes.

00:09:47.760 Unless it's by the state, the two minutes of hate.

00:09:49.860 There's so many things in this book that are that almost had to wait for our age to be to be as relevant as they are.

00:09:58.700 I want you to take us through your illustrations because I'll tell you, Paul, one of the things that was important to me here is how do I get my own kids to read this?

00:10:09.740 How do I make it easier to read, more exciting to read in the age of Marvel movies and Netflix?

00:10:17.560 How do we say stop for a second and read a book and read it?

00:10:21.940 It's not the cramped first edition version, which 99% of the books are.

00:10:27.620 And it's got some beautiful illustrations.

00:10:30.580 I would like you to take me and our viewers through some of your illustrations.

00:10:37.380 Talk a little bit about the illustration, what it meant in the book, and what you were trying to do through the image.

00:10:43.560 So take it away.

00:10:44.600 You've got 30 of these in the book.

00:10:47.680 Tell us your favorite view.

00:10:50.200 All right.

00:10:50.540 Well, first I'll give it kind of an overview.

00:10:52.640 So here's the book.

00:10:56.040 And Winston Smith is on the cover.

00:10:59.620 And then we've got the half title it's called, which is like the first facing page.

00:11:04.180 And then we've got the main titles, which is like a spread, kind of dramatic movie style.

00:11:11.120 And then we have Ezra's foreword.

00:11:14.360 And then the book begins.

00:11:16.400 And again, as you said, I believe earlier, we haven't changed anything in the book.

00:11:20.080 We haven't taken anything out.

00:11:21.380 It's not a like Reader's Digest version of the book.

00:11:23.900 And it's also not a graphic novel.

00:11:25.540 So we haven't kind of done anything to it except add these illustrations.

00:11:29.560 So here, for example, you see Winston Smith in his very shabby kind of apartment.

00:11:36.640 He's on a lunch break in the beginning of the book.

00:11:38.840 And it's ironically named Victory Mansions, where he lives.

00:11:42.200 But there doesn't seem to be much of a victory.

00:11:44.280 So and I'll show you a few more.

00:11:47.720 This is him writing in his corner.

00:11:50.360 In the story, he begins, this is without giving too much away, but he begins writing a private diary, which is completely forbidden in the world of 1984.

00:11:59.440 So this is like his first act of rebellion.

00:12:01.700 It's a great act of courage.

00:12:03.820 And he has kind of a nook in the corner of his apartment where the telescreen, which is a device that's constantly watching him, cannot see him.

00:12:11.420 So here he is starting to write.

00:12:12.780 So that's probably one of my favorites.

00:12:15.180 And I'll kind of maybe flip here.

00:12:17.960 This is the illustration showing the two minute hate, which is a, as it said, it's two minutes where the workers in all the buildings are rallied to kind of have a mass orgy of hatred at the screen.

00:12:34.000 And they show some political enemies.

00:12:35.620 Yes, exactly.

00:12:36.660 Well, how is that any different than politicians demonizing the unvaccinated?

00:12:40.820 We were supposed to rage.

00:12:42.320 Two minutes of hate.

00:12:43.260 You're not supposed to hate the government.

00:12:44.960 You're not supposed to hate your life.

00:12:47.040 We will tell you who to hate.

00:12:48.620 Are you ready?

00:12:49.500 Go.

00:12:49.940 Two minutes. 0.99

00:12:50.540 Hate them. 0.99

00:12:51.700 Shout, shout, shout. 1.00

00:12:52.860 Get it out.

00:12:53.380 Get out of your system. 0.98

00:12:54.520 Hate them. 0.95

00:12:55.560 Okay, now be docile with me. 0.99

00:12:58.840 Like two minutes of hate is, it's strange.

00:13:01.860 And when it's called that, it's crazy.

00:13:03.880 But how is that different from the enemy of the day, you know, whatever the political class says is the enemy of the day?

00:13:13.260 Don't hate other than our official enemy.

00:13:16.460 Oh, yeah.

00:13:16.780 It's really not that different except maybe in our time.

00:13:19.220 It's more a little bit slicker.

00:13:21.300 So in the book, because it's a drama, it's a little more dramatic.

00:13:25.420 And there's even, like I said, there's the two-minute hate.

00:13:28.100 In part of the book, Winston is involved in something called Hate Week, which is an entire week of, like, relentless propaganda where everybody's urged to hate the enemy.

00:13:37.480 I forget if it's Eurasia or East Asia.

00:13:40.100 But in the book, it's posited that in the future, there would be three great super states, super totalitarian states that are constantly at war, fighting with each other, but no one ever triumphs.

00:13:51.280 So I think it's Oceania, East Asia, and Eurasia.

00:13:55.140 And the allegiances switch.

00:13:57.200 That's why Winston's got to change the old newspapers.

00:14:00.100 And they have to re-edit everything constantly on the fly.

00:14:02.700 And it's a massive amount of work.

00:14:04.240 And it's very dehumanizing.

00:14:06.620 So it shows how it's dehumanizing for everybody, but even for the people involved.

00:14:10.720 Because, for example, Winston is shown, working in his cubicle, and he's glancing over at another one of the workers who he suspects, as would routinely happen, is also working on re-editing the same article.

00:14:23.540 So what Orwell is showing is that everybody's labor is basically wasted.

00:14:27.660 But they're all lying, and they're all working on fabricating lies, but it might even never make it because it's ephemeral.

00:14:34.680 It'll last for a few weeks or months.

00:14:36.920 Some other anonymous worker in his outer party, because he's an outer party member, Winston Smith.

00:14:43.360 So he's laboring away this cubicle, changing history, but it's all a fake history, and someone else might erase it.

00:14:49.620 So even the creative labor that he's putting in has no grounding.

00:14:53.520 It'll be all swept away.

00:14:55.020 And the whole thing you see is a kind of madness.

00:14:57.540 But again, as you're saying, Ezra, how different is that than today, when people's lifetimes of work are suddenly canceled, erased, they're unpersoned, and they have no longer a voice.

00:15:08.580 And how many so-called academic disciplines are just fake BS, ephemeral, that really has no meaning, and it'll be politically incorrect in the generation anyways.

00:15:18.040 Take us through some more of your images, because that's, I think, really the special thing here.

00:15:22.540 And the reason why Rebel News is publishing this, again, as you said, it's word for word, letter for letter, down to the punctuation marks, an exact replica of the first edition.

00:15:35.000 And that's important for copyright reasons, because Orwell's book is in the public domain only if you use the exact way it was published more than 70 years ago.

00:15:42.780 So we have the legal authority to publish this.

00:15:45.880 What we've done is we've made it beautiful.

00:15:48.760 When I say we've done that, I mean, you've done that.

00:15:50.800 Thank you.

00:15:51.240 Not just with the cover, but the 30 articles, and even laying the thing out to make it readable.

00:15:56.040 The purpose of this book, to me, I mean, I know you have your own artistic motivations.

00:16:02.420 The Bible, Shakespeare, the works of Kipling.

00:16:05.620 There are some beautiful things that everyone in the world should read, of course.

00:16:10.320 But this is such a powerful political lesson, commentary, warning that is so relevant, has never been more relevant ever.

00:16:22.320 And we must get people to read it again.

00:16:24.880 And the whole purpose here is to make this more accessible than it's ever been, and to have a new generation of people read it before it is swept away.

00:16:33.800 Oh, yeah.

00:16:34.280 So take us to some more of your images.

00:16:36.280 Yeah.

00:16:36.560 I mean, and my goal was, as you're talking about, was to augment the book.

00:16:40.500 And they're kind of like punctuation marks that should entice you to keep reading and give you a visual idea of what's happening.

00:16:46.620 So, for example, here is an image where Winston has gone for lunch.

00:16:50.900 It says, deep in an underground canteen, there's lots of mist.

00:16:54.620 And it's very, it's very kind of, you know, totalitarian, somewhat oppressive.

00:16:59.700 In the next illustration, I show him, he's eating lunch with his co-worker.

00:17:05.240 There's the omnipresent telescreen announcing news of the latest great victory in the non-ending, ever-present war.

00:17:12.060 So, I think it gives you an atmosphere of what's going on in the book.

00:17:17.120 I'll show you the next one, which is, he's going down a street, and suddenly there's a rocket bomb that falls.

00:17:24.680 And it's kind of alarming, but it's one of the more sort of action moments in the book.

00:17:31.820 And here's Winston crouching as this rocket bomb explodes somewhere randomly.

00:17:36.760 So, what Orwell talks about is that, this is very interesting for the political commentary, it's still relevant for today, which is that these rocket bombs launched purportedly by the enemy would occasionally just randomly explode in London, in the cities he's in.

00:17:50.760 I think he's in London, in Airstrip One, which is like a state of Oceania.

00:17:55.540 So, these rocket bombs randomly explode, but Orwell in his narration says, there was a great suspicion that it was all fake, and that in fact, they were doing it to themselves.

00:18:07.300 Like, that these bombs are not launched by an enemy, they're just launched to keep everybody, that's actually in this book, that they're launched to keep everybody in a state of fancy.

00:18:16.360 A false flag.

00:18:17.140 Yes, exactly.

00:18:18.040 Exactly.

00:18:19.240 There's so much in this book like that, if you read it carefully, and pay attention to all these details.

00:18:24.300 And that gets into what he talks about later in the book, within the book, which is the purpose of constant war, which is again relevant to today, that many wars, in the book he's claiming that the war is entirely fake, that no one is meant to triumph, and that the purpose of it is to absorb excess labor.

00:18:44.060 So, he talks about, and this is the book within the book, the author talks about how the purpose of war is to keep people absorbed in producing goods, which would be then used up, and purposely destroyed, and it's like an endless vicious circle of futility.

00:19:03.120 You know, Eisenhower called that the military-industrial complex a few years later.

00:19:07.000 Exactly.

00:19:07.060 And the idea was to keep people down, so that otherwise, if they got too luxurious and got too rich individually, too many people, there would be no reason to have an elite.

00:19:16.940 And that's stated in this book.

00:19:18.600 Wow.

00:19:18.800 It's just prescient, it doesn't do the justice.

00:19:23.200 Well, we are proudly going to publish this book for everyone.

00:19:30.740 I'm going to reread it, all our staff here, and we want to make it accessible wherever we can.

00:19:38.380 And this book is for sale on our special website, buy1984.com, B-U-Y, the numeral 1984.com.

00:19:48.220 Obviously, you can get it on Amazon.

00:19:50.380 I mentioned how we're allowed to do this, because under copyright law, after 70 years after Orwell's death, the book is in the public domain in countries like Canada, the U.K., Australia.

00:20:02.640 So, in the places where we can, it's for sale on Amazon.

00:20:05.780 So, if you're a Canadian, go to Amazon.ca.

00:20:08.340 If you're a Brit, go to Amazon.co.uk.

00:20:11.380 And you can find all the info at buy1984.com.

00:20:16.320 I think that this project is very personal to me.

00:20:20.020 Now, obviously not as personal as it is to you.

00:20:22.300 You lived and ate and breathed this book for months and months.

00:20:27.160 But I think about this book every day.

00:20:29.900 If not the book, the ideas from it.

00:20:31.760 And I feel like reading and rereading this book, it's like a command, an exhortation to me not to give up fighting.

00:20:44.520 If Orwell saw this and Orwell warned us, we must continue.

00:20:49.060 You know, for the reasons he outlines is for our own reasons.

00:20:52.840 We have to keep bait.

00:20:54.880 I think we've published a lot of interesting books at Rebel News.

00:20:59.160 Some of them are ephemeral.

00:21:00.240 Some of them are passing.

00:21:01.100 This one could not be more enduring.

00:21:06.800 And I think it's priced so it could be a great Christmas gift.

00:21:11.220 I think the number one buyer of this book, in my mind, is going to be probably dads like me who want their kids to read it.

00:21:18.720 Or grandparents who want their grandkids to read it.

00:21:21.560 People who just haven't read it since high school.

00:21:25.140 People who want to read it and relearn what's happening to them now in this dystopian time.

00:21:31.300 And I think that with your artwork, the refreshed typography, and our distribution through Amazon and through Rebel News, I think we can get thousands and thousands and thousands of people to wake up again.

00:21:51.200 That's my hope.

00:21:51.880 That's why I believe in this project.

00:21:54.840 It's a great book, but the book has to help save us.

00:21:58.580 This book, I think, will help save the world.

00:22:00.380 Yeah, and I think, as we've been talking about, it's completely relevant to today.

00:22:05.380 And it will be relevant to the theme of Rebel News and your viewers, which is freedom, individual freedom.

00:22:11.760 Privacy.

00:22:12.300 This book is about privacy, isn't it?

00:22:13.980 All that is about trying to keep carved out your own personal sort of space or whatever you want to call it, of individuality.

00:22:22.560 The whole struggle of the protagonist in this book is to maintain some sense of his own life.

00:22:29.740 And in fact, in Newspeak, that's a forbidden thing.

00:22:32.800 There's a term in Newspeak, the language in the book, called own life, which is a crime.

00:22:38.620 If you have your own life, meaning individuality and freedom to speak and just do what you want, go where you want, that is a crime in this future.

00:22:47.760 And we can see that rapidly arriving now.

00:22:50.000 People will relate to this.

00:22:51.420 It's all in the book from Orwell.

00:22:53.160 You know, some books, the very first sentence hooks you.

00:22:58.580 You know, Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

00:23:03.820 And that sentence goes on for quite a bit.

00:23:06.160 And it grabs you.

00:23:09.780 Ayn Rand's, you know, John Galt laughed.

00:23:13.180 Let me just read the first paragraph, the first sentence here.

00:23:15.600 And I'm reading from the old-fashioned version here, which is cramped.

00:23:19.180 That's the Canadian first edition, yeah.

00:23:21.080 I mean, if this doesn't get you revved up and curious and exciting, it was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.

00:23:32.320 And it just goes from there.

00:23:35.160 I love this book.

00:23:37.640 Start with the Bible, move to Shakespeare.

00:23:39.380 Once you've done that, come and learn what the world is like today, written by a man who saw more clearly than most.

00:23:46.740 And his hero's name is Winston Smith.

00:23:48.400 Winston, clearly named after Winston Churchill.

00:23:51.400 Smith, the common man, the everyman.

00:23:54.900 And this book should be read by every man and woman and every child.

00:23:58.860 I wouldn't go younger than high school because there's some adult scenes in it.

00:24:02.340 But this is a book that everyone, if they're not being assigned it in high school, and it wouldn't surprise me if they're not.

00:24:07.460 Yeah, probably not.

00:24:08.240 It's a parent's duty.

00:24:09.700 It's a grandparent's duty to have this book on the shelf and to have this book on a coffee table.

00:24:14.840 And even just picking it up and leafing through the pictures.

00:24:17.640 You did it in that old-fashioned style where each picture has sort of a sentence from the book on there.

00:24:24.160 I think it's great.

00:24:26.060 Go to buy1984.com.

00:24:28.240 It is my personal mission to breathe life into this book again.

00:24:34.060 Not that it ever was obsolete.

00:24:36.600 Not that it ever faded in any way.

00:24:38.240 But that this new version will make it more appealing and tantalizing.

00:24:42.660 It's priced fairly.

00:24:44.660 It's gorgeously illustrated and laid out.

00:24:47.140 This is an enduring book.

00:24:51.080 And I hope you read it and enjoy it as much as I do.

00:24:54.020 Last word to you, Paul.

00:24:55.420 I mean, you've spent a lot of time on this project.

00:24:58.840 What do you hope that comes from?

00:25:01.060 Well, I think I would just reiterate what I was saying that I hope people see deeper into what's happening today.

00:25:09.160 Because, again, my emphasis is, you know, in refreshingness, in a sense, it wasn't that difficult because it is really all relevant.

00:25:17.880 The only thing that's slightly sort of so-called older is the technology.

00:25:22.360 And I reflected that a little bit in the illustrations.

00:25:25.620 So I didn't try and portray a digital world because it wouldn't have fit with the narrative in the book.

00:25:30.000 But the main thing is that it's like a touchstone.

00:25:32.800 As you're saying, Ezra, it's a classic that everybody should read.

00:25:36.500 And I think they'll have a deeper insight into what's happening today.

00:25:39.440 And plus, really, on the surface, it's a kind of gripping suspense thriller.

00:25:43.280 Because there is a surface story of what happens to the protagonist, Winston Smith, as he tries to evade detection by the thought police.

00:25:51.620 Yeah, the thought police.

00:25:52.700 That's another term that he coined.

00:25:54.600 Well, there you have it.

00:25:55.740 The book is called 1984.

00:25:58.740 The author is George Orwell.

00:26:00.460 The illustrator is the man with whom we've been talking these last minutes, Paul Revoche.

00:26:05.140 I'm Ezra Levant, the publisher of Rebel News.

00:26:07.760 And it is my hope that this book will be read by you and everyone in your family as a warning.

00:26:14.820 To get a copy of this book, go to buy1984.com or visit Amazon.

Rebel News Podcast - June 22, 2023

EZRA LEVANT ｜ Rediscovering Orwell： Introducing an Illustrated Edition of 1984

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript