Sales are soaring for
George Orwell's "1984" in the wake of incorrect or unprovable statements made by President
Donald Trump and
some White House aides.
Orwell's classic dystopian tale of a society in which facts are distorted and suppressed in a cloud of "newspeak" was in the top 5 on Amazon.com as of midday on Tuesday.
The sales bump comes after the administration's assertions that Mr Trump's inaugural had record attendance and Mr Trump's unfounded allegation that millions of illegal votes were cast against him last autumn.
Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Mr Trump, coined an instant catchphrase on Sunday when she called Mr Trump's claims about crowd size "alternative facts," bringing comparisons by some to "1984."
“Alternative facts is a George Orwell phrase,” Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty said on CNN’s Reliable Sources.
Social media users posted excerpts from the book, such as: “If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control,’ they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.”
One Twitter user noted: “Someone should let Kellyanne Conway and
Sean Spicer know that Orwell's 1984 is a warning; not a guide.”
