Give me strength. The start of the piece:
“The 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell’s novel 1984, which coined the term “thoughtcrime” to describe the act of having thoughts that question the ruling party’s ideology, has become an ironic lightning rod in debates over alleged trigger warnings and the role of historical context in classic literature.
The introduction to the new edition, endorsed by Orwell’s estate and written by the American author Dolen Perkins-Valdez, is at the center of the storm, drawing fire from conservative commentators as well as public intellectuals, and prompting a wide spectrum of reaction from academics who study Orwell’s work.
Perkins-Valdez opens the introduction with a self-reflective exercise: imagining what it would be like to read 1984 for the first time today. She writes that “a sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity,” noting the complete absence of Black characters. [J4MB: Maybe because the book says nothing about race or ethnicity?]
She also describes her pause at the protagonist Winston Smith’s “despicable” misogyny, but ultimately chooses to continue reading, writing: “I know the difference between a flawed character and a flawed story.”
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Justice for Men & Boys 
1984 was published in 1949. The Wikipedia entry on ethnic GB population of the time states this: “In 1950, there were probably fewer than 20,000 non-white residents in Britain, almost all of them born overseas.” Thus, it is highly unlikely that Orwell would have felt any fundamental oversight in not introducing topics which spoke to race and ethnicity as part of the fabric of his novel.
As for the ‘misogyny’ which Ms Perkins-Waldez speaks of, the most famous line is actually an acute observation. “It was always the women, and, above all, the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies, and the nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”
This tendency is one of the main reasons that modern society so resembles the dystopian nightmare pictured by Orwell in 1949. Post WW2, women were leaving behind the domestic sphere, making incursion into business and commerce, politics and jurisprudence, bringing female values with them, and finding fault in men for being there.
Now, as in the novel, we all must pretend, pretend, pretend, toe the Party line, follow the Narrative, or risk cancellation. Perhaps be banged up for a time under the watchful eye of Two-Tier Keir, less of a Big Brother than a Big Girl’s Blouse, useful idiot to his feminist Cabinet. We must listen to the endless complaints of Ms Perkins-Waldez and her ilk, determined to see the world through a lens of irrelevance while they attempt to sully the reputation of works which they barely understand.
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