(Roughly) Daily

Readers may well have seen this photo, which has been making its way across the web:

If the irony seems too perfect, it’s because it is… It is a crop of this photo:

… one of Steve Ullathorne‘s “Restyles of the Dead and Famous,” a collection of subtly– and pointedly– altered photos.

So, if the image isn’t, after all, an “actual” evocation of Orwell’s Oceania, it is a pretty powerful portrait of “Big Brother”…

Still, it may be that Orwell’s worries, while all-too-prescient, were less valent than Huxley’s– that our challenge isn’t so much the fear-infected world of 1984 as it is the soma-laced, desire-driven future of Brave New World:

Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother.

– Alan Moore

As we practice our newspeak, we might recall that it was on this date in 1943 that the “White Rose,” a student protest group, painted “Freedom” and “Down with Hitler” on the walls of the University of Munich. The leaders of the group were arrested two days later, and beheaded on February 22.

 Hans Scholl, his sister Sophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst- leaders of the White Rose (source)