Blah Blah Flowers

Just finished watching the BBC2 documentary on George Orwell. Lacking the kind of archive material that normally pads these things out the producers took the step of making some, then ageing it in much the same way that Portishead put crackle on the ancient samples they recorded only the day before. Orwell was played by Chris Langham, who is one of those people who is seen in a fair number of things but you can never remember his name. And I think it's a remarkable piece of film because with regard to his most famous works, 'Animal Farm' and '1984', it explicitly states how the former was initially supressed because it was not wished to insult our Soviet allies, until it was politically safe to do so. But the film ends with Orwell making clear the latters message about how totalitarianism can exist anywhere and how to prevent the future of mankind being that 'boot stamping on a human face - forever' means for humanity to rise up.
It's a message the Western world needs to remember now. The love the people feel for Big Brother is for the most part genuine, because he has saved them. Is it such a great leap to imagine he has saved them from terrorists flying planes in to their buildings, or from foreigners with chemical weapons and nuclear weapons which are somehow worse than their own chemical weapons and nuclear weapons? Orwell saw the British give up their freedoms to fight Germany, now we see Americans loose their freedoms to fight a more amorphous and ill-defined threat. Orwell's message is a warning from history.