Symptoms of George Orwell's 1984 [1956]

RUSSELL HAD BEEN asked for this piece on recent “Orwellian” developments by The New York Times over two years before its eventual appearance in Portraits from Memory (1956), pp. 203-10, and, heavily abridged, in Reynolds News and Sunday Citizen, 30 Sept. 1956, p. 3. On 22 June 1954 Heather Bradley had forwarded from the newspaper’s London office the text of this telegram from New York: “Suggest Bertrand Russell if interested discussing what fiction in George Orwell’s 1984 has come to pass not only in Russia but in Western world; which has doublethink rightthink etc. too. In other words examination how much 1984 there is in 1954.”