The George Orwell Memorial Fund appears to have missed the point of the Orwell lecture. It's not supposed to be a lecture by someone who embodies Orwellian societies.
But nonetheless the George Orwell Annual Lecture was given by Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim Brotherhood Islamist stooge who misrepresents his affiliations, on a properly Orwellian topic. 'Democratising the Middle East: A New Role for the West'
When Tariq Ramadan talks about "democratizing", he really means allowing a fundamentally undemocratic Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, to take over, in pursuit of its agenda of Islamizing, not Democratizing, the Middle East.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a totalitarian organization dedicated to taking away everyone's civil rights while manipulating language. Its self-description as the Freedom and Justice Party turns out to mean slavery and injustice.
That's certainly what we think of as Orwellian.
So the George Orwell Annual Lecture presented a properly Orwellian lecture while being too stupid to realize what it was doing, thereby proving that Orwell really is dead.
The "popularization" of George Orwell by college students helps lead to an absurd situation in which everyone completely misses the point. And that leads to an event like this coming to you in 2014
Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, The Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.
The Inaugural George Orwell Lecture in Dubai. This event is staged in association with the Orwell Trust
Gavin Esler delivers the inaugural Orwell Lecture at Emirates Litfest. And he points out that The Ministry of Truth, depicted in Orwell's iconic novel, 1984, was mostly dedicated not to rewriting the past, but to producing dim-witted but catchy pop songs, idiotic TV programmes and newspapers obsessed with crime, sport and sex. Did George Orwell really see into the 21st century world of the X-Factor, tabloid newspapers and Wayne Rooney?
And so we have it.
An employee of a national news outlet which everyone must support by law will deliver a lecture in a totalitarian Islamist state that argues that George Orwell wasn't writing about totalitarianism… but about catchy pop songs.
It's so brilliantly evocative of the manipulation of ideas that Orwell was against. And it's being done in his name. Islamists are using Orwell to promote the Islamization of Europe.
(Note to readers, Islamist does not refer to a separate branch of Islam, as some seem to think, it refers to organized Islamic political groups and individuals who promote Islamization.)