Welcome to the final instalment of our latest Tale for Our Time - George Orwell's almost excessively timely tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Thank you for all your kind comments. Michael, a First Hour Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club from Colorado, writes:
Mark, I have thoroughly enjoyed your every spoken word of 1984! Thank You!
As for Room 101, we are currently inside it, it's been disguised as the US Senate Chamber. I'm not at all fooled by who the rats are and what they really want to feast on.
Indeed. There are so many parallels between Orwell's imagination and our reality that I think it's important to zero in on the most disturbing element - not the politicians, not the technology, but the attitudes, the increasing adoption of a totalitarian mindset: millions of people, whether consciously or not, are thinking like Orwell's party members.
And, with that grim thought, let us proceed to tonight's concluding episode:
'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you. 'What happens to you here is FOR EVER,' O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
They can get inside you: There's a lot of that about. Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read the conclusion of Nineteen Eighty-Four simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
Thank you so much for your compliments about Tales for Our Time during this time of lockdown and 'lections. Some like the ripping yarns for boys, some the more genteel social comedy for girls, and some of you even enjoyed our summer whimsy from yours truly. But of the tales in totality all seem to be in favor. Thank you too for your continued kind words about our Covid-spawned audio edition of The Mark Steyn Show, and its various features such as Last Call and The Hundred Years Ago Show.
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