The Internet Makes Strange Bedfellows

It's one of those weird things about the internet - pictures and quotes and memes get passed around without thinking about what they mean or where they might have come from.

Tonight I noticed that a friend of mine had shared the following picture/quote from the FB group Capitalism.  "The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it" - George Orwell.

Which struck me as strange because George Orwell was a Socialist.  Yes.  The man who wrote Animal Farm and 1984 (usually and mistakenly read as warnings against the evils of Socialism) was in fact, very much a socialist.   How strange is it that a group advocating for unrestrained Capitalism would hijack a quote from an ardent Socialist?


But, in the end, it doesn't matter.  The quote cannot be definitively attributed to Orwell.  It's not in any of his published writing.   It's one of those bogus quotes that gets circulated without anyone checking it.