Ezra Levant and artist Paul Ravoche unveil a 1984 illustrated edition with 30 original drawings by Ravoche, preserving Orwell’s exact text—including cramped typography—to honor Canada’s copyright rules as the book enters public domain after 70 years. Their project reimagines 1984’s dystopian warnings (telescreens, "unpersoning," Newspeak) as chilling parallels to cancel culture, state propaganda, and the military-industrial complex, arguing Orwell’s critique was rooted in real-world systems. Available via buy1984.com and Amazon, this edition aims to reignite global awareness of totalitarianism’s creeping threats, especially among younger readers, by making Orwell’s prescient vision more accessible. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I think for many people, they'd say the Bible.
It's not just a religious text.
It's a work of literature.
It's the archetypes of our culture.
Maybe another name you would suggest are the collected works of William Shakespeare.
But if you're interested in politics and freedom, I put it to you that one of the most important books ever written was by George Orwell called 1984.
So powerful that to this day, the word Orwellian means a totalitarian regime where civil liberties are being stamped out by the state.
It's an amazing book published in the 1940s.
And to this day, you can find the book, but it's cramped.
The writing is cramped.
It's very hard to find an illustrated version of the book.
But how do you get young people to pick up 1984 and read it?
Well, I guess you could be inspired by Bibles.
There's a lot of children's illustrated Bibles out there.
How do you make the book more accessible, not just to grownups, but to teenagers too?
I think more than ever, they need to read 1984.
And so Rebel News has teamed up with a great artist, and we've done something we've never done before.
I'm very excited about it.
We'll talk with you about it today.
We have taken the first Canadian edition of Orwell's 1984.
We have laid the book out in a beautiful, breathable typeface to make it easier to read than the cramped text of the original from the 1940s.
And most importantly, Paul Ravosch, a world-class illustrator, has done 30 original drawings inspired by the book's story to make the thing come alive, to fire the imagination, and to get the next generation to read this.
I first read 1984 when I was in high school.
I read it again in university.
I've read it again as an adult.
This book is not just a classic.
It's as fresh as today's headlines.
And for the course of the next 15 minutes, I'm delighted to be here in the studio with the man who made this book come alive, the artist Paul Ravoche.
Paul, great to see you.
Well, likewise, Edward.
Great to be here.
You probably know this book as well as any Orwell scholar now because you spent so much time with it, not just laying it out so beautifully, but then coming up with the list of 30 illustrations reflecting the book.
How has reacquainting yourself with the book 1984 changed your way of thinking?
Well, it's given me great insight into the book.
And like you, I read it initially in high school, and it made a great impression on me.
It was very gripping.
And I had reread it a couple of times through the years.
But I guess I got the most out of it having to work on this project, which is having to set up all the different illustrations, the spacing of them, choosing the moments to illustrate.
I had to really kind of go through it with a fine-tooth comb.
So you're exactly right.
You get to know it in a deeper way.
And I guess as we talk, we could get into some of this.
But personally, for me, what I found is it's not only what it is on the surface, which is a gripping suspense thriller.
There's also a romance story, but there's a very deep commentary on, which is the surface of that commentary is what people usually pick up on, in my opinion, the more dramatic elements, which are completely valid.
But there's also a very much deeper analysis, which is still relevant for today.
So in the book within the book, which, you know, it's in the in the story, the main character, Winston Smith, he's given a forbidden book, which is produced by the Brotherhood, which purports to explain the true story of the inside of this totalitarian world.
So to round this out, when you read this carefully, you see that Orwell is not only explaining what might come, but in my opinion, what's already here, even back when he wrote it in 1949, but much more so as we see revealed today, particularly with the last three years.
There's so many things in that book written more than 70 years ago that he had a kind of prophecy, like in every home, a telescreen pumping out propaganda from the dictatorship, but at the same time, spying on the 40s and 50s, that must have sounded absurd, but what's that other than our own computers and our phones?
Yeah, I mean, it's eerie the level to which Orwell predicted the world of today.
Now, he didn't completely predict it, which is interesting.
A lot of writers and people who analyze this stuff, they contrast it with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which was more sort of concentrated on biology and also a different approach.
We could get into that, whereas Orwell was talking about more the rigid sort of Soviet totalitarianism.
So in the book, it's kind of a little bit retro, although still very relevant.
But the retro part is the machinery.
In other words, Orwell didn't predict digital things, nanotechnology, you know, biotechnology, computers, the internet, all that stuff.
So he has the protagonist, Winston Smith, who works in the Ministry of Truth, which is really the Ministry of Lies and Propaganda.
He has him working on something called the speakright machine.
And it's a machine where he speaks into the microphone.
We'll show it in one of the illustrations.
And it instantly kind of copies down what he's saying.
And what he's doing is on the fly, they're altering the present and the past and even the future because he's re-editing newspapers.
So the book is all based on sort of newspaper level from the past of delivering information.
Having said that, everything else that he did, it's completely relevant to our digital age because we see the same things happening.
Yeah, I mean, in the novel, his job, and what a crazy job, was to take newspaper articles from the artist.
Exactly.
And if his country was at war with a new enemy, they would make it so it was always thus.
So he would go back to old newspapers, cut out the story that was inconvenient, paste in the latest version, and then file it.
And then maybe he would come back to it and do the reverse another day.
And so, yes, there was the cutting and the gluing and the taping.
But really, other than the technology, that's exactly what's being done now with deleting things on the internet, rewriting books.
Oh, yes.
And so although some of his technology, he couldn't have imagined it, the underlying concept of destroying the past so you control the present and you can shape the future.
What is that other than tearing down our statues, canceling historical figures, renaming edifices that were built after heroes of the past?
Everything he said is happening more now than it even happened in the 1940s.
Exactly.
And in the book, there's an underlying, it's very gripping, there's underlying sort of tension and fear.
And you can see how that's produced in the story because people are unsure of their cultural ground.
It's like the cultural common glue that held everybody together from the past that everybody agreed upon, which even if they were left or right, Democrat, Republican, whatever, liberal, conservative in Canada, people had a common understanding.
And you can see in the book, what they've done is what I should say, what they've shown is that this method of constantly erasing and re-editing the past, it undermines everybody's commonality and confidence.
So nobody is going to deviate from the narrative.
They're going to only stick to what's exactly on the page.
Otherwise, they will be unpersoned.
They will be dealing with the person.
That's the book.
Thought crime, unpersoned, new speak.
Those are words coined by Orwell in this book.
We use them all the time.
We do.
Yes.
It's incredible.
Two Minutes of Hate00:05:16
In just a minute, I want to start tucking into some of those 30 images.
But there's just one more thing I want to talk about because it is so 2023, but he wrote it more than 70 years ago.
And that is new speak.
Changing the language to make it smaller and smaller so you can't think outside the lines.
Getting rid of any colorful words.
So it was just good and ungood.
And double plus ungood.
Yeah.
And so you were, I mean, if you have a good, ungood, double plus good, double plus ungood.
So you just have the one root and then you just flip it back and forth or more or less, you've eliminated thousands of words.
And with it, the ability to think.
And there's this wonderful passage where he says, you know, the Declaration of Independence or philosophical documents like that, you could not express them in New Speak.
They would just be swallowed up by the word crime think.
And we have thought crimes today.
They're usually more feelings crimes, hate crimes, unless it's by the state, the two minutes of hate.
There's so many things in this book that almost had to wait for our age to be to be as relevant as they are.
I want you to take us through your illustrations because I'll tell you, Paul, one of the things that was important to me here is how do I get my own kids to read this?
How do I make it easier to read, more exciting to read?
In the age of Marvel movies and Netflix, how do we say stop for a second and read a book?
And read it, it's not the cramped first edition version, which 99% of the books are.
And it's got some beautiful illustrations.
I would like you to take me and our viewers through some of your illustrations.
Talk a little bit about the illustration, what it meant in the book, and what you were trying to do through the image.
So take it away.
You've got 30 of these in the book, plus your favorite few.
All right.
Well, first I'll give like kind of an overview.
So here's the book.
And Winston Smith is on the cover.
And then we've got the half title it's called, which is like the first, just the facing page.
And then we've got the main titles, which is like a spread, kind of dramatic movie style.
And then we have Ezra's foreword.
And then the book begins.
And again, as you said, I believe earlier, we haven't changed anything in the book.
We haven't taken anything out.
It's not a like reader's digest version of the book.
And it's also not a graphic novel.
So we haven't kind of done anything to it except add these illustrations.
So here, for example, you see Winston Smith in his very shabby kind of apartment.
He's on a lunch break in the beginning of the book.
And it's ironically named Victory Mansions, where he lives, but there doesn't seem to be much of a victory.
So, and I'll show you a few more.
This is him writing in his corner.
In the story, he begins.
This is without giving too much away, but he begins writing a private diary, which is completely forbidden in the world of 1984.
So, this is like his first act of rebellion.
It's a great act of courage.
And he has kind of a nook in the corner of his apartment where the telescreen, which is a device that's constantly watching him, cannot see him.
So, here he is starting to write.
So, that's probably one of my favorites.
And I'll kind of maybe flip here.
This is the illustration showing the two-minute hate, which is a, as it said, it's two minutes where the workers in all the buildings are rallied to kind of have a mass orgy of hatred at the screen.
And they show some political enemies.
Yes, exactly.
Well, how is that any different than politicians demonizing the unvaccinated?
We were supposed to rage two minutes of hate.
You're not supposed to hate these government.
You're not supposed to hate your life.
We will tell you who to hate.
Are you ready?
Go.
Two minutes.
Hate them.
Shout, shout, shout.
Get it out.
Get out of your system.
Hate them.
Okay, now be docile with me.
Like two minutes of hate is it's strange.
And when it's called that, it's crazy.
But how is that different from the enemy of the day?
You know, whatever the political class says is the enemy of the day.
Don't hate other than our official enemy.
Oh, yeah, it's really not that different, except maybe in our time.
It's more a little slicker.
So in the book, because it's a drama, it's a little more dramatic.
And there's even, like I said, there's the two-minute hate.
In part of the book, Winston is involved in something called Hate Week, which is an entire week of like relentless propaganda where everybody's urged to hate the enemy.
I forget if it's Eurasia or East Asia, but in the book, it's posited that in the future, there would be three great super states, super totalitarian states that are constantly at war fighting with each other, but no one ever triumphs.
So I think it's Oceania, East Asia, and Eurasia.
And the allegiance is switched.
That's why Winston's got to change the old newspaper.
Rocket Bombs and Propaganda00:05:00
And they have to re-edit everything constantly on the fly.
And it's a massive amount of work.
And it's very dehumanizing.
So it shows how it's dehumanizing for everybody, but even for the people involved, because, for example, Winston is shown working in his cubicle and he's glancing over at another one of the workers who he suspects, as would routinely happen, is also working on re-editing the same article.
So what Orwell is showing is that everybody's labor is basically wasted, but they're all lying and they're all working on fabricating lies.
But it might even never make it because it's ephemeral.
It'll last for a few weeks or months.
Some other anonymous worker in his outer party, because he's an outer party member, Winston Smith.
So he's laboring away this cubicle, changing history, but it's all a fake history and someone else might erase it.
So even the creative labor that he's putting in has no grounding.
It'll be all swept away.
And the whole thing you see is a kind of madness.
But again, as you're saying, Ezra, how different is that than today when people's lifetimes of work are suddenly canceled, erased, they're unpersoned, and they have no longer a voice?
Well, and how many so-called academic disciplines are just fake BS that ephemeral that really has no meaning and it'll be politically incorrect in the generation anyways.
Take us through some more of your images because that's, I think, really the special thing here.
And the reason why Rebel News is publishing this, again, as you said, it's word for word, letter for letter, down to the punctuation marks, an exact replica of the first edition.
And that's important for copyright reasons because Orwell's book is in the public domain only if he used the exact way it was published more than 70 years ago.
So we have the legal authority to publish this.
What we've done is we've made it beautiful.
When I say we've done that, I mean you've done that.
Thank you.
Not just with the cover, but the 30 articles and even laying the thing out to make it readable.
The purpose of this book to me, I mean, I know you have your own artistic motivations.
The Bible, Shakespeare, the works of Kipling, there are some beautiful things that everyone in the world should read, of course.
But this is such a powerful political lesson, commentary, warning that is so relevant, has never been more relevant ever.
And we must get people to read it again.
And the whole purpose here is to make this more accessible than it's ever been and to have a new generation of people read it before it is swept away.
Yeah.
So take us through some more of your images.
Yeah, I mean, and my goal was, as you're talking about, was to augment the book.
And they're kind of like punctuation marks that should entice you to keep reading and give you a visual idea of what's happening.
So for example, here is an image where Winston has gone for lunch.
It says deep in an underground canteen.
There's lots of mists.
And it's very, it's very kind of, you know, totalitarian, somewhat oppressive.
In the next illustration, I show him, he's eating lunch with his co-worker.
There's the omnipresent telescreen announcing news of the latest great victory in the non-ending, ever-present war.
So I think it gives you an atmosphere of what's going on in the book.
I'll show you the next one, which is he's going down a street and suddenly there's a rocket bomb that falls.
And it's kind of alarming, but it's one of the more sort of action moments in the book.
And here's Winston crouching as this rocket bomb explodes somewhere randomly.
So what Orwell talks about is that this is very interesting for the political commentary, still relevant for today, which is that these rocket bombs launched purportedly by the enemy would occasionally just randomly explode in London, in the cities he's in.
I think he's in London in Airstrip 1, which is like a state of Oceania.
So these rocket bombs randomly explode.
But Orwell in his narration says there is a great suspicion that it was all fake and that in fact they were doing it to themselves.
Like that these bombs are not launched by an enemy.
They're just launched to keep everybody.
That's actually in this book, that they're launched to keep everybody in a state of science.
False flags.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
There's so much in this book like that if you read it carefully and pay attention to all these details.
And that gets into what he talks about later in the book within the book, which is that the purpose of constant war, which is again relevant today, to today, that many wars in the book, he's claiming that the war is entirely fake, that no one is meant to triumph, and that the purpose of it is to absorb excess labor.
So he talks about, and this is the book within the book, the author talks about how the purpose of war is to keep people absorbed in producing goods, which would be then used up and purposely destroyed.
Enduring Dystopian Hope00:07:13
And it's like an endless, vicious circle of futility.
You know, Eisenhower called that the military industrial complex a few years later.
And the idea was to keep people down so that otherwise, if they got too luxurious and got too rich individually, too many people, there would be no reason to have an elite.
And that's stated in this book.
Wow, it's just prescient.
It doesn't do it justice.
Well, we are proudly going to publish this book for everyone.
I'm going to reread it.
All our staff here.
And we want to make it accessible wherever we can.
This book is for sale on our special website, buy1984.com, B-U-Y, the numeral1984.com.
Obviously, you can get it on Amazon.
I mentioned how we're allowed to do this because under copyright law, after 70 years after Orwell's death, the book is in the public domain in countries like Canada, the UK, Australia.
So in the places where we can, it's for sale on Amazon.
So if you're a Canadian, go to amazon.c.
If you're a Brit, go to amazon.co.uk.
And you can find all the info at buy1984.com.
I think that this project is very personal to me.
Now, obviously, not as personal as it is to you.
You lived and ate and breathed this book for months and months.
But I think about this book every day.
If not the book, the ideas from it.
And I feel like reading and rereading this book, it's like a command, an exhortation to me not to give up fighting.
If Orwell saw this and Orwell warned us, we must continue to, for the reasons he outlines, is for our own reasons.
We have to keep faith with him.
I think we've published a lot of interesting books at Rebel News.
Some of them are ephemeral.
Some of them are passing.
This one could not be more enduring.
And I think it's priced, so it could be a great Christmas gift.
I think the number one buyer of this book in my mind is going to be probably dads like me who want their kids to read it or grandparents who want their grandkids to read it.
People who just haven't read it since high school.
People who want to read it and relearn what's happening to them now in this dystopian time.
And I think that with your artwork, the refreshed typography, and our distribution through Amazon and through Rebel News, I think we can get thousands and thousands and thousands of people to wake up again.
That's my hope.
That's why I believe in this project.
It's a great book, but the book has to help save us.
This book, I think, will help save the world.
Yeah, and I think as we've been talking about it, it's completely relevant to today, and it will be relevant to the theme of Rebel News and your viewers, which is freedom, individual freedom.
Privacy.
This book is about privacy.
All that is like about trying to keep carved out your own personal sort of space or whatever you want to call it of individuality.
The whole struggle of the protagonist in this book is to maintain some sense of his own life.
And in fact, in NewSpeak, that's a forbidden thing.
There's a term in Newspeak, the language in the book, called own life, which is a crime.
If you have your own life, meaning individuality and freedom to speak and just do what you want, go where you want.
That is a crime in this future.
And we can see that rapidly arriving now.
People will relate to this.
It's all in the book from Orwell.
You know, some books, the very first sentence hooks you.
Yeah.
You know, Taylor's Two Cities, Charles Dickens, it was the best of times.
It was the worst of times.
And that sentence goes on for quite a bit and it grabs you.
Ayn Rand's, you know, John Galt laughed.
Let me just read the first paragraph.
Yeah.
First sentence here.
And I'm reading from the old-fashioned version here, which is cramped.
That's the Canadian first edition.
I mean, if this doesn't get you wrapped up and curious and exciting, it was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking 13.
And it just goes from there.
I love this book.
Start with the Bible, move to Shakespeare.
Once you're done that, come and learn what the world is like today.
Written by a man who saw more clearly than most.
And his hero's name is Winston Smith.
Winston, clearly named after Winston Churchill, Smith, the common man, the everyman.
And this book should be written, read by every man and woman and every child.
I wouldn't go younger than high school because there's some adult scenes in it.
But this is a book that everyone, if they're not being assigned it in high school, and it wouldn't surprise me if they're not.
Yeah, probably not.
It's a parent's duty, it's a grandparent's duty to give this, but to have this book on the shelf and to have this book on a coffee table and even just picking it up and leafing through the pictures.
You did it in that old-fashioned style where each picture has sort of a sentence from the book on there.
I think it's great.
Go to buy1984.com.
It is my personal mission to breathe life into this book again.
Not that it ever was obsolete, not that it ever faded in any way, but that this new version will make it more appealing and tantalizing.
It's priced fairly.
It's gorgeously illustrated and laid out.
This is an enduring book.
And I hope you read it and enjoy it as much as I do.
Last word to you, Paul.
I mean, you've spent a lot of time on this project.
What do you hope to come that comes from it?
Well, I think I would just reiterate what I was saying that I hope people see deeper into what's happening today.
Because again, my emphasis is, you know, in refreshing this in a sense, it wasn't that difficult because it is really all relevant.
The only thing that's slightly sort of so-called older is the technology.
And I reflected that a little bit in the illustrations.
So I didn't try and portray a digital world because it wouldn't have fit with the narrative in the book.
But the main thing is that it's like a touchstone, as you're saying, Ezra.
It's a classic that everybody should read.
And I think they'll have a deeper insight into what's happening today.
And plus, really on the surface, it's a kind of gripping suspense thriller because there is a surface story of what happens to the protagonist Winston Smith as he tries to evade detection by the thought police.
Yeah, the thought police.
That's another term that he coined.
Well, there you have it.
The book is called 1984.
The author is George Orwell.
The illustrator is the man with whom we've been talking these last minutes, Paul Ravosch.
I'm Ezra Levant, the publisher of Rebel News, and it is my hope that this book will be read by you and everyone in your family as a warning.