To Orwell Today,

Hi Jackie,

I broused your site with interest. I am a great Orwell fan - have been for 30 years. What compelled you to put so much work into the project?

-Don Lodge, York Portraits

Greetings Don,

My interest in individuals and society, and the evil that is being perpetrated against them, and their apathy toward it, gradually developed, in large part from my voracious reading of literature and history, and through my study of the JFK assassination. I came to realize that the same people who arranged for his murder - and his brother's - had committed such political crimes in other countries - always blaming some innocent dupe or group. Acts like this have been going on for centuries.

When I was in my early 20s I travelled for four years in England, Europe, India, parts of Asia, and ultimately to Australia, and my observations of how people all over the world are basically the same - just victims of their varying types of government - fuelled my love for humanity and sovereign nations.

In my 30s, while raising children, I became alarmed at the prevalence of abortion and pornography in Canadian society and tried to warn people about its dangers and repercussions, to no avail. Words of warning seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Ultimately, in 1991, I re-read Orwell's "1984" and realized that instead of wasting my time trying to explain things through my words (which aren't as good as his) I'd just explain things through his words - which he expressed as "clear as a window pane" in his final masterpiece, which is a warning to mankind, laying out the blueprint of worldwide tyranny, including many of the aspects that I had been myself warning against.

Thus, in Orwell, I'd found a kindred spirit, and my website "Orwell Today" is therefore the ultimate expression of our shared concern for the future of not only the Western World, but all the world.

That is what compelled me to put, as you say, so much work into this project. To me it isn't work, it's a labour of love, and it is a result of what I do anyway, ie read and try to explain what I read.

All the best,
Jackie Jura