1984 by George Orwell

Date finished 06 Feb 2021

Winston is a functionary in a totalitarian state. He begins to rebel, and meets a girl, but finds that he’s no match for the system. As Orwell wrote this the Allies were battling Fascism, Stalinism was showing its true colours, and it looked like no matter the ideology all roads led to authoritarianism and consolidation of power (to the disillusionment of many communists). There’s a fairly dull patch around the middle, but it’s a powerful book and it became a fixture of popular culture, influencing many other dystopian visions.

Side note: I learned that much of the plot is very similar to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel ‘We’; which written in 1924 some 25 years prior to the publication of 1984, is in fact the first dystopian novel. Even so, there are many aspects of 1984 which are dystopian “classics” such as Thought Crime, Room 101 and Newspeak which all shaped the genre.

Notes

• Newspeak: exerting control by changing language.
• The Hate: enemy created to draw attention and anger.
• The party
  • “ Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.“ - called “reality control”.
  • Slogans: War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength
• Winston (protagonist) on the proles, the masses; “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.“
• Proles p76: “All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations.”
• The all-seeing Telescreen invites parallels between smart devices in homes. But it seems that all new technology or at least a great deal of it has the potential both for uses that improve peoples lives and the use by governments and organisations for nefarious purposes. Atomic energy provides clean power for millions but the science also brought the atomic bomb. The advent of motor transport and aviation allows people to travel and move around more freely but also agents of control to do so. Smart devices in homes enables easy communication, easy entertainment and connection to others but also the potential for monitoring and snooping. Same can be said with connectivity.
• “All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and Three-Year-Plans and the Two-Minutes-Hate and all the rest of the bloody rot?“p142
• “There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred and the lunatic credulity which the party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the party, and the party had turned it to account.”
• Children… were systematically turned against the parents and taught to spy on them and report the deviations. ..the family had become in affect an extension of the Thought Police.