Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel by George Orwell, published in 1949 and set 35 years in the future, in 1984. It tells the tale of a nightmarish future totalitarian state through one helpless man's struggle to hold on to his humanity.

Contents

[edit] Summary

It is set in a world where, at least as far as anyone knows, three warring superstates based on the British Empire/United States, Soviet Union, and China or Japan dominate more than 75% of the Earth's surface and fight an ongoing and inconclusive three-way war with constantly shifting alliances and the old colonial lands of Africa and South Asia largely ignored except as meaningless territorial gains. It follows the story of a London bureaucrat named Winston Smith, a propaganda writer for the "Ministry of Truth", as he attempts to make a change, however small, in the opaque and brutal government of "Big Brother", concluding in his betrayal by a Party double agent and his resistance being broken under torture and brainwashing.

[edit] Background

Written in 1948, the book is most obviously a critique of the Stalinist U.S.S.R. (Nineteen Eighty-Four's Ingsoc, or "English Socialism" was imagined as a technologically-advanced development of Stalinism). Although many readers miss the references, the book also critiques fascism and imperialism. Both were much more present in memory in 1948 than in subsequent decades. Thus the Thought Police is a reference to the Japanese Thought Police (the Thought Section of the Criminal Affairs Bureau)[1] and Oceania is unmistakably Winston Churchill's Union of the English-Speaking Peoples (an Anglo-Saxon pan-nationalism that would have seen the United States take responsibility for the British Empire). Orwell understood the evils of British imperialism because he was raised in India and served in Burma.

Historical presentism and failure to understand the breadth of Orwell's political denunciation has meant poorly informed criticism of the work.[citation needed] However, science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a particularly scathing attack on the book for being uncreative and overly focused on communism while failing to criticize other forms of authoritarianism.[2]

It has become popular to use the book as an attack on socialism in general (as opposed to the totalitarian regimes of the communists), while ignoring the fact that Orwell himself was a committed socialist.[3]

1984 contains a critique of the reasoning used by some Young Earth Creationists: Were you there?.[4]

[edit] Influence

Several phrases coined in the book have entered common use, most notably "Big Brother (is watching you)," but also the Two Minutes of Hate, doublethink, Thought Crimes/Police, Newspeak, and, perhaps unfairly to the memory of Orwell, "Orwellian" as a term used to describe the society depicted in the book. While Big Brother is a watchword for privacy rights on both sides of the political aisle, and Nineteen Eighty-Four is particularly beloved by conservatives because of its supposed applicability to the issue of political correctness. This rather flies in the face of Orwell's political beliefs, and his opinions on the extreme form of totalitarianism known as Stalinism was formed by his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War as a foreign irregular.[5]

[edit] Adaptations

The novel has been adapted for various formats. Including:

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Richard Deacon. 1983. Kempei Tai. Tokyo: Tuttle. pp. 156-167
  2. Asimov, Isaac. Review of 1984, published 1980.
  3. "The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it." -- "Why I Write", 1946
  4. James F. McGrath. "Big Brother's Young-Earth Creationism". http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2014/04/big-brothers-young-earth-creationism.html. }
  5. Readers may wish to read Orwell's account of his experiences: Homage to Catalonia from 1938.
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