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1984

George Orwell

Start date: January 23, 2015

Discussion: UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA - ORWELL

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UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA - ORWELL

1984 Part 3 : ENDING SPOILERS
By Traveller · 59 posts · 31 views

last updated Jan 01, 2016 04:07PM

1984 Part Two
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last updated Jan 01, 2016 09:28AM

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Jul 16, 2016 Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, classics, fiction, english-20th-c, made-into-movie, dystopian, novels

This classic dystopian nightmare remains as relevant in the 21st C as it was when Orwell published it in 1948. The story of Outer Party member Winston Smith having his brief glimpse of truth and even love with Julia before being literally eaten alive by his erstwhile revolutionary but solidly IngSoc party operative O'Brien is heartbreaking. On one hand, the fact that Winston does get a brief instant of revelation and pleasure is a sort of victory, but it is so short-lived and so brutally repress This classic dystopian nightmare remains as relevant in the 21st C as it was when Orwell published it in 1948. The story of Outer Party member Winston Smith having his brief glimpse of truth and even love with Julia before being literally eaten alive by his erstwhile revolutionary but solidly IngSoc party operative O'Brien is heartbreaking. On one hand, the fact that Winston does get a brief instant of revelation and pleasure is a sort of victory, but it is so short-lived and so brutally repressed that it is disheartening.

The other protagonist is, of course, the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Big Brother who glares out of every wall, who watches everyone's every move through the telescreens and who enforces strict adherence to the principles of doublethink and harsh repression of thoughtcrime via his ominous Thought Police. These figures have all become, since, figures of the popular imagination. Of course, in the 70plus years since the book was published, the Stalinist system and the East German system came very close to the totalitarian society that Orwell described. I think it can be argued that, although the division of the world into three competing but equal sides never happened, we are in a state of perpetual war (the one in Afghanistan run by the US has been running for nearly 18 years with no goal and no end in sight) and perhaps with webcams and the spyware that Edward Snowden warned us about, we have pretty much telescreens as well. My understanding is that in China, the screens in many places have been connected to AI systems with facial recognition and thus we are only a baby step away from Thought Police-style enforcement of the conformance of ideas.

One of Orwell's central questions in 1984 is how and why it is perpetuated by fellow human beings with such awful results (massive pollution, rampant hate, the total lack of love or positive passion, etc). O'Brien explains this during Winston's imprisonment: it is all about power which becomes both an ends and a means and, according to O'Brien, thus perfects all the previous systems of totalitarianism in its purity and simplicity.

As an American who detests Trump and Trumpism, the sections that struck me the hardest as relevant to today were:
1/ when Julia and Winston are in the hidden apartment and the differences between their philosophies (hers being a generation after that of Winston) where Julia says 'Who cares? It's all one bloody war after another, and one know the news is all lies anyway." (p. 161). This brings home to me how Fox&Friends works and how insidious it is with Trump attacking the veracity of the media. Unfortunately, this has worked completely and irrefutably for the 38%.
2/ In this same discussion, Talking to her, he realised how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did they no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. (p. 163) The piece I italicized is important because it is a manifestation of how keeping people stupid, you can manipulate them to accept things like children in cages, 4-month old babies standing trial, and the non-stop lies coming out of the White House and the Senate.
3/ In the famous forbidden book which Winston reads before his struggle abruptly ends, the sinister layout of the system is described: Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with War, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contraditions that no power can be retained indefinitely...If human equality is to be for ever averted - if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently - then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity. (p. 225) I found this particularly terrifying, but it makes some sense out of how morally high-minded evangelists could continue to point to morally decrepit Trump (forced to pay a $2M fine for frauding people with his own charity).
4/ The image that O'Brien gives Winston of society before obliterating his free will is iconic and graphic: 'Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.' (p. 280) This is precisely what I see behind the crispy rictus-like smiles and narrowed, angry eyes on photos from Trump rallies, that desire for an orgy of violence.

Winston, of course, is released from the Ministry of Love as a changed, subservient man. He is given a deadend job (that as described on page 307 resembles many many of today's corporate jobs) and loves Big Brother. Will the next generation of Americans (and Brazilians and Hungarians and Poles and Italians...) break this pattern which their far-right wing leaders are trying to impose on history? Or will they coalesce into faceless masses screaming hate into the eternal night? ...more

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Feb 25, 2018 P.E. rated it liked it

Shelves: utopia-dystopia

The book responsible for the fame enjoyed by the dystopia genre. The ideas on totalitarianism and conformism and mass psychology are ground-breaking... but the prose proves... tough.

Matching Soundtrack :
2+2=5 - Radiohead

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Le livre qui a fait connaître le genre de la dystopie. Les idées sur les régimes totalitaires, la surveillance, le conformisme, la psychologie des foules sont passionnantes (pensée spéciale pour le livre de Goldstein).

En Anglais ou en Français, la prose est trè ...more

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Oct 25, 2018 Gretel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: politics, fascism, fiction, dystopia

I started reading "1984" several years ago. In fact, it's been so many years, I don't even remember when. I know I was still living with my mom and it must have been around the time I started university. So it must be 2008ish? 2010ish? Eh, who cares.
I bought the German translation because I didn't think my English would be good enough to understand the original. Now, I'd buy the novel in English and I plan on re-reading this a few years from now. For reasons completely separate from the novel, I I started reading "1984" several years ago. In fact, it's been so many years, I don't even remember when. I know I was still living with my mom and it must have been around the time I started university. So it must be 2008ish? 2010ish? Eh, who cares.
I bought the German translation because I didn't think my English would be good enough to understand the original. Now, I'd buy the novel in English and I plan on re-reading this a few years from now. For reasons completely separate from the novel, I'm intensily fascinated by the translation. It's so very...German. I don't think I can properly verbalize the German charasteristics but it's the tone and style, the expressions...some of it seem like from a dream, from a German from twenty years ago because it uses words and phrases I know, remember and understand but just aren't used anymore. Or is it that I don't hear it that often because I read so much in English?
Nonetheless, the translation is so German, it takes out the Englishness of the source material. And while reading I was always wondering if the original used the many faces of the English language, like accents and regional quirks to convey information that is completely absent from the translation. Everything is proper, clean German. I'm curious to see how the original uses language. The German seems sometimes almost...sterile and too rigid to convey the society within the novel.

So, today I finished the last 100 pages and it has been a wild ride. Not because of the book itself but the reality it reflects. While reading it, I couldn't stop thinking about: the GOP, the SVP, the AfD, Putin, Drumpf, Kavanaugh, Pence, the spineless toad Ryan, Lahren, Breitbart, Loesch, the NRA, Brexit, Southern, Duterte, bin Salman, all 4chaner and 8channers, Kekistan, GG and all the toxic internet cultures based on sexism and white supremacy, Incels, the KKK, TERFS, etc. etc. etc.

But I also thought of all the smart, kind and passionate people dismantling these ideologies and are also fighting for human rights. And while it is important to never forget the negative examples - or rather to never let them out of sight -, it is even more important to never forget the good examples, the people fighting and caring for one another because it's the knowledge of their existence, struggle and work that motivate us to continue helping and caring and protecting.
We won't forget the past.
We won't let them re-write reality.
We won't accept their labels.
...more

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Nov 18, 2018 Vigneswara Prabhu rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 20th-century, classics, science-fiction, favorites, dystopia, banned-books

It would not be stretch to wonder if Orwell was some canary prophet or far seer. Who had an undisclosed innate ability to tear apart the fabric of the present and glance into the future. Perhaps he was. And perhaps he channeled his visions into his writing driven by what he has seen and experienced in the wars against dictatorships.
I only bring up this tangent for the uncanny parallels it drawn in current and then future world. Here lies at the corner of my desk the completed copy of Orwell's It would not be stretch to wonder if Orwell was some canary prophet or far seer. Who had an undisclosed innate ability to tear apart the fabric of the present and glance into the future. Perhaps he was. And perhaps he channeled his visions into his writing driven by what he has seen and experienced in the wars against dictatorships.
I only bring up this tangent for the uncanny parallels it drawn in current and then future world. Here lies at the corner of my desk the completed copy of Orwell's magnum opus. Also present is a tab full of news stories about the notorious, bizarre and sometimes almost terrifying exploits of the Chinese regime, officially known as the Chinese communist party. I shiver at the last word, a phantom remnant of the pages.
Mass surveillance, truncated and laughable civil liberties, subverting foreign democracies, ethnic cleansing of religious minorities, manipulating the media, land and the people to essentially breed a race of mindless uncaring zombies who are completely subservient to the party. It is hardly the first time, life has borrowed from the written word. Yet rarely this accurately. And never has to hit closer to reality and to the heart.
The one who controls the minds of the people holds the reins of power. As much as the minds of men that are infinitely malleable.
But perhaps this one’s thoughts are far fetching and egregious. We after all don’t live under a regime that monitors our every thought, action and desire. Not yet at least.

Orwell’s prose has an amount of power and life to them. So do the characters that utter them. Even when half the text is exposition, observations and memories narrated from a phantom observer, the moments where the characters take our is an engaging river. The way they talk, interact and react ever so eloquently captures one’s rapt attention.
As does the agency of each of the character. Even the supposed antagonist O'Brien is so earnest, clear and resolute in his convictions we as readers come to understand his position. And never does he come across as a bad person. Certain not a mustache twirling villain. He talks things through in the most calm and rational manner. Even when he has a cage full of hungry rats inches away from eating Winston's face.
Which brings us to Winston. Who is the complete antithesis. A man who dreams loftily of freedom and defiance. One who is willing to be a martyr for the resistance, he too cracks under the iron boot of the party. Perhaps it was the desire to somewhat redeem himself which drive him to this end. Or perhaps to once again feel the warmth and life of being a human.
To prove to ghosts that, no he wasn’t the coward who left his family to die. The silent partner to the rule and oppression of the party. A coward who built sandcastles in the clouds. A flawed human being. But one, if put in similar circumstances we can come to relate to.

So what does it all amount to. Is 1984 indeed Orwell bleak prediction to the eventuality that awaits the ends of human nature. Are we all doomed to one day either be the animals that are free. Or the ones in chains of the mind, who agree with 2+2=5. Perhaps not. Though not out rightly stated, perhaps yearned and wished by Winston; the human spirit and resilience is one of legend. Even if it spends a lifetime being the face stomped on by the boot there will come a time when life finds a way. A generation that is willing to throw away their very selves and brace entire storms to live free, to say and think whatever they wish for. And if not them, then the those that come afterwards.

There is no doubt, in time there will come a time, when all, not just proles and animals, are free.
...more

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Feb 06, 2016 Son Tung rated it really liked it

1984 - George Orwell was notalby mentioned by Christopher Hitchen many times in those public debate and discussion. People often call Hitchen's sharp wit, humorous and impenetrable arguments: Hitch Slap.

All of that humor, seriousness, vigorousness, intellectual humility & power can be recognized in great resemblence in 1984 and Animal Farm of George Orwell.

To a lesser degree, all the Thought-Police, Ministry of Love, Made Up History .. was to be found in Chinese, Vietnamese and notoriously the ...more

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