[The first two parts of this essay on George Orwell’s 1984 are here and here.]
THOUGHT police, groupthink, thoughtcrime, unperson, memory hole, doublethink and Newspeak — these are words from the book 1984 that have become part of our vocabulary. The novel chillingly depicts psychological warfare through mass propaganda:
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed— if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.
Here is the work of a masterful artist, transporting us into a vivid alternate reality, an unforgettably bleak vision of hell on earth.
Orwell, who was born Eric Blair, was a socialist. He was aware of what had happened in Russia. He told the author and producer Sidney Sheldon that the book was about life in Bolshevik regimes:
[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.
For good reason, Orwell despised the uniformity, ugliness and inhumanity of industrial capitalism too and many passages in 1984 are reminiscent of his writings on the working poor in England and France.
The main character Winston Smith is 39. He has grown up in London during a devastating war. He survives but his father, mother and sister were all taken away, never to be seen again. He painfully recalls his family:
The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
Privacy, love, and friendship — these are the casualties of collectivism and ideological fanaticism.
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