Review: 1984

4/5 stars

1984, by George Orwell (1949)

I know I'm late to the game on this one. Most folks have already read this, I bet!

In this post-apocalyptic future set in what may be 1984 (no one is really sure of the date anymore): Big Brother is always watching. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

... That last one, in particular, really got me, given the times we're living in now, and the way we, as a country, reward stupidity.

The world is divided into three totalitarian superpowers: Oceania, made up of the Americas, the British Isles, Australia and southern Africa; Eurasia, "the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmass from Portugal to the Bering Strait;" and Eastasia, China, the Japanese islands, and "a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet." These three powers are constantly at war, though ally and enemy are always changing.

Winston works for the Ministry of Truth, a government agency whose sole purpose is to re-write the past. Given slips of paper each day with instructions in "Newspeak" - a dumbed-down, simplified version of English - Winston updates articles, books, and other forms of media to reflect whatever today's version of past events are. For example, if Oceania is currently at war with Eastasia and in an allyship with Eurasia, then that is how is has always been. If last week or last year or last decade Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in an allyship with Eastasia, all indications of this past must be erased and updated.

“Who controls the past controls the future.

Who controls the present controls the past.”

It's the ultimate form of censorship. Control the past, and you control the narrative of the present and the future. Not unlike, "history is written by the victors."

Winston follows orders, but internally he is in turmoil, with doubts about Big Brother's existence, and whether or not Enemy #1, a man called Goldstein who supposedly leads a secret counter-revolutionary organization, is actually the good guy. He meets Julia, a fellow doubter, and they strike up a clandestine, if ill-fated, romance.

There is no happy ending here. Just the hard truth of an all-powerful government. Below is, to me, the most prescient passage in the book:

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

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UP NEXT: Guilty by Definition, by Susie Dent