Posted on 06/12/2024 7:12:34 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Americans still read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, 75 years after it was first published on June 8, 1949. At the time, the year 1984 was far in the future; now it’s 40 years in the past. Yet our present feels more than ever like Orwell’s dystopia.
The novel is set on Airstrip One, a totalitarian version of what is today Britain. Its protagonist is Winston Smith, a censor working in the Ministry of Truth. His job is to alter historical records to conform to whatever the ruling party now decrees. He rewrites history and the very documents on which historians rely.
Reality is whatever the Party says it is; who could prove otherwise? Surveillance is inescapable: every screen watches the people who watch it. Even thinking the wrong thoughts is a crime, though the authorities do everything in their power to prevent thoughtcrime before it happens by mutilating language itself.
“We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day,” boasts one of Winston’s colleagues who’s working on the latest Newspeak dictionary. There will be no more words like “excellent” or “bad,” only “doubleplusgood” or “ungood,” variations on a single base term.
The 1984 of Orwell’s imagination resembled the Soviet Union of his lifetime in many ways. But he intended the book as a warning about what could happen in the West, too.
The Soviet Union is long gone, yet much of what Orwell feared is coming to pass in the free world today, not under a totalitarian dictatorship but through the pervasive power of politically correct ideology.
Nineteen Eighty-Four presents a simple picture of a state run by one party. We have competing parties in government, but in effect one ideological party dominates our schools, our media and the federal bureaucracy, as well as much of corporate America—particularly Human Resources departments.
And what does the party do?
It destroys words, alters books and documents, surveilles us all and polices opinion. When a dissenter is made to disappear in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he’s “vaporized.” Our Newspeak word for that today is “canceled.”
If we’re better off because the Thought Police of 2024 don’t employ torture, as the Ministry of Love does in Nineteen Eighty-Four, we’re also worse off in one way: We have no excuse. We aren’t violently coerced into obedience; we’re simply nudged, nagged and incentivized into going along with insanity.
A Supreme Court nominee doesn’t know what the word “woman” means; well, how could she, if the Newspeak dictionary hasn’t been perfected yet? The Canadian Cancer Society can’t use the terms “cervix” or “vagina”; instead, it’s “front hole.” When someone like Bruce Jenner changes sex, a Winston Smith in 2024 amends birth certificates and encyclopedias to say Jenner was always a woman.
The modern Winston also rewrites novels by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to reflect today’s political sensitivities—not under orders from the government but in compliance with self-censoring publishers and copyright holders.....
It is like Groundhog Day where every day is April 1, 1984.
"Don't Drive Angry!"
Most of us rational people took Orwell’ writings as warnings. 1984 is mentioned here. Animal Farm also counts.
The left took them as playbooks. And have executed.
Or the author simply understood human nature and could "see" where it would take us.
BTTT
“I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too!”
Cannot disagree with your assessment.
The most depressing thing about “1984” is that at the end the system wins and Winston loves big brother.
Doesn't Atlas Shrugged have a better ending?
One Christmas recently, I gave my grandson and grandaughter each a hardcover four-book set I assembled for them. “1984,” “Brave New World,” “Fahrenheit 451,” and “Animal Farm.”
Their mother intercepted and confiscated the books, and told the kids she’d give them to them, “a little later, when you’re ready.”
He’s in high school, she’s in college.
* fap * (said Major Hoople.)
Orwell was an optimist.
I’m reading it for the 3rd time over a 5 decade period. Keeps getting better. These ‘friends’ of Winston keep getting sneakier.
1984 was based on Orwell’s observations when he was in the part of Spain controlled by the Communists before they were defeated by Franco.
George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blaire.
I read 1984 50 years ago and considered it entertaining fiction. I was wrong. His fiction has become a terrible prediction that is quickly becoming reality.
When I read 1984, I thought there was no way people could be convinced to disbelieve fundamental reality, like math and facts of nature. I have since been reeducated about human nature.
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