Political Views

Orwell was a social democrat and an anarchist sympathizer.

(the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia).

Born Eric Arthur Blair, George Orwell created some of the sharpest satirical
fiction of the 20th century with such works as Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty-Four. He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the
major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and
communism.
George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair

(born June 25, 1903, Motihari,

Bengal, Indiadied January 21, 1950, London, England), English novelist, essayist,
and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949),
the latter a profound anti-utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.
Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first
book, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared in 1933 as the work of George
Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia). In time
his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew
his real name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in
Orwells lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment
into a literary and political rebel.

rwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British
colonial civil servant. He was educated in England and, after he left Eton, joined the Indian
Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. He resigned in 1927 and decided to become
a writer. In 1928, he moved to Paris where lack of success as a writer forced him into a
series of menial jobs. He described his experiences in his first book, 'Down and Out in Paris
and London', published in 1933. He took the name George Orwell, shortly before its
publication. This was followed by his first novel, 'Burmese Days', in 1934.
An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s he had begun to consider himself a socialist. In
1936, he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in
northern England, which resulted in 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937). Late in 1936, Orwell
travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists. He was forced to
flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary
socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist.

Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became
literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. By now he was a prolific
journalist, writing articles, reviews and books.
In 1945, Orwell's 'Animal Farm' was published. A political fable set in a farmyard but based
on Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell's name and ensured he was
financially comfortable for the first time in his life. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was published four
years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with
its title and many phrases - such as 'Big Brother is watching you', 'newspeak' and
'doublethink' - entering popular use. By now Orwell's health was deteriorating and he died
of tuberculosis on 21 January 1950.

George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, was born in Motihari, India and grew
up in Henley-on-Thames, England.
Orwell was a lifelong Anglican in name, but not so much in spirit. He was baptized an
Anglican1 and buried, by specific request, in the Anglican tradition.2 He did attend a Catholic
school as a young boy, but would, later in life, refer to the Catholic Church as parasitic and
those stinking Catholics.3
Orwell seems to have felt a sort of loyalty to Anglicanism and did attend services as an
adult. Explaining his relationship to the religion as a boy, he said:
[I accepted] mechanically the Christian religion without having any sort of
affection for it.4
Orwell was an intellectual, a thinking mans thinker and ultimately considered religion as a
whole quite irrational and an institution that encouraged irrational thinking, which paved the
way for the coercion of the masses. He said:
As long as supernatural beliefs persist, men can be exploited by cunning priests
and oligarchs, and the technical progress which is the prerequisite of a just
society cannot be achieved.5
In the end, it was a complicated relationship Orwell had with his church. Much like his
relationship with Englanda staunch patriot who was highly critical of many of his countrys
policies and attitudes, which brings us to
The Orwellian Worldview

Orwell was, to apply the obligatory labels, a socialist, a social democrat and even by some
accounts, an anarchist.
Orwells productive years were also some of the most politically interesting and tumultuous
years in European (and maybe world) history. Orwell saw and experienced much and many
of his views are in reaction to that. He witnessed the atrocities of Soviet Russia, which he
satirized in his novel Animal Farm. He saw the rise and fall of the fascist dictatorships of
Mussolinis Italy, Hitlers Germany and Francos Spain. In fact, Orwell even participated in
the Spanish Civil War, siding with the anarchists, who helped shape his worldview. He wrote
of his experiences from a hospital bed:
I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I
never did before.6
Later, he would write in his book, The Road to Wigan Pier,
I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the
punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be
trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone. 7
Orwell added the caveat, however, that governments must exist to protect people from crime
and injustice.8 But this brings up an interesting contradiction. Can one be both an anarchist
and a socialist? They do seem to be quite ideologically distinct. But, really, Orwells main
fixation was regarding personal/individual freedom and democracythat people must govern
themselves and he painted a grim picture of the opposite of freedom in his seminal
work, 1984.
For much of his adult life, Orwell was a card-carrying member of Britains Independent
Labour Party, but like his views on religion, he didnt accept it without major reservations
and often disagreed with the partys approach to the details of social governance. 9
Perhaps what would most sum up Orwells sociopolitical views is his commentary on his
writing, of which he said:
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.10

Opinions : Essays : Orwell's Political Messages

from Rhodri Williams (rhodri@ferncliffe.demon.co.uk)
Orwell once said that he wanted to "make political writing into an art". What are
the political messages he expresses in his books 'Nineteen Eighty-four', 'Animal
Farm' and 'Homage to Catalonia'?
Orwell's ambition as a political author was to "make political writing into an art" ('Why I
Write'). He saw his duty as being to "attack the Right, but not to flatter the Left". His
political views were shaped by his experiences of Socialism, Totalitarianism and Imperialism
all over the world. In his essay 'Why I Write' (1946) he admitted that "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".
Orwell wrote about his experiences of the Spanish Civil War in 'Homage to Catalonia'.
During the war Orwell began to realise the true nature of Stalin's rule in Russia. The actions
of the Communists in Spain exposed to him how false the idea was that Russia was a
Socialist State. He then went on to write Animal Farm as a way to remind people about the
true facts of the Russian Revolution and the nature of Stalin's rise to power, becoming a
totalitarian dictator. Essentially Orwell wanted to save Socialism from Communism. It was
the realisation of Orwell's fears about Stalinist Russia and the rise of Totalitarianism that
inspired him to write his final novel 'Nineteen Eighty-four' - an Anti-Utopian novel depicting
a world where Totalitarianism had taken over.
Orwell wrote 'Animal Farm' primarily as an allegory of the Russian Revolution thinly
disguised as an animal fable. Orwell specifically had Russia in mind but also draws from his
experiences in Spain to show that all well-meant societies are at risk. The major theme of
'Animal Farm' is the betrayal of the Russian Revolution and the way that good will can fall
prey to ambition, selfishness and hypocrisy. 'Animal Farm' also addresses the abuse of
power. Gradually as the pigs gain more and more power they find it harder to resist
temptation. Soon their "resolution falters" (Ch.I )and they "adopt his vices"(Ch. I ) - they
move into Jones' house, drink alcohol and engage in trade with the other farms (all things
which Old Major had specifically urged them not to do). Orwell's message is that any society
which has leaders with absolute power is ultimately doomed to failure due to the
inevitability of leaders manipulating power for their own personal benefit. Orwell mocks the
pretence that any such society could be regarded as being fair or equal - hence addition of
the suffix "but some animals are more equal than others" to the original commandment "All
animals are equal". The philosophy of 'Animalism' in 'Animal Farm' quite clearly is designed
to represent Marxist-Communism. The parallels between the commandment "Whatever goes
upon two legs is an enemy" and Marxism's hatred of Capitalism is obvious. What started off
as a philosophical set of ideas by Karl Marx was transformed into a means of propaganda by
Stalin. In 'Animal Farm' the theory of Animalism is drawn up into seven commandments
exclusively by Snowball, Squealer and Napoleon. Animalism quickly becomes a means of
breeding such a great fear of man into the animals so that they would become even more
determined to work hard. Orwell is attacking Stalin for betraying the revolution to suit his
own ends.
Orwell hints at the shortcomings of Old Major's Marxist teachings in a number of subtle
ways. The supposition that all animals are "comrades" is undermined straight away by the

fact that the dogs and cats openly show hostility to the rats, who "only by a swift dash for
their holes" escape from the dogs with their lives. A second thing which undermines the
Animalist maxim that "All animals are equal" is the fact that even before the revolution
there is evidence of a basic hierarchical society. The pigs straight away take their places
"immediately in front of the platform" (Ch.I) when the animals meet to hear Old Major's
speech, thus signalling the fact that they are seen as more important than other animals. It
is the pigs who take it upon themselves to direct the revolution, and it is they who assume
leadership after Jones had been driven out.
Animal Farm follows the events of the Russian Revolution quite closely with characters from
the book representing real life people or groups. The way that Orwell presents these real-life
people in the book gives an insight into his political feelings.
Old Major represents a mixture of Marx and Lenin. He preaches the Marxist Doctrine of
Revolutionary Socialism and provides the basic beliefs which later become the Seven
Commandments. He is presented as being a kindly, wise, natural leader who has a dream
about a Utopia where 'All animals are equal' (Ch. I ). Orwell shows Old Major in a
sympathetic light - Old Major is seen as having good intentions but too much of a naive
idealism to realise that not all animals share the same public-spiritedness that he has.
Revolution leads to power, and once power is achieved it is prone to being abused. Orwell
himself believed that revolution was not the answer - he believed that revolution was not a
way of changing society : it was in fact merely a way of keeping it the same. Revolutions
often have good intentions and provide new faces with a new rhetoric but soon it is hard to
tell the new faces from the old. The answer according to Orwell was reform, not revolution :
Reform really changes. Orwell believed that The Left in Russia had been tricked into
revolution by its enemies.
Farmer Jones represents Czar Nicolas II who was the leader of Russia before the Revolution.
Right at the start of the book Orwell shows Jones as being a drunk, neglectful Farmer who
cares very little about his animals. The farm was in a terrible state - "the fields were full of
weeds, the buildings wanted roofing, the hedges were neglected, and the animals were
underfed"(Ch.I). Orwell clearly wanted to show that Nicolas was a bad ruler who ran Russia
for his personal benefit only. The animals were clearly oppressed and had good reason to
want change. Orwell deliberately contrasts the improving way of life for the animals after
the revolution with the poor lives they had under Jones. He also draws parallels between
Jones's drunkenness and the drunkenness of the pigs after they had moved into the house.
Jones and Napoleon are as bad as each other - both exploit the animals for his own benefit :
they are typical all-powerful dictators motivated solely by self-interest.
Orwell's attitude towards religion is shown through the way that he presents Moses the
Raven who symbolises organised religion in Russia. Orwell is very critical of religion,
describing Moses as being "a spy, a tale, bearer but also a clever talker". At first Moses was
loyal to Jones, just as the Russian Church had been to the Czarist Regime. Orwell showed
how Moses's tales of a heaven called "Sugarcandy Mountain" were useful to Jones as a way
of keeping the animals in order - religion gave them hopes of a better life after they died
and their belief made them more willing to accept their current harsh lives. Religion was
contrary to the beliefs of Socialism and so the Church was heavily opposed after the
revolution - hence Moses' disappearence. Moses's return in Chapter IX represents the way
in which Stalin allowed religion to re-establish itself in Russia as he realised that he could
use it ,just as Nicolas II had, as a way of pacifying the animals. Orwell showed religion to be

a both a crutch for the animals to lean on when times were bad (gave them unrealistic
hopes for the future), and also as a means of preventing rebellion against authority
(whether it be Czarist or Communist).
Orwell's views about Trotsky were mixed and these contrasting feelings are shown in the
way he describes Snowball (who represents Trotsky in the book). Snowball is shown to have
been a key factor in the success of the Battle of the Cowshed - his bravery was inspirational
to animals around him. Orwell also describes him as being "brilliant and inventive" in
Chapter 2. Snowball is also shown to have a darker side - the fact that he supported
Napoleon's seizure of the apples shows that he is also susceptible to greed. Orwell clearly
preferred Trotsky to Stalin, but saw him as merely the lesser of two evils - the main
difference between the two being that Stalin used terror and force in order to assert his
authority over the animals and Trotsky main support was gained from his inspiring
speeches. Snowball's collaboration with Napoleon leads us to wonder whether life for the
animals would really have been much better under Snowball than it was under Napoleon.
Orwell's attitude towards Stalin is hinted at even in the naming of his equivalent in the
book. 'Napoleon' was the name of a famous French revolutionary leader who tyrannised his
people and was regarded by some as being the Anti-Christ. As far as Orwell was concerned,
Stalin represented the main force behind the threat to true Socialism. Stalin claimed to be
committed to making a fair and equal society but Orwell saw him in a very different light. In
'Animal Farm' Orwell closely follows Napoleon's rise to power and illustrates to the reader
how Napoleon used cunning and brute force to gain and maintain power on Animal Farm.
Orwell is keen to try and show how evil Stalin was and how far removed the way he ran
Russia was from the original Marxist Socialist beliefs which had been the inspiration for the
revolution in the first place.
The character Boxer in 'Animal Farm' represents the typical loyal, hard working, man in
Russia. His name originates from the Boxer Rebellion in China which signalled the rise of
Communsim in China. Orwell shows Boxer as being an honest worker who follows Animalism
faithfully without fully understanding its more intricate details. Boxer is of limited
intelligence and has complete trust in the pigs. His maxims "Napoleon is always right" and
"I must work harder" are ultimately his downfall - he works himself to exhaustion and is
sent off to the knackers yard by Napoleon, not realising his fate until it is too late. The
example of Boxer is used by Orwell to show to the reader that even the most loyal and
honest people suffer under such a brutal regime. The fact that Napoleon sends Boxer off to
his death signals to the reader how corrupt this Stalinesque figure has become. Boxer's
demise illustrates what can happen to those who have blind trust in their rulers.
The dogs in 'Animal Farm' are a metaphor for the Terror State which Stalin created in Russia
as a means of keeping his political opponents in order. They are a tool of oppression for both
Jones and Napoleon. Their lack of loyalty to Animalism right from the start puts the whole
principles of Animalism into question. If "All animals are comrades" then why do the dogs
attack the rats at the first meeting in the barn?
The gradual changing of the Seven Commandments of Animalism is one of the main devices
which Orwell uses when illustrating to the reader the extent of the betrayal of the
revolution. The commandments, which were themselves a crude simplification of Old Major's
teachings, were altered by Squealer in order to suit Napoleon's requirements. The fact that
even these blatant changes went almost unnoticed by many of the Animals shows how little
they really understood Old Major's teachings and casts further doubt on Old Major's
supposed "wisdom".
The constant arguing between Snowball and Napoleon over almost every issue (most

notably the windmill) on Animal Farm caused great tension. Within Russia the arguements
between Trotsky and Stalin were also never-ending. Orwell mirrors this in the situation
between Snowball and Napoleon, saying how "These two disagreed at every point
disagreement was possible". In the same way that Trotsky was exiled to Mexico due to
Stalin's fears that Trotsky's supporters would assasinate him, Snowball was chased out of
the farm by Napoleon who feared him in a similar way.
Orwell wrote 'Nineteen Eighty-four' to try and show how political systems can suppress
individual freedom. 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is a warning for the future that of what society
could become should totalitarianism be allowed to achieve dominance. The totalitarian
Dystopia in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is inescapable for those who suffer under it and is
constantly changing for the worst. The world of 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is a model of Orwell's
idea of a Totalitarian state that has evolved into its ultimate form. However, Orwell is not
trying to make a complete and accurate prediction of what the world will be like in the
future under a totalitarian government, but instead he presents it as an extreme instance
that sheds light on the nature of current societies that already exist. Shortly before his
death Orwell spoke of 'Nineteen Eighty-four', saying "I do not believe that the kind of
society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe that something resembling it could
arrive".
Orwell once said he writes "because there is some lie that I want to expose". It is this
fundamental lie upon which the political structure of 'Nineteen Eighty-four' rests. The very
slogans of the party are contradictions : "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is
Strength". In writing 'Nineteen Eighty-four' Orwell wanted to expose the cruelty of political
oppression and the kind of lie on which that inhumanity depends.
'Nineteen Eighty-four' can be interpreted as an antipolitical book - the nightmarish world in
which Winston lives is one where politics has displaced humanity and the state has stifled
society in its quest for total control over its inhabitants. The purpose of the Party was not to
rule for the general good, but in order to have control over everyone and everything. Power
is everything. The most startling concept that Orwell deals with in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is
the idea that a political party could see power as being the ultimate goal. The Party rules
over its people without even the pretence that it is governing for the benefit of the people.
In 'Nineteen Eighty-four' Orwell used the form of Scientific Romance because it allowed him
to express his political messages in the form of a novel. Orwell used the Scientific Romance
in a realistic way in order to drive home his political point - that a Dystopia such as the one
in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is a human possibility. Essentially Orwell is warning us of what may
happen should certain dangerous political trends be allowed to carry on.
'Nineteen Eighty-four' has a narrow plot which focuses solely on the life of Winston Smith.
However, Orwell makes a political point from this - Winston Smith is the only person left
who is worth writing about; all the rest have been brainwashed already. When considering
the title for the novel Orwell mentioned in a letter that he was considering "The Last Man in
Europe" - a clear indication that he saw Winston Smith as the last true free thinker in
Europe.
The political and human aspects of 'Nineteen Eighty-four' are very closely linked. Every
thought that Winston makes against Big Brother is Thoughtcrime, every time he writes
another entry in his diary he is risking arrest, even embracing Julia was "a blow struck
against the party". His very relationship with her was "a political act".
In 'Nineteen Eighty-four' Orwell examines how the human spirit copes under the worst
conditions possible. Winston is, as O'Brien laughingly calls him, "the guardian of human

spirit" - a half starved wreck of a man. He is the last person alive capable of free thought
against The Party. Orwell shows how political organisations are capable of doing anything in
order to reach their goals. In this case The Party's goal is to eradicate individual thought
and they are prepared to do anything in order to achieve their goal and think nothing of
torture. Winston's heresy is his insistence on the individual's right to make up his own mind
rather than having to follow what the Party perceives as truth and so he is tortured
constantly until, eventually, he has learned to "love Big Brother"(Section 3, Ch.VI).
In the world of 1984 there has been no improvement in the living standards of the average
person since1948. Big Brother had deliberately kept it this way in the belief that should
people not have to concentrate on trying to get the bare essentials for life then they might
turn their attentions to demanding more from the Party. Orwell makes a political point from
the similarity of living conditions in 1948 and 1984. The opening chapter of 'Nineteen
Eighty-four' describes how the lift seldom worked even "at the best of times", that "the
electricity was cut off during daylight hours", and how he had to use "coarse soap" and
"blunt razor blades". Winston has a nagging belief that life used to be better than what he
could remember but he couldn't prove it - when he spoke to the old prole in a pub the only
fact that he could extract from him was that "the beer tasted better before Big Brother".
The description that Orwell gives of Big Brother as being "a man of about forty-five, with a
heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features" immediately brings the image of
Stalin to the reader's mind. 'Big Brother' is the icon of the Party and it is under his name
that every Party announcement is given - "every success, every achievement, every victory,
every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to
issue directly from his leadership and inspiration" (Part II, Ch.IX, Goldstein's book, Chapter
I).
The character of Goldstein is designed to resemble Stalin's political arch-enemy Trotsky. Just
as in 'Animal Farm' a Trotsky-like scapegoat is incessantly blamed for all problems and is
labelled an enemy of the people by a government led by a Stalinesque figure. Goldstein's
book "The Theory and Practise of Oligarchical Collectivism" is an obvious replica of Trotsky's
"The Revolution Betrayed". The sections of Goldstein's book which are printed in 'Nineteen
Eighty-four' serves two purposes - firstly it identifies many of the ways in which the Party
manipulates its own people (they are merely "cheap labour"), and secondly it mocks
Trotsky's revolutionary rhetoric of polysyllables and ridiculous paradoxes such as "The fields
are cultivated with horse plows while books are written by machinery".
In Section 1,Chapter 7 Winston writes in his Diary "If there is hope, it lies in the Proles".
However, there is no evidence of any revolutionary desires amongst the Proletariat at all in
the novel. O-Brien laughs at Winston in 3.3 for placing his hopes in them and declares "The
proletarians will never revolt". The reason for this is that the Proles do not show the
intelligence, or the desire to revolt - The Party no longer fears the proles because as a class
they have become totally demoralised. Orwell himself confessed in a letter written in 1940
"I have never met a genuine working man who accepted Marxism".
One of the major issues in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is the nature of freedom and the way that
Totalitarianism has the capacity to destroy it. Winston's comment in his diary that "Freedom
is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four" encapsulates Orwell's belief that the
individual must have the right to make up his own mind, regardless of official political party
lines. Orwell saw his role as a writer to be the objective conscience of a society - he was
trying to express the truth as he saw it.

'Homage to Catalonia' differs from 'Nineteen Eighty-four' and 'Animal Farm' in that it is a
non-fiction account of Orwell's actual experiences rather than an allegorical work of fiction
or scientific romance novel. Orwell is describing events as he sees them, putting his own
views across about real events. Orwell's experiences in Spain when fighting in the Civil War
had a major effect on his political attitudes - before Spain he had read much about
Socialism and had experienced varying degrees of Socialist rule, but this was the first time
that he experienced an attempt to put a truly Socialist society into practice.
Orwell came to Spain as a journalist and claimed to be "uninterested in the political
situation" (Appendix I). He joined up in the POUM militia because he wanted to fight against
the forces of Fascism (for this was how he saw the situation at that time, his knowledge
mainly based on English newspaper reports).
Orwell showed his bitterness at the Communists regularly after he left Spain, once
commenting how "The Spanish Communists and their Russian allies were bent not on
making a social revolution happen, as most Western intellectuals believed, but on
preventing one from happening". Instead he saw the Communists as being the true
Conservatives - they simply used their rhetoric of radicalism in order to bamboozle the
Spanish people. The issue of power which was crucial in both 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen
Eighty-four' raised it's head in 'Homage to Catalonia' - the Communists were not Socialist,
they were merely extremely adept at obtaining power and keeping it.
Orwell's motive when writing 'Homage to Catalonia' seemed to be to simply tell the truth
about the events in Spain. However, this 'truth' that Orwell was so desperate to write about
was focused around the treachery of the Communists in Spain. Many historians have taken
issue with Orwell's harsh words about the Communist influence, saying that they had to
tone down the radical elements of the Federalist side (the militias) in order to try and
encourage other European countries to supply them with the much needed weapons with
which to fight Franco. It was certainly true that most of the West preferred the prospect of a
Franco-run Spain than a radically socialist one. Recent studies have also cast doubt on
Orwell's accusation that the Communists deliberately held back weapons from the militias,
fearing that they might get into the hands of Franco's troops.
In 'Homage to Catalonia' Orwell describes the terrible conditions that he had to endure
whilst fighting on the front line for the POUM. He and other troops had to endure "boredom,
heat, cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger". The rats that ran riot all over the
trenches were one of the most horrible, and most common problems. The ever-present rats
which Orwell had to endure provided inspiration for his description of the dreaded "Room
101" in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' where they attacked Winston and caused him to eventually
cry out "Do it to Julia! Not me!" and consequently betrayed his love for her.
Although the chapters Orwell wrote about the political situation in Spain were relegated to
appendices because he felt he needed to separate them from his account of his own
personal experiences, Orwell still devotes a lot of space throughout the book to political and
philosophical topics such as the nature of Socialism. In chapter VII he talks of the "mystique
of Socialism" and how Socialism to most people "means a classless society". It was this
attempt to create a classless society which Orwell found so intriguing. Orwell talks
enthusiastically about the militias dotted around the front line and described them as "a sort
of microcosm of a classless society" (Ch.VII) - it was the sense of comradeship and hope
that permeated the militias that gave Orwell's "desire to see Socialism established much
more actual than it had been before". Orwell describes how in Aragon there were thousands
of people "all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality...in theory it was
perfect equality, and in practice it was not far from it". He then goes on to say how the

situation in Spain was constantly changing so rapidly that "such a state of affairs could not
last. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it". Orwell's
short time in Spain during the early stages of the war modified his political outlook - now he
could believe in Socialism, not just as a theory, but (at least in its early stages) as a reality.
He had "breathed the air of equality" (Ch.VII).
The in-fighting between different factions of the Republican movement clearly distressed
Orwell - it seemed to him that Spain was suffering from "a plague of initials" (Appendix I).
When he arrived in Spain had the attitude "why can't we drop all this political nonsense and
get on with the war?", but eventually even he was forced to take sides "For even if one
cared nothing for the political parties and their conflicting 'lines', it was all too obvious that
one's own destiny was involved". Orwell described himself as "a pawn in the enormous
struggle being fought out between two political theories". It was, most definitely, far more
complex than simply a case of a struggle between the forces of Socialism and Fascism.
Homage to Catalonia certainly provided a lot of inspiration for Orwell when he wrote 'Animal
Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-four' and their are many aspects of the book which link closely
to them.
The most obvious link that joins 'Animal Farm', 'Nineteen Eighty-four' and 'Homage to
Catalonia' is the way that they all examine the forces of totalitarian and socialist
government. 'Homage to Catalonia' tells the story of Orwell's experiences in Spain in such a
way that reveals not only what happened but his opinions, his feelings, and his political
hopes. His two novels 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-four' are also primarily selfrevalations about his political ideas. The in-fighting within the Republican movement in
Spain, according to Orwell, was caused by the different factions becoming engulfed in a
struggle for power. The corrupting influence of mans desire for power over his fellow man is
one of the most major themes in both 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-four'. In 'Animal
Farm' the revolution was betrayed by Napoleon in his quest for personal power and material
benefit, and in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' Big Brother becomes the figurehead of an organisation
whose sole goal is the acquisition and maintainance of political power.

George Orwell, Why I write p. 394

Firstly, George Orwell was definitely a democractic Socialist. He stated this
consistently throughout his life from the mid 1920s to his death in 1950. It is true
that he wrote a compelling account warning of the dangers of totalitarian state.
But, Orwell always maintained that just because you severely criticised Soviet
style Communism didnt make you any less a Socialist. In fact, Socialism as
Orwell understood it, stood for all the values democracy, liberty, equality that
Soviet Communism rejected. Orwell believed that only a truly democratic
Socialist regime would support liberty.
And the only regime which, in the long run, will dare to permit freedom of speech
is a Socialist regime. If Fascism triumphs I am finished as a writer that is to

say, finished in my only effective capacity. That of itself would be a sufficient

reason for joining a Socialist party.
George Orwell, Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party:
Homage to Catalonia

Orwell detested Soviet style Communism a belief strengthened when he ended up

fighting Soviet backed Communists during the Spanish civil war Orwell went to
Spain to fight against Fascism and for the Republican movement. As a member of
the ILP, he joined a fraternal Spanish party POUM a small Marxist /
Anarchist Socialist grouping who had strong utopian Socialist ideals. Orwell
loved their utopian Socialism.
Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here
that those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish
militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that
community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of
everything but no privilege and no bootlicking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast
of what the opening stages of socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of
disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see
socialism established much more actual than it had been before.
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
But, Stalin wanted to crush all left-wing parties who were not the Communist
party, this led to a civil war amongst the Republican movement in Spain. Orwell
got caught up in this and it made him really disgusted with Stalin and the
Communist party.
the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon the extreme right. In
reality this should come as no surprise, because the tactics of the Communist
parties elsewhere
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
This experience of fighting alongside Socialist idealists and against Stalinist
backed Communist party, only strengthened his belief in democratic Socialism.

Down and out in Paris and London

Orwell had a privileged upbringing he studied at Eton College, along with many
future members of the British establishment. After school, he got a job in the
Burmese civil service. But he came to reject his class privileges and also grew to
detest the British Empire. In Down and out in Paris and London and Road to
Wigan Pier, Orwell wanted to experience the difficult life that working class
people experienced. These experiences in Paris, London and Wigan made Orwell
very sympathetic to the cause of the working class, and Orwell believed it was
Socialism that was the fairest way to help create a more equal society.
For perhaps ten years past I have had some grasp of the real nature of capitalist
society. I have seen British imperialism at work in Burma, and I have seen
something of the effects of poverty and unemployment in Britain. One has got
to be actively a Socialist, not merely sympathetic to Socialism, or one plays into
the hands of our always-active enemies.
George Orwell, Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party
Animal Farm
Animal Farm is an allegory on revolutions which fail their ideals. It is clearly an
indictment of the Russian Revolution. Orwell made no secret of the fact that he
detested what Stalin was doing in Russia. Orwell was scathing of left-wing
intellectuals (like George Bernard Shaw) who thought Soviet Russia was a
Socialist paradise. Orwell lamented that Communists in Britain were too liable to
excuse Stalins crimes and paint a picture of Russia which was not reality.
To Orwell, Soviet Russia was a failing of democractic Socialist ideals. Stalin had
merely replaced one dictatorship (old Tsars) with another more murderous
dictatorship.
Independent Labour Party
George Orwell was a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). The ILP
were one of the founding forces of the British Socialist and labour movement.
Their roots were strongly influenced by Christian Socialism and Fabian. Key

figures in the party included John Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and James
Maxton.
To give a flavour of the ILP 1928, the ILP developed a Socialism in Our Time
platform, embodied in the programme:
1.

The Living Wage, incompletely applied

2.

A substantial increase of the Unemployment Allowance

3.

The nationalisation of banking, incompletely applied

4.

The bulk purchase of raw materials

5.

The bulk purchase of foodstuffs

6.

The nationalisation of power

7.

The nationalisation of transport

8. The nationalisation of land

Conclusion
Unfortunately, many in America equate Socialism with Soviet Communism. They
are unaware that Socialist ideals have nothing to do with Stalins policies. Orwell
saw Stalin and Hitler has pursuing essentially the same aim of creating a
totalitarian state. Orwell wrote against totalitarianism and passionately for a
democratic and fair Socialist society in Britain.

George Orwell and his Political Views

George Orwell's books - especially Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm - are written against
totalitarianism and also against Communism from the point of view of an ardent socialist.
Orwell thought that all political theories and ideologies - except socialism - are hopeless and
disillusioning. But Orwell did not mean the utopian Socialism, but the realistic view of this
political line and his aim was to split the two types of socialism and to establish the realistic one.
He said, that Socialist did not claim that they could make the world perfect, but they were trying
to improve it. He also argued that if there were no more very rich and no more very poor people,
such a society would still have a vast number of other problems to solve, because a society
which is balanced in wealth, is not a perfect society. In Orwell's point of view most of the labour
parties of Europe were just parties in the hand of trade unions, that were concerned just of local
problems and especially wages. He judged that real socialism can just be successful in Europe,

when there is something like the United States of Europe, because it would include half the
skilled industrial workers of the world. His dream continued that Europe then will be an example
for the whole world and that socialism - real socialism and not totalitarian communism - will
spread around the world. Although he was as anticommunist as anti-totalitarian he did not
criticise the Soviet Union, because he could not clearly see, what was behind this system of
society. So he wrote in an essay that the people of the USSR are the hungriest, but at the same
time the best fed, that these people are most advanced and most backward and that they are the
happiest and the most miserable as well. He then hoped very strongly that the world will
recognise Stalin's policy not as clever, but merely stupid and in best case opportunistic. While
writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948 he was fully convinced that the Communist revolution in
Moscow was just a failed experiment, because the Communists got a permanent ruling caste,
which was neither elected nor recruited by birth, but by adoption. For this reason they had to rule
the country in a totalitarian style. If they had not done so, the opposition would have grown and
they would have criticised the whole system. Orwell did not like Communism as well, because
he saw that the Communists always had to find scapegoats to hide their own failure and their
own errors.
Orwell also was a pioneer of the left wingers, because he said that the Communism and Fascism
are from the psychological point of view more or less the same. He admit that they were different
in their beginning but the older the grow the more similar became the regimes on both sides. He
stated that both sorts of regimes began to expropriating and nationalising the industry. Orwell
saw in the Communist as well as in the Fascist leaders just people who were greedy for power
and that their political views did not matter a lot so long the meanings promised increase of
power.
His experiences in the Spanish civil war reinforced his view on the Communists, the Fascist and
authoritarian respectively totalitarian regimes in general. He saw that their only aim was to get
the power over Spain and that they did not fight for any particular form of society to help the
people to increase their life standard.

4.10. Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-FourLINK was Orwells last book. It was published in the middle of 1949, and Orwell died in
January 1950. But also in a figurative sense was this his last book. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the conclusion of almost
everything that Orwell had written since 1936 when he with The Road to Wigan Pier began criticising the orthodox
Left and when he went to Spain. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell created a totalitarian universe, Oceania, with its
own history and inner mechanism.
In the fourth decade of the twentieth century, Orwell says in the book, all main political ideologies were
authoritarian. Paradise on Earth had been rejected at the precise moment when it became feasible. Every new
political theory, whatever its name, led to hierarchy and regimentation. After wars, civil wars, revolutions and
counterrevolutions all over the world Ingsoc (Newspeak for English socialism) and its rivals appeared as fully
developed theories. They were a continuation of various political systems, generally called totalitarian, and the
development had long been obvious.
What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up
for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts,
sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. [. . .] As compared with their opposite
numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and above
all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. [NEF p. 164]
After the revolutionary period of the 1950s and 1960s, Orwell continues, society had as always returned to the old
class system with an upper, middle and lower class. But the new thing was that the upper class had realised that
collectivism was the only way of ensuring the oligarchy. Private property was abolished by expropriating the

capitalists, and in this way private property was concentrated on fewer hands, namely one; the Party was the new
owner.
The world of 1984 is divided into three super states that are at perpetual war with each other; the two against the
third with the alliances changing constantly. Orwell says that it is a war with limited objectives in which none of the
warring parties is capable of destroying the others. There are no material causes for fighting nor any ideological
ones of any importance. What matters is to consume the products of the machine without raising the standard of
living.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour.
War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea,
materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run,
too intelligent. [NEF p. 154]
Furthermore, a general increase in the standard of living would destroy the hierarchical social structure since wealth
would no longer be something dividing the classes.
At the top of Oceanias hierarchy is Big Brother, who is infallible and all-powerful.
Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all
happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. [NEF p. 166]
No one has ever seen Big Brother; he is a face on posters, a voice on the telescreen. Big Brother is the guise in
which the Party has chosen to appear to the world. Big Brother is somebody to whom you direct your love, fear and
affection, as these are feelings more easily felt towards a person than an organisation.
Below Big Brother in the hierarchy is the Inner Party followed by the Outer Party. The Inner Party is the brain and
the Outer Party the limbs.
The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own
children, as such; [. . .] The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence
of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a
ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its
blood but with perpetuating itself. Who yields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical
structure remains always the same. [NEF pp. 167-68]
And at the bottom of the hierarchy are the Proles, constituting about 85 per cent of the population. Orwell writes that
in reality nobody really knows anything about the Proles. Left to themselves they have reverted to a way of life that
seems natural to them and that belongs to the past. They are born, grow up in the gutter, start working at the age of
twelve, have a short blooming period of beauty and sexual desire, and mostly they die at the age of 60. They are not
difficult to control. All the time agents from the Thought Police are among them, spreading false rumours and
removing those individuals who might become dangerous. But no attempts are made to indoctrinate them with the
Partys ideology; it is not desirable that the Proles have strong political emotions.
The regime of Oceania has several methods of controlling the population. Agents from the Thought Police are
everywhere. In all houses are telescreens capable of receiving as well as transmitting so that the occupants are under
constant surveillance. Every day there is the Two Minutes Hate. People gather in front of the telescreens and watch a
program that makes them scream and shout with hatred. To the books protagonist, Winston Smith, the terrible thing
is not so much that you are forced to participate but that it is impossible not to get carried away. The contents change
every day but the main character of the program is always Emmanuel Goldstein.
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once [. . .] had been one of the leading figures of the Party,
almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counterrevolutionary activities, had
been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. [. . .] All subsequent crimes
against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teachings.
[NEF p. 13]
According to the Partys propaganda Goldstein is the leader of the brotherhood, a big underground army, working
for the overthrow of Oceania. Goldstein has written a book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism in
which the history and inner mechanism of Oceania are explained. At the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four it turns out
that Goldstein is the invention of the Party and that his book is written by among others OBrien, who represents the
Party and who is the villain of the book. Goldstein is used as a scapegoat to divert discontent and for exposing rebels
like Winston, who confides in OBrien whom he thinks is a member of the Brotherhood.

A major reason for the hysteria during the Two Minutes Hate is repressed sexuality. The Party is against sex and the
goal is not just to prevent men and women from feeling loyal to each other, which in turn will prevent the Party from
exercising its control. The real purpose is to remove pleasure from sex.
[. . .] sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever
and leader worship. [NEF p. 109]
Apart from the mentioned concrete forms of control the Party also employs a more subtle form that is harder to fight
against because it is aimed at the mind. First, the entire system is based on falsification of history for two
purposes. Outwardly the Party is infallible and is forced to change all information when it has been wrong in some
connection or other. The falsification of history takes place in the Ministry of Truth where Winston works. Of course
he knows what he is really doing, but that does not worry him because so many changes have already been made
that he is just replacing one lie with another.
The second purpose is to eradicate memory from the minds of people. The only reason why people put up with their
miserable conditions is that they have been told that it was much worse before the revolution. And as no correct
information about the past exists, nobody knows if it is true. Perhaps it really was worse before, and then you
shouldnt complain.
When it is necessary to manipulate with history and your own memory it is equally necessary to forget that you have
done so. This is accomplished with a mental technique, which in Oldspeak was called reality-control and in
Newspeak is calleddoublethink
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies,
to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to contradictory and believing in
both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that
democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was
necessary to forget, then draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then
promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the
ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of
the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word doublethink involved the use of
doublethink. [NEF pp. 31-32]
Newspeak is the official language of Oceania and its purpose is to fulfil the ideological demands of Ingsoc. In 1984
no one employs Newspeak as the only way of expression, but it is expected that Newspeak will have replaced
Oldspeak around 2050. Newspeak consists of abbreviations, and Orwell writes in his Appendix to Nineteen EightyFour on Newspeak that already early in the twentieth century abbreviations were part of political language. It was
especially widespread in totalitarian countries and organisations. As examples he mentions Nazi, Gestapo,
Komintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop. From a totalitarian viewpoint the advantage of abbreviations like these is that their
meaning is limited and altered so that all associations are removed.
The purpose of Newspeak is not only to be a medium for the ideas and world view of Ingsoc; it is also meant to
make all other ways of thinking impossible and thus remove all heretical thoughts.
Dont you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall
make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every
concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined
and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. [. . .] Every year fewer and fewer words, and the
range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, theres no reason or excuse for
committing thoughtcrime. Its merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there
wont be any need even for that. [. . .] In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy
means not thinking not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. [NEF pp. 45-46]
At a point Winston writes in his diary that he understands how but not why. This why George Bowling already asked
in Coming up for Air in 1939, and in Nineteen Eighty-Four OBrien gives him the answer.
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are
interested solely in power. [. . .] Power it not a means, it is an end. [NEF p. 211]
First of all you have to realise, OBrien says, that power is collective. The individual only has power if he ceases to
be an individual. Alone and free man will always suffer defeat. It has to be this way because man is mortal. But if
the individual can subject himself completely, if he can escape from his identity, if he can let himself be engulfed so

much by the Party that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. Next, you have to realise that power is
power over people, over the body and especially over the mind.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever. [NEF p. 215]
Oceania is the result of a socialist revolution; it is a continuation of Animal Farm. Orwells description of Oceania
contains everything that the anarchists have said about the State, particularly the marxist state, ever since Russian
anarchist and founder of the historical anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin in 1873 wrote:
For its self-preservation, the State must necessarily be externally powerful, but if it is so in its relations with
the outer world, it must equally certainly be powerful internally. Every State has to be inspired and guided
by a special morality conforming to the particular conditions of its existence, a morality which is a negation
of human and universal morality. The State must make sure that all its subjects, in thought and above all in
deed, are inspired only by the principles of this patriotic and particular morality, and that they remain deaf
to the teachings of a purely human and universal morality. Hence the need for State censorship, since too
much liberty of thought and opinion is as Marx believes with good reason if one accepts his eminently
political point of view incompatible with that unanimous adherence which security of State demands.
[Note 19]
It was also Bakunin who said that the lust for power is stronger and more perverting than any material or economic
motive.
Because of the obvious anti-communism in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the book was a great success in the USA where
McCarthyismLINK had just reared its head. It was overlooked, however, that Orwell in the book says
that all ideologies in the mid-twentieth century were authoritarian. Because Nineteen Eighty-Four was
misinterpreted and in some cases misused, Orwell wrote in 1949:
My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a
supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have
already been partly realized in communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe
necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something
resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals
everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences. [CEJL vol. 4 p. 564]
5. Conclusion
On the surface Orwells political development may seem filled with contradictions. After his time as a policeman in
Burma he was an anarchist; a superficial one perhaps and not very consistent but that was how he felt. In the early
1930s he became more critical of society, and in The Road to Wigan Pier we see him as a socialist. But he is an
undogmatic socialist who does not care much for the theories and who criticises the doctrinaire socialists, who
precisely because of their theories have forgotten that socialism first and foremost is about liberty and justice. After
Spain he was very sympathetic to anarchism and was even more undogmatic after having seen what dogmatism can
lead to. The membership of the ILP therefore seems inconsistent since party membership will always to some extent
result in dogmatism. But this must be seen in relation to the war which at that time was just around the corner.
Orwell was against the war and he felt that the ILP was the only party that would adopt the right attitude to the war,
most likely because of the partys pacifism. With the war a drastic change in Orwell took place. Having been against
the war he was now for it; he criticised the pacifists for views that he himself had held just a few years before; and
he left the ILP. With Animal Farm he took up the themes from Spain and Homage to Catalonia and elaborated on
them. Orwells anti-authoritarianism became more pronounced as he came closer toNineteen Eighty-Four, where we
see Orwell as a fairly consistent anarchist who saw the dangers of the State and leaders in general.
As said, this development may seem contradictory, but this is because Orwell lived in the present. His views were
always to some extent shaped by the situation he at any given time was in. Perhaps he only had one view. In 1936
Orwell said that to him socialism first and foremost meant liberty and justice, and this view he never left. The
contradictions were in many ways a consequence of this basic belief.
It is difficult to put a political label on Orwell, precisely because he was undogmatic. Unlike the doctrinaire
socialists Orwell saw socialism as the social aspect of an all-encompassing moral attitude; a view that undoubtedly
was caused by meeting the Spanish anarchists to whom anarchism was a moral attitude with political consequences.
It would, however, be an exaggeration to say that anarchism was Orwells all-encompassing moral attitude, although
there are many anarchist traits in Orwells criticism of society, of the communists, the professional politicians and

the elitist socialists, who believed they were the vanguard of the working class. But one of the most basic tenets of
anarchism, the rejection of the State, Orwell could not accept. Orwell meant that some form of state was necessary
to maintain freedom. In his view, the stateless society of anarchism contained totalitarian tendencies. In Politics vs
Literature from 1946 he says:
This illustrates well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the Anarchist or pacifist vision of society.
In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public
opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less
tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by thou shalt not, the individual can
practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by love or reason, he is
under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else. [CEJL
vol. 4 p. 252]
Although rejecting the alternative society of anarchism Orwell did not have anything better to put instead. He was
against the society of the day but had no ideas about how and to what it should change. The importance of Orwell as
a political writer is not as a theoretician but as a critic, the guilty conscience and loyal opposition of the Left. To
Orwell socialism was the only solution. It would not lead to a perfect world but at least to a better world. But in
order for that to happen constant criticism was necessary.
We cannot really put a political label on Orwell. He had so many facets and aspects that he escapes any unequivocal
definition. And since he himself tried to maintain his individuality and avoid the dogmas with their unresolved
contradictions, this seems only fair. At one point, Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four writes in his diary:

The Political Ideas of George Orwell

George Orwell

George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Blair who was born at Mothari, India on 25 June 1903;
educated at St Cyprian's preparatory school, Eastbourne where he won a scholarship to Eton and.
after completing his education, worked as a policeman in Burma, attaining the rank of subdivisional officer, a private tutor, school teacher and an assistant in a book shop. He fought
against the fascists in Spain in 1935-37, worked for the BBC for a time during the Second World
War and for Tribune after the war. From about 1930 he tried to earn his living as a writer, finally
achieving outstanding success with his last two novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty
Four ( 1949). His last years were dogged by tuberculosis and he died in London on 21 January
1950.
Orwell was a fine, though somewhat confused, journalist who became famous for the plain style
of writing evident in his essays; his successful attempt to make political writing an art; his
famous satires on totalitarianism; his search for objectivity and honesty in journalism depicted
most graphically in Homage to Catalonia (1938). Many of Orwell's experiences are captured in
his books and essays. Indeed any study of Orwell must keep in mind the fact that there is some
fiction in all his autobiography and some autobiography in all of his fiction.
Orwell described himself as lower-upper-middle class, failing to realise that there are only two
classes: the capitalist class which possesses but does not produce and the working class which
produces but does not possess. Nevertheless, the myths that have sprung up about his poverty are
incorrect. His father's pension was 438-10/- (438.50) a year compared with the average annual
wage of about l00 for a skilled manual worker in 1913-14.
Some twenty years later Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to write about conditions
in the coal mining areas of the industrial north with an advance of 500 spread over two years
a considerable sum when Orwell himself stated that the miners earned less than 3 a week in
1934 (even allowing for expenses incurred in obtaining material for the book). Although Orwell
did not make a great deal of money from his writing until the publication of Animal Farm in

1945, he was able to keep his head above water with a standard of living, although far from
luxurious and certainly spartan by today's standards, that would have been the envy of many
miners in the 1930s.
Throughout his novels, documentaries, essays and journalism Orwell relentlessly and
uncompromisingly criticised imperialism, nationalism, capitalism, political dishonesty, power,
totalitarianism, privilege and private education. He claimed to be a democratic socialist, joining
the Independent Labour Party in June 1938 until after the outbreak of the Second World War, but
his confused notions of socialism can be read inThe Lion and the Unicorn (1941) in which he
states:
In England there is only one Socialist party that has ever seriously mattered, the Labour Party. It
has never been able to achieve any major change, because except in purely domestic matters it
has never possessed a genuinely independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of the trade
unions, devoted to raising wages and improving working conditions. This meant that all through
the critical years it was directly interested in the prosperity of British capitalism.
Thus Orwell describes the Labour Party as socialist and continues in the same paragraph to
describe, quite accurately, why it is not and cannot be socialist. He also suggested that there
should be Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain
does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one", which even the majority of Conservatives
would recognise as unsocialist. He also described Russia as "the only definitely socialist
country, although it is true he had many harsh things to say concerning the perversion of
socialism in Russia in many of his other books.
Nevertheless in this, arguably his worst book, Orwell describes the inefficiency and
contradictions of capitalism when he wrote of British capitalists selling war materials to
Germany:
Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers were tumbling over one another in their
eagerness to sell Germany tin, rubber, copper and shellac - and this in the clear, certain
knowledge that war was going to break out in a week or two. It was about as sensible as selling
somebody a razor to cut your throat with. But it was "good business".
In an article in the 1983 Socialist Standard, Brian Rubin argues that Orwell's socialism" was in
fact little more than a moral stance, a call for justice and liberty and a more humane and
decent world. Rick Hales, in the 1980 Socialist Standard (Literary lefties in the 1930s) claims
that the literary left-wing tried to expiate their class-guilt mostly by becoming Communists or
fellow travellers except for the two heretics of the left-wing Julian Symons, who became a
Trotskyite, and George Orwell who became a tramp.
Orwell's imaginative writing was not as good as his autobiographical or documentary work, but
it was in his political journalism and polemical essays that he excelled. He was not an original
writer, however, and many of his ideas had been written about previously; The Road to Wigan
Pier (1937) in which he discovered poverty in the industrial north and Down and Out in Paris
and London in which he became a tramp had been written about by Jack London in The People
or the Abyss (1902) and W. H. Davies in The Autobiography or a Super-Tramp (1908). The
section in A Clergyman's Daughter in which the central character, Dorothy, spends the night in
Trafalgar Square with a group of tramps is an attempt to emulate the stream-of-consciousness

style of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and fails artistically. It was an experiment which Orwell
did not repeat. Bernard Crick, Orwell's biographer, has drawn attention to similarities between
Jack London's The Iron Heel (1907) in which is written By virtue of that power we will remain
in power . . . . We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon
your faces, and Nineteen Eighty Four: The party seeks power for its own sake. We are not
interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power . . . We know that no-one ever
seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it, and If you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever. Animal Farm owes much to Swift's satire
and, indeed, Orwell wrote an excellent essay "Politics vs. Literature: an examination of
Gulliver's travels" in 1946. Nineteen Eighty Four owes a debt to Evgeny Zamyatin's
book We (1925), which Orwell acknowledged in a letter to George Woodcock (1967), in which
he stated that he had only been able to obtain a copy of the book in French and was looking for
an English translation. However, it would be unfair to accuse Orwell of plagiarism because he
borrowed ideas. Most topics and human emotions have been written about previously and
genuine originality is difficult to achieve. It is sufficient to say that most of Orwell's work was
well written and all of his work has survived him.
A common view held by the political right-wing is that Orwell exposed the horrors of
"socialism" by predicting what would happen under a regime of the Stalinist model which the
right-wing claims to be representative of all socialist ideals, conveniently ignoring the fact that
he was writing about state capitalism represented as socialism and that the book was intended to
be satire and not prediction. Also conveniently ignored are his other writings depicting the evils
of imperialism, the inherent unfairness of privilege and the inefficiency and self-interest of
capitalism.
The Communists had good reason to detest Orwell for exposing their treachery in Spain, during
the civil war, with the publication of Homage to Catalonia in 1938 in which he stated:
. . . among the parties on the Government side the Communists stood not upon the extreme
Left, but upon the extreme Right . . . In particular, the USSR is in alliance with France, a
capitalist-imperialist country. The alliance is of little use to Russia unless French capitalism is
strong, therefore Communist policy in France has got to be anti-revolutionary.
In 1940 Orwell wrote, in his long essay Inside the Whale:
The more vocal kind of Communist is in effect a Russian publicity agent posing as an
international socialist. It is a pose that is easily kept up at normal times, but becomes difficult in
moments of crisis, because of the fact that the USSR is no more scrupulous in its foreign policy
than the rest of the great powers.
As a result, the Communists tried to portray Orwell either as a traitor who played into the hands
of the right-wing or as the work of a disillusioned and desperately ill man. Brian Rubin quotes
Llew Gardner of the Daily Worker: When he wrote 1984, the anti-socialist work that shocked
the nation on television, George Orwell was sick in mind and body, a fast dying man (18
December 1954.) Although Orwell had been seriously ill with tuberculosis since 1947 and his
health had not been good before that he acknowledged in a letter to George Woodcock that the
book was gloomy because he had been feeling so ill when he wrote it it is a gross distortion to
suggest that he was mentally ill. Orwell had been making plans for a further novel and arranging
for treatment in a Swiss clinic when he had his fatal lung haemorrhage. Certainly, he was

expecting to live a little longer. Apart from the obvious political tactic of trying to denigrate
Orwell, to see Nineteen Eighty Four in psychological terms is to ignore the fact that the book
draws together ideas that Orwell had been expressing for more than ten years.
Orwell had some harsh words to say about political careerists: . . . the type who becomes a
Labour MP or a high-up trade union official. This last type is one of the most desolating
spectacles the world contains. He has been picked out to fight for his mates, and all it means to
him is a soft job and the chance of bettering himself (The Road to Wigan Pier). He also referred
to Labour Party back-stairs crawlers, and Bolshevik commissars as half gangster, half
gramophone. In the same book, Orwell criticised elitism: The truth is that to many people
calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which
they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which we, the clever ones, are
going to impose upon them, the Lower Orders.
The anarchists tend to hold Orwell in high regard, appreciating his criticism of totalitarian
regimes of both the right and left and his understanding of imperialism and capitalist values
which can be seen in his earliest books, In 1933 he wrote: Why are beggars despised? for they
are despised universally, I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living,
In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic, the sole thing
demanded is that it shall be profitable . . . Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test
beggars fail, and for this they are despised, and one of Orwell's characters, Bozo, the Parisian
tramp tapped his forehead and said: I'm a free man in here (Down and Out in Paris and
London}.
Despite having strong words to say against authoritarianism, Orwell had an acute awareness of
the dangers that could arise from the apparent renunciation of power and the nature of moral
coercion and the force of public opinion. In 1946, in an essay entitled Politics vs. literature he
wrote:
In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour
is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in
gregarious animals is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by
thou shalt not, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are
supposedly governed by love or reason, he is under continuous pressure to make him behave
and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.
Animal Farm, the book that launched Orwell to fame, is a clever satire on the perversion of
revolutionary aims. The plot of the book concerns the rebellion of the animals against their
human oppressors and taking over the farm to be run for the benefit of animals. Gradually the
pigs take over the management of the farm and make all the decisions, first publicly, but later in
private. Eventually there is a power struggle between the pigs and Snowball is driven off the
farm by dogs trained by Napoleon. Animals considered traitors are slaughtered and trade with
other farms is re-established. The farm grows richer without making the animals richer, except
for the pigs and dogs. At the end of the book when the men and pigs play cards and cheat leading
to a quarrel the other animals, consumed with curiosity, look through the window: The creatures
outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it
was impossible to say which was which. The comparison with Stalinist Russia and the purge of
Trotsky is irresistible. The book also introduced the famous and frequently quoted phrase: All
animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

Nineteen Eighty Four depicts a nightmare future in which all the citizens of a totalitarian state
live under constant surveillance from telescreens controlled by Big Brother. The central
character, Winston Smith, embarks on a clandestine love affair with Julia, a party member, and
joins The Brotherhood, an illegal organisation dedicated to the overthrow of Big Brother. He is
caught, tortured and brainwashed. He ends up loving Big Brother. Orwell enlarged on the theme
of the falsification of history in this book:
If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened
that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
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 when memory failed and written records were falsified when that happened, the claim of
the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there
did not exist, and never again could exist, any standards against which it could be tested.
The Nineteen Eighty Four theme of the two minutes Hate period each day had been written
about by Orwell in 1939: "It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for about a fortnight
without stopping. It's a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting
propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let's all get
together and have a good hate. Over and over. It gives you the feeling that something has got
inside your skull and is hammering down on your brain (Coming Up for Air).
It is surprising that Orwell should get so near the truth in Nineteen Eighty Four by having
Winston Smith read in The Brotherhood's forbidden book: But no advance in wealth, no
softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre
nearer. From the point of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change
in the name of their masters, without drawing the conclusion that a socialist movement without
leaders would solve the contradictions of power.
The importance of George Orwell as a writer lies in his questioning of institutions, power
structures and political statements. The state, law, religion, charity, public schools, political
parties and the media all came under his scrutiny. The morals behind individual beliefs were
questioned in essays such as Raffles and Miss Blandish:
People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old
boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring
pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin.
There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook (1944).
Despite Orwell's influence political journalism is as corrupt as ever. However, if we,
individually, question what we read and try to be honest and objective in what we write then it is
a start. Above all it is important that our socialism is not compromised and that we do not put our
trust in leaders but our confidence in the power of the working class.
Syndicalism: Its Origin and Weakness

George Orwells Letter on

Why He Wrote 1984
In 1944, three years before writing and five years before
publishing 1984 , George Orwell penned a letter detailing the thesis of his
great novel. The letter, warning of the rise of totalitarian police states that
will say that two and two are five, is reprinted from George Orwell: A Life in
Letters , edited by Peter Davison and published today by Liveright. Plus,
Orwell's advice to Arthur Koestler on how to review books .
To Noel Willmett
18 May 1944
10a Mortimer Crescent NW 6
Dear Mr Willmett,

Many thanks for your letter. You ask whether totalitarianism, leaderworship etc. are really on the up-grade and instance the fact that they are
not apparently growing in this country and the USA.
I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things
are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the
expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires
and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national
movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to
German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group
themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar,
Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the
theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement
seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made
to work in an economic sense but which are not democratically
organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the
horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the
existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the
words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a
sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own
times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are

endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the

mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that
will become official history. He cant say that two and two are five,
because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if
the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great
superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could
become five if the fuhrer wished it.1 That, so far as I can see, is the
direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process
is reversible.
As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the
pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very
hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The
Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to
centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But
one must remember that Britain and the USA havent been really tried,
they havent known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad
symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general
indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that
no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see
the great mass of people of that age dont give a damn for this? Secondly
there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook
than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have
opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them
are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic
falsification of history2 etc. so long as they feel that it is on our side.
Indeed the statement that we havent a Fascist movement in England
largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer
elsewhere. One cant be sure that that wont change, nor can one be sure
that the common people wont think ten years hence as the intellectuals
do now. I hope3 they wont, I even trust they wont, but if so it will be at
the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and
doesnt point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring
totalitarianism nearer.
You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I
support the war. It is a choice of evilsI fancy nearly every war is that. I
know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it
against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I
would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR
cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas
of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi
Germany. I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or
thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making
it the better, which involves constant criticism.

Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell
[XVI, 2471, pp. 1902; typewritten]
1. and 2. Foreshadowings of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
3. Compare Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 72, If there is hope, wrote
Winston, it lies in the proles.
Reprinted from George Orwell: A Life in Letters, selected and annotated
by Peter Davison. Copyright George Orwell. First American Edition
2013. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior
written permission of the publisher.

George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter

Why Hed Write 1984
Most of the twentieth centurys notable men of letters i.e., writers of books, of essays, of reportage
seem also to have, literally, written a great deal of letters. Sometimes their correspondence reflects
and shapes their real written work; sometimes it appears collected in book form itself. Both hold
true in the case ofGeorge Orwell, a volume of whose letters, edited by Peter Davison, came out last
year. In it we find this missive, also published in full at The Daily Beast, sent in 1944 to one Noel
Willmett, who had asked whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade
given that they are not apparently growing in [England] and the USA:
I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase.
Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the
Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the
national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination,
seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler,
Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that
the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of
centralised economies which can be made to work in an economic sense but which are not
democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of
emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all
the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has
in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be
universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to
keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that
will become official history. He cant say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of,
say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of
two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could
become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are
actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.
As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we
have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I
explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to
centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that
Britain and the USA havent been really tried, they havent known defeat or severe suffering, and
there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general
indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under

26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age dont give a
damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than
the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the
price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police,
systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on our side. Indeed the
statement that we havent a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this
moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One cant be sure that that wont change, nor can one be
sure that the common people wont think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hopethey
wont, I even trust they wont, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims
that all is for the best and doesnt point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring
totalitarianism nearer.
You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a
choice of evilsI fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it,
but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I
would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR cannot altogether escape its
past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful
phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or
thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which
involves constant criticism.
Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell
Three years later, Orwell would write 1984. Two years after that, it would see publication and go on
to generations of attention as perhaps the most eloquent fictional statement against a world reduced
to superstates, saturated with emotional nationalism, acquiescent to dictatorial methods, secret
police, and the systematic falsification of history, and shot through by the willingness to disbelieve
in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of
some infallible fuhrer. Now that you feel like reading the novel again, or even for the first time, do
browse our collection of 1984-related resources, which includes the eBook, the audio book, reviews,
and even radio drama and comic book adaptations of Orwells work.
Related Content:
George Orwells 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources
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George Orwell and Douglas Adams Explain How to Make a Proper Cup of Tea
For 95 Minutes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life
George Orwells Five Greatest Essays (as Selected by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Columnist Michael
Hiltzik)
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities,
Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. Hes at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles
Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

WHY ORWELL WROTE "1984"

"Good prose is like a windowpane."
Eric Blair, pseudonym George Orwell, was a master writer and story teller. He
wrote his first poem at the age of four or five, by dictation to his mother. In

the last sixteen years of his life (born in 1903 - died in 1950) he wrote nine
major books and 700 essays and articles.
In the essay WHY I WRITE, published in 1947, Orwell says:
"...In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive
books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As
it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five
years in an unsuitable profession (The Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and
then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my
natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of
the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me
some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences
were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came
Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach
a firm decision. The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 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, againsttotalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I
understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think
that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one
guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what
approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias,
the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's
aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
"...I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact
to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a
hearing. ...Of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more
exactly. ANIMAL FARM was the first book in which I tried, with full
consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic
purpose into one whole. I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound
to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what
kind of book I want to write...."
As we all know, the book Orwell went on to write was "1984". It has since
been translated into 62 languages and it, along with ANIMAL FARM, had sold
more than 40 million copies by 1984. In the USA it sold 1,000 copies a day
that year. Quoting Orwell again from WHY I WRITE:
"...All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of
their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible,
exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never
undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one
can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is
simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for
attention.... Good prose is like a windowpane...."
Not only figuratively but also literally was the writing of "1984" like a bout of
some painful illness for George Orwell. Throughout its writing he
was fighting tuberculosis and was at times admitted to the hospital
where his typewriter was taken away from him. Undaunted he sat in bed,

propped up on pillows, and wrote in longhand with ball-point pen. He

was administered a newly developed drug to which he developed a severe
allergic reaction. His skin flaked, his mouth became painfully
ulcerated, his hair and nails fell out. After several months recuperating
in the sanitorium Orwell returned to his home on the remote Scottish island
of Jura, one of the most inaccessible spots in the British Isles,
and finished writing "1984" in December 1948. He then went
immediately back into hospital and was never again healthy enough to be
discharged. "1984" was published in June 1949 and Orwell died seven
months later on January 21st, 1950, at the age of 46.
In "1984" George Orwell describes how a hierarchical world tyranny is
set up, how it stays in power, how it treats its people, and what life is
like living under such a system. "1984" is in fact a coded blueprint for world
tyranny, laying bare its structure and exposing its components.
Orwell wrote "1984" for us, the future, in the hope we would recognize
the signs and symptoms of tyrannical world government and prevent its
establishment in our world. Let's make sure he did not write in vain. ~
Jackie Jura

Why I Write
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.
Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with
the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle
down and write books.
I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my
father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed
disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely
child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from
the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.
I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this
created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.
Nevertheless the volume of serious i.e. seriously intended writing which I produced all through
my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age
of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that
it was about a tiger and the tiger had 'chair-like teeth' a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem
was a plagiarism of Blake's 'Tiger, Tiger.' At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a
patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the
death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished
'nature poems' in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That

was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.
However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was
the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart
from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now
seems to me astonishing speed at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of
Aristophanes, in about a week and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in
manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took
far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all
this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was
the making up of a continuous 'story' about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe
this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I
was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my 'story'
ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I
was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my
head: 'He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through
the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot.
With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell
cat was chasing a dead leaf,' etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through
my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be
making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The
'story' must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but
so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.
When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and
associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost
So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling
'hee' for 'he' was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already.
So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books
at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed
descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly
for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote
when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.
I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives
without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the
age he lives in at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own but before he
ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely
escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some
immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he
will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great
motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in
any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is
living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism.
Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on
the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive,
and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers,
soldiers, successful businessmen in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of
human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of
being individuals at all and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But
there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end,
and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and selfcentered than journalists, though less interested in money.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right
arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the
rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to
be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of
textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may
feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is
quite free from aesthetic considerations.
3. Historical impulse.
Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4. Political purpose.
Using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain
direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again,
no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with
politics is itself a political attitude.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must
fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature taking your 'nature' to be the state
you have attained when you are first adult I am a person in whom the first three motives would
outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and
might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into
becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian
Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my
natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working
classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but
these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler,
the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a
little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma:
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,

I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,

We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own

The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,

Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;

We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,

The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune

While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,

And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 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. It seems to me nonsense, in
a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in
one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows.
And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically
without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.
My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a
book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie
that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a
hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not
also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is
downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not
able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as
I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the
earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to
suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the
essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.
It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the
problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My
book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political book, but in
the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the
whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter,
full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with
Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary
reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. 'Why did you put in all
that stuff?' he said. 'You've turned what might have been a good book into journalism.' What he said
was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England
had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry
about that I should never have written the book.
In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would
take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and
more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have
always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I
was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for
seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure,
but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. Looking back through the last page

or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I
don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very
bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a
long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on
by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is
simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can
write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose
is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know
which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably
where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages,
sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

What is the similarity between 1984 and society today?

George Orwell's '1984' (first published 1949) still holds a lot of significance for
societies and people today. In its own day it was considered a 'visionary' and
'futuristic' novel, which posited how the world would be in years to come.
Indeed, we can say that many of Orwell's ideas (in particular with regard to
totalitarianism and the tendency of modrn governments to want to 'control'
citizens) in this work, were proved true-- societies, governments, carried out
steps to curtail popular freedom/s and citizens' voices and protests, and
systems of vigilance emerged that remind one of 'Big Brother' watching...
Even today, in the 21st century, over 60 years after the novel's publication,
there are numerous ways that it is still relevant; whereby we can see how the
soiety in the book and contemporary societies around the world, have many
similarities-- for example, here are some common points:
1. State control-- various states and governments still continue to exert
increasing vigilance and control on the public, on citizens, in various ways eg
through the media, in monitoring opinion/s, in guiding and dictating how
people live and interact.
2. Electronic intrusion and mind control-- even today, various people such as
governments, large corporations/businesses etc, 'play' with peoples minds
and also intrude into various aspects of their lives through electronic means;
for example, look at so many advertisements today, which are based on how
other people are able to obtain our private information and collect all sorts of
data on us, to ultimately exploit or control us, and to affect our minds with
some sort of 'brainwashing' at some level.
These are only some basic examples, am sure you can think up many more
when you re-read the text of the novel and contrast it to our daily lives today. It
would be right to say that Orwell's book is still 'relevant' to our situation.
I also hope the links below are somewhat helpful in clarifying things and
guiding further.

4 Predictions From Orwells

'1984' That Are Coming True
Today
It would be an exaggeration to say that our world has turned into the
totalitarian state outlined by George Orwell in his landmark novel, Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
The planet hasn't devolved into an ongoing clash between super-states, and
U.S. society is far from a quasi-communist one-party state in which individual
rights are routinely ignored.
Still, it might pay to look at some interesting parallels, and to ask ourselves
whether we might wind up in an Orwellian world by following a different plot.
We might be slowly, voluntarily embracing some of the same things
that 1984 depicts as being forced on a world still reeling after atomic warfare.

1. Big Brother is Watching You

This, of course, is the most obvious parallel. In Orwell's 1984, Big Brother
the purported leader of the Party that rules the nation of Oceania keeps
constant tabs on the population through "telescreens" (basically two-way
televisions). With our National Security Agency (NSA) involved in warrantless
wiretapping, maintaining a call database (MARINA), and engaged in datamining (PRISM), we can be forgiven for wondering if Big Brother is no longer a
fictional character. The difference, though, is that telescreens weren't owned
by most people in Orwell's1984, because they were too expensive. In the real
world, however, each of us has a hand-held "telescreen" we carry with us
most everywhere we go, which we've willingly paid for ourselves and which we
almost never turn off. To be fair, in The Dark Knight, our smartphones were
used to defeat the Joker. But is the NSA more Batman or Big Brother?

2. Perpetual War
In 1984, the Party embraces a policy of continual war so as to eat up any
economic surplus and keep people poor and under control. The U.S.
government isn't accomplishing anything like that, but we do seem to have a
habit of moving seamlessly from one military conflict to another. Despite
having left Iraq in just the past year or so and being slated to leave
Afghanistan soon, we're getting more deeply involved in places like Libya and
Syria. And what's going on in Syria and spilling into Lebanon, Turkey, and
Iraq as well is shaping up to be the latest episode of the Sunni-Shiite
schism, a rift that has endured for over a thousand years. Not sure we can
settle that one anytime soon. Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea might have
atomic weapons. Yay!

3. Bread and Circuses

In 1984, the vast majority of the population the "Proles" (i.e., proletariat)
were almost not even worthy of surveillance. So long as the Party gave them a
regular infusion of food, alcohol, the lottery and pornography, they Proles were
considered to be under control. Maybe Orwell was harkening back to another
satirist, Juvenal, who complained about the "bread and circuses" that Imperial
Rome used to control the plebians and to pry them away from their rights and
responsibilities as Roman citizens. (Juvenal also helpfully gave us the phrase,
"Who will watch the watchmen?", paving the way for Alan Moore's graphic
novel, Watchmen, which also described an alternate, dystopian 1980s.)
Currently trending on Google are Kim Kardashian, Man of Steel, Miss USA,
and Italy's win over Mexico in the FIFA Confederations Cup. Would you like
bread with that?

4. Newspeak
Every society engages in euphemism and linguistic evolution, but is it used for
good or ill? Confucius linked the misuse of vocabulary to the warfare and
social breakdown of his day, and called for a "rectification of names". In1984,
Orwell lays out in detail how language can be (mis)used to deceive and
control the masses. In the real world today, political correctness and
euphemism are both pervasive and pervasively derided. George

Carlin worked comedic wonders mocking our gutless linguistic evasions. But
as funny as they are, they're not fictional: wealthy people are "job-creators";
when the government takes less money from people it's called a "tax
expenditure" (if we don't make people perform community service, is that a
work furlough?); and the massacre of 13 Army personnelby Maj. Nidal Hasan
(while yelling "Allahu Akbar") is a case of "workplace violence." If the
fictional Orwellian Newspeak of 1984 makes us wince, how much more should
the actual vocabulary of U.S. politics?
It appears that the police now have a device that can read license plates and check if a
car is unregistered, uninsured or stolen. We already know that the National Security
Agency can dip into your Facebook page and Google searches. And it seems that
almost every store we go into these days wants your home phone number and ZIP code
as part of any transaction.
So when Edward Snowden -- now cooling his heels in Russia -- revealed the extent to
which the NSA is spying on Americans, collecting data on phone calls we make, it's not
as if we should have been surprised. We live in a world that George Orwell predicted in
"1984." And that realization has caused sales of the 1949, dystopian novel to
spike dramatically upward recently -- a 9,000% increase at one point on Amazon.com.
Comparisons between Orwell's novel about a tightly controlled totalitarian future ruled
by the ubiquitous Big Brother and today are, in fact, quite apt. Here are a few of the
most obvious ones.
Telescreens -- in the novel, nearly all public and private places have large TV screens
that broadcast government propaganda, news and approved entertainment. But they
are also two-way monitors that spy on citizens' private lives. Today websites like
Facebook track our likes and dislikes, and governments and private individuals hack into
our computers and find out what they want to know. Then there are the everpresent surveillance cameras that spy on the average person as they go about their
daily routine.
The endless war -- In Orwell's book, there's a global war that has been going on
seemingly forever, and as the book's hero, Winston Smith, realizes, the enemy keeps
changing. One week we're at war with Eastasia and buddies with Eurasia. The next
week, it's just the opposite. There seems little to distinguish the two adversaries, and
they are used primarily to keep the populace of Oceania, where Smith lives, in a
constant state of fear, thereby making dissent unthinkable -- or punishable. Today we
have the so-called war on terror, with no end in sight, a generalized societal fear,
suspension of certain civil liberties, and an ill-defined enemy who could be anywhere,
and anything.

Doublethink -- Orwell's novel defines this as the act of accepting two mutually
contradictory beliefs as correct. It was exemplified by some of the key slogans used by
the repressive government in the book: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is
Strength. It has also been particularly useful to the activists who have been hard at work
introducing legislation regulating abortion clinics. The claim is that these laws are only to
protect women's health, but by forcing clinics to close because of stringent regulations,
they are effectively shutting women off not only from abortion, but other health services.
Newspeak -- the fictional, stripped down English language, used to limit free thought.
OMG, RU serious? That's so FUBAR. LMAO.
Memory hole -- this is the machine used in the book to alter or disappear incriminating
or embarrassing documents. Paper shredders had been invented, but were hardly used
when Orwell wrote his book, and the concept of wiping out a hard drive was years in the
future. But the memory hole foretold both technologies.
Anti-Sex League -- this was an organization set up to take the pleasure out of sex, and
to make sure that it was a mechanical function used for procreation only. Organizations
that promote abstinence-only sex education, or want to ban artificial birth control, are
the modern versions of this.
So what's it all mean? In 1984, Winston Smith, after an intense round of "behavior
modification" -- read: torture -- learns to love Big Brother, and the harsh world he was
born into. Jump forward to today, and it seems we've willingly given up all sorts of
freedoms, and much of our right to privacy. Fears of terrorism have a lot to do with this,
but dizzying advances in technology, and the ubiquity of social media, play a big part.
There are those who say that if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to be
afraid of. But the fact is, when a government agency can monitor everyone's phone
calls, we have all become suspects. This is one of the most frightening aspects of our
modern society. And even more frightening is the fact that we have gone so far down the
road, there is probably no turning back. Unless you spend your life in a wilderness
cabin, totally off the grid, there is simply no way the government won't have information
about you stored away somewhere.
What this means, unfortunately, is that we are all Winston Smith. And Big Brother is the
modern surveillance state.
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Orwells 1984: Are We There Yet?

SEAN FITZPATRICK
The second most terrifying thing about George Orwells 1984 is the
supposition that it is possible to destroy humanity without destroying
humankind. The first is how many aspects of our democratic nation resemble his
dystopian nightmare.
George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 as a political satire of a totalitarian state and a
denunciation of Stalinism. Orwell himself was a socialist, who fought for the
republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded by a sniper bullet to the
throat. As the West became aware of the horrors of Stalin, Orwell became
disillusioned.
1984 was Orwells resulting futuristic-cautionary tale of Winston Smith in a
world of government domination defined by anxiety, hatred, and cruelty. The
Party, whose head is reverently called Big Brother, presides over existence
through omnipresent surveillance and mind control. Their subjugated citizens
are programmed not only to accept if Big Brother says that 2 + 2 = 5, but also to
believe it. Winstons adventures begin as he slowly and fearfully steps out of the
established traces, sensing the hypocrisy that surrounds and penetrates him, to
search for truth. What he finds is pain.

Commenting on 1984, Orwell wrote, I do

not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe
that something resembling it could arrive.
Has it?
Of course, the United States is not autocratic; but many of the disturbing
elements of 1984 actually exist in American society. In some cases, what is
happening in the U.S. is more draconian and invasive than anything Orwell
conceived.
War is Peace
One of the Party pillars in 1984 is endless war on a global scale. The war,
however, is a fabrication accepted and treated as fact. For, unreal as it is, it is not
meaningless. World powers become enemies and allies interchangeably simply to
keep the masses in perpetual fear, perpetual industry, and perpetual order. War
provides outlet for unwanted emotions such as hate, patriotism, and discontent,

keeping the structure of society intact and productive without raising the
standard of living.
Where is the enemyor the endin our war on terror? The faceless foe and
limitless objectives are productive of a widespread atmosphere of paranoia and
restricted civilian liberties. In the wake of the sequestration military-spending
cuts, it is also manifest that, to many, war means little more than a job.
Freedom is Slavery
The perpetual warfare in 1984 sacrifices individual freedom for collective
freedom. By submitting entirely to the Party, people surrender their identity and
the impulses that arise from having one, passively receiving everything. The
principles of unfreedom and inequality are consciously perpetuated to stifle
revolution and uprising, uniting all in a trance under the watchful eye of Big
Brother.
True freedom is the unimpeded capacity to realize the human good. Freedom in
America is generally defined as mere license, which enslaves when human
inclinations stray from the good. This American fallacy defines liberty as getting
what is wanted, and moreover, that the government is there to give it.
Subservience through mindless entitlement for government handouts and
bailouts is not freedom, but slavery.
Ignorance is Strength
Any transgression against the Party is a capital crime. The common habit,
therefore, is invincible ignorance: the appearance of orthodoxy without knowing
what orthodoxy entails. The Partys world-view is impressed most successfully on
people incapable of understanding it.
Has anyone read the Affordable Care Act? The plan appears to be to swallow it in
blind lip-service to the ideologies of big government. This mentality is rendered
common by a decliningif not falleneducation system. (Who can afford college
anyway these days?) Rather than address the plague of ignorance, America seems
more concerned with protecting the ignorant from profiling and unequal
opportunity.

Telescreens
Practically every public and private place in Orwells fictional world is under
surveillance through telescreens, that also broadcast announcements, news,
and propaganda. They are the sleepless eyes monitoring every move, every word,
every facial expression, and every involuntary reaction of every person in the
effort to detect thoughtcrime. Big Brother is watching you.
Social media keeps close record of our likes and activities. Our telephone calls
and browsing histories are accessible to apparently any NSA analyst, according to
Mr. Snowden. Our social security numbers and zip codes are increasingly part of
everyday transactions. Private lives are spied upon. Drones fly overhead.
Cameras record invisibly. Data is collected. We, too, are being watched.
Doublethink
Party members in 1984 practice a mental contortion that assumes two
contradictory premises simultaneously for the sake of exercising control over
reality. This practice is called doublethink, and leaves no impression that reality
has been violated. This mind control, or memory control, allows the Party to
shape their world: Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the
present controls the past.
Politicians often use forms of doublethink when they carefully and consciously
lie. National Intelligence Director James Clapper, for instance, was asked at a
Senate hearing last March whether the NSA collected information on millions of
Americans. No, Clapper answered. Not wittingly. Following the NSA leak,
Clapper insisted he did not lie, but responded in the least untruthful manner.
We are too accustomed to mutable truththe gospel according to Wikipedia.
From conflicting Benghazi reports to misleading Trayvon photographs, the media
regularly and unabashedly fabricates, falsifies, and manipulates according to the
agenda du jour.
Newspeak
A prominent feature of progress in 1984 is the language newspeak, a strippeddown, impotent distortion of English. Orwell draws a connection between the

success of the tyrannical government and the deterioration of language, as

newspeak renders certain ideas literally unthinkable through reduction of
vocabulary and grammar. Language control results in thought control.
We have our own variations of newspeak that limits what we think by limiting
what we say. Politically correct language is speech that hedges thought.
Technological autocorrect and autocomplete functions often dictate our
phraseology. Emails and tweets promote stilted communication. And let us not
forget text talk, which AFAICT, is not helping anything. WYSIWYG. As a
language deteriorates, the grand and noble ideas it is capable of expressing are in
danger of deteriorating also.
Although we are not citizens of Orwells world, there is a complacency in our
civilization that is akin to Orwellian capitulation. The fears and confusions of a
rapidly changing culture and its permeating devices are disorienting and
discouraging. Affairs may not be as grisly as they were for Winston Smith, but we
may not be far off. After all, can facecrime really be much different than hatecrime? Is it better for sex to be reduced to its practical purpose or its pleasure?
Whether memory holes or paper shredders, a society resembling Orwells
description may have arrived.
There is only so much we can do. When all are monitored, all are suspect.
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as
handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be,
there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible
except to extend the area of sanity little by little.

Since last weeks revelations of the scope of the United States domestic surveillance
operations, George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published sixty-four
years ago this past Saturday, has enjoyed a massive spike in sales. The book has been
invoked by voices as disparate as Nicholas Kristof and Glenn Beck. Even Edward
Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old former intelligence contractor turned leaker,
sounded, in the Guardian interview in which he came forward, like hed been guided by
Orwells pen. But what will all the new readers and rereaders of Orwells classic find
when their copy arrives? Is Obama Big Brother, at once omnipresent and opaque? And
are we doomed to either submit to the safety of unthinking orthodoxy or endure reeducation and face what horrors lie within the dreaded Room 101? With Orwell once
again joining a culture-wide consideration of communication, privacy, and security, it
seemed worthwhile to take another look at his most influential novel.
Nineteen Eighty-Four begins on a cold April morning in a deteriorated London, the
major city of Airstrip One, a province of Oceania, where, despite advances in technology,
the weather is still lousy and residents endure a seemingly endless austerity. The
narrator introduces Winston, a thirty-nine-year-old man beset by the fatigue of
someone older, who lives in an apartment building that smells of boiled cabbage and
works as a drone in the Ministry of Truth, which spreads public falsehoods. The first few
pages contain all the political realities of this future society: the Police Patrol snoops in
peoples windows, and Thought Police, with more insidious power, linger elsewhere. Big
Brother, the totalitarian figurehead, stares out from posters plastered throughout the
city, and private telescreens broadcast the Partys platform and its constant stream of
infotainment. Everyone simply assumes that they are always being watched, and most
no longer know to care. Except for Winston, who is different, compelled as if by muscle
memory to court danger by writing longhand in a real paper journal.
Thinking about Edward Snowden on Sunday, it wasnt much of a leap to imagine him
and his colleagues working in some version of Oceanias Ministry of Truth, gliding

through banal office gigs whose veneer of nine-to-five technocratic normality helped to
hide their more sinister reality. Holed up in a hotel room in Hong Kong, Snowden
seemed, if you squinted a bit, like Orwells protagonist-hero Winston, had he been a bit
more ambitious, and considerably more lucky, and managed to defect from Oceania to
its enemy Eastasia and sneak a message to the telescreens back home. In fact, at one
point in hisinterview with the Guardian, Snowden could be channelling the novels
narrator, or at least delivering a spirited synopsis of the book:
If living unfreely but comfortably is something youre willing to accept, and I think
many of us are, its the human nature, you can get up every day, you can go to work, you
can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and
go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize thats the world that
you helped create, and its going to get worse with the next generation, and the next
generation, who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you
realize that you might be willing to accept any risk, and it doesnt matter what the
outcome is, so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how thats
applied.
Are we living in Nineteen Eighty-Four? The technological possibilities of surveillance
and data collection and storage surely surpass what Orwell imagined. Oceanias
surveillance state operates out in the open, since total power has removed any need for
subterfuge: As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By a
routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit, the narrator
explains. This sounds like an analogue version of what Snowden describes: The N.S.A.,
specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. That
seems like a safe operating assumption about e-mails, texts, or telephone callseven if a
person is not saying anything interesting or controversial, and even if no one is actually
monitoring our communication, the notion that ones personal digital messages would
remain inviolably private forever, or that they would not be saved or stored, was
probably nave. Regardless of the actual scope of the governments snooping programs,
the notion of digital privacy must now, finally and forever, seem a mostly quaint one.
Meanwhile, words, as Amy Davidson points out, are manipulated by the three
branches of government to make what might seem illegal legalleading to something of
a parallel language that rivals Orwells Newspeak for its soulless, obfuscated meaning.
And, indeed, there has been a hint of something vaguely Big Brotherian in Obamas
response to the public outcry about domestic surveillance, as though, by his calm
manner and clear intelligence, the President is asking the people to merely trust his
beneficencewhich many of us might be inclined to do. Even Winston, after all, learns
to love Big Brother in the end.
Still, all but the most outr of political thinkers would have to grant that we are far from
the crushing, violent, single-party totalitarian regime of Orwells imagination. In one of
the more chilling passages in the novel, the evil Party hack OBrien explains, We are not
interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in
the overt act: the thought is all we care about. The N.S.A., on the other hand, is
primarily interested in overt acts, of terrorism and its threats, and presumablyor at
least hopefullyless so in the thoughts themselves. The war on terror has been
compared to Orwells critique of the special mental atmosphere created by perpetual
war, but recently Obama made gestures toward bringing it to an end. That is not to say,
of course, that we should not be troubled by the governments means, nor is it clear that
the ends will remain as generally benevolent as they seem today. But Orwells central
image of unrestrained political power, a boot stamping on a human faceforever, is
not the reality of our age.

While its tempting to hold the present moment up beside Orwells 1984, the book is
more than a political totem, and overlooking its profound expressions of emotion robs it
of most of its real power. Some novels have both the good and bad fortune of being
given over to wider history, inspiring idiomatic phrases that instantly communicate a
commonly understood idea. Through this transformation, books become blunt and
unsubtle, losing something of their art. We might call it the Catch-22 of Catch-22, or,
in this case, of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is not simply a cold counterfactual. Instead, it is a love story
between Winston and Julia, a younger member of the civil service, and, like many great
novels, some of its high points can be found in the minor moments shared between
these two characters. Their first real meeting, because of its implicit danger, is one of the
more breathtakingly romantic scenes in modern literaturea mixture of lust and
decorum like something out of Austen. In the office hallway, Julia slips Winston a piece
of paper, a dangerous act. Filled with nervous excitement, he returns to his desk and
waits a full eight minutes to look at it. When he does, the words appear as a jolt: I love
you. They arrange to meet in a crowd in order to remain anonymous. Among a mass of
people, standing close, their hands touch. A love affair followsthey go to the
countryside, like Adam and Eve attempting to push their way back into Eden. Later,
they keep a small flat. The Partys stamping out of sex is an essential mode of control.
But love, it seems, may exist in a place beyond the governments reach:
They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or
thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself,
remained impregnable.
But, in the end, even that place can be foundlove is also a political act, and so it must
be destroyed, and Orwell uses its dissolution as final, terrible evidence of the scope of
oppression. Winston and Julia are broken by the Party, forced to inform on each other
and, later, made to live on with the memory of having done so. The two meet a final
time, and share a muted exchange, akin to one of the clipped, inarticulate breakup
scenes from Hemingway, in which, bruised by heartache, no one can quite think of the
right thing to say. Julia explains that by denouncing Winston, she has somehow
obliterated him:
And after that, you dont feel the same toward the other person any longer.
No, he said, you dont feel the same.
Were this just a novel, rather than ideological novel with an aim to warn and instruct, it
might have ended here, in ambivalence, leaving out the clever and rather heavy-handed
turn of Winstons final conversion. If so, its political utility might be less clear, but we
would be left instead with its artistic force and mysterious inner workings.

1984 and 2015: Was George Orwell a Psychic?

1984 and 2015: Was George Orwell a Psychic?

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Big Brother is watching you.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is
Strength.
With those memorable quotes, a captivating story,
thinly veiled criticisms of totalitarianistic
governments and reversing the last two digits of
the year he wrote it in, George Orwell
penned 1984, a dystopian novel where the
freedoms we love and take for granted are no
more. Even our thoughts are under constant
scrutiny and surveillance. Since Orwell, the ideas of
freedom, what it means and what are the
consequences of it, have been contemplated in
various mediums. Marvel comics did it with Civil
War, 2K Games did it with the Bioshock series,
even 1984 wasnt Orwells first time with exploring
these ideas, as he had done it earlier in Animal
Farm.
Now that were in 2015, many would look at our
world today, compare it to 1984 and think that
Orwell was off base. In many ways, our freedoms
havent gone away, maybe even changing for the
better. However, there are instances where our
own government, the one that has championed
freedom of speech, religion, press, etc., finds itself
in conflict with the people as it tries to figure out
where and if a line should be drawn when it comes
to those rights. Not to mention that certain aspects
of society today do parallel Orwells bleak vision of
the future. Its then that the comparisons can be
drawn between the situation at hand and 1984,

sometimes throwing out the adjective of

Orwellian to describe the issue. This begs the
question: how close did we get to George Orwells
famous novel?
First of all, this isnt a subject that is coming out of
nowhere. Senior AP English classes read 1984 and
held a socratic seminar to discuss it. It was during
this time that questions were posed about the
novel and the thoughts that some of our fellow
students had about how our society mirrors that
of 1984 were brought to light.
During this socratic seminar, a lot of obvious
differences were thrown out, as it was quickly
decided that some of the things in 1984 couldnt
possibly happen. Take for example, the character
of Big Brother: the enigmatic leader of the
continent of Oceania. Despite Orwells well known
hatred of Communism, it probably isnt far fetched
to say that Big Brother is not based off Joseph
Stalin or any other communist leader around at the
time. As evil as people like Stalin are, the aspect
that Big Brother beats them in is that he doesnt
seem to be human. That is hinted toward the end
of the novel, when the character of OBrien tells
Winston Smith, the novels protagonist, that Big
Brother and his followers, known as The Party,
obtain power because they simply want power.
That is such a one-dimensional point of view and
character trait. Surely, there cant be a person on
Earth that demented or robotic. At least with the
infamous leaders of history, you could tell that they
had ulterior motives for having power, a lot of said
intentions actually being pretty good in the

beginning. Somebody like Big Brother would be

weeded out quickly as a psychopath, and no fool
would allow that guy into power.
This idea brought up another point. If theres one
thing humans are good at, its noticing fast change.
Its the slow, calculating kind of changes that seem
to go over human heads, until its too late. That is
an explanation as to how fascist, totalitarian
governments are born. For example, had Hitler
starting killing Jews right after he came into power,
surely somebody wouldve noticed that, and at
least tried to stop it. Before doing all of that, Hitler
had to be patient, cunning and very calculating. He
had to gain credibility with his people so that they
would trust him and his judgment. Under Hitlers
rule, Germany did get back on track economically,
and to this day, achievements from his time in
power are still around today, such as Germanys
Autobahn and Volkswagen cars. Hitler was even
named Man of the Year by Time in 1938, thus
giving him more credibility as a leader, not to
mention no negative attention from other
countries. Since he had a good track record,
nobody really said too much when he began to
systematically weed out various Jewish people, at
least, not until it was too late.
Even in America, the role of government has
shifted. Though America has yet to become a
dictatorship like the old USSR or an oligarchy like
Hitler and the Nazi party, theres no denying that
certain people in our government are gaining more
power than what the founding fathers wouldve
liked. Today, the President is the leader of the free

world, the face of our country and the person that

either gets praised or criticized for all the things
that happen while hes in power. Had America
strictly stuck to what the constitution read, that
shouldnt have happened. For a while, thats what
the country did, not wanting to do anything unless
it was explicitly allowed in the constitution. That
wouldve been okay, if the constitution wasnt as
ambiguous as it is. We think we understand what
the constitution says, but considering that the
people who wrote it were the same people that
said that all men are created equal, and yet
thought it was okay to deny rights to African
Americans and women for so long, who knows
what they meant?
For example, the constitution talks about freedom
of speech, but what does that mean? What is
speech? When the constitution was written,
speech was probably referring to actually
speaking or the newspaper. That was what was
around at the time, but today in 2015, we have the
Internet, books, so many many more outlets than
America in the 1700s. None of those outlets
actually involve physical speech, so should they be
included when we talk about free speech? Most
would say yes, but not because they read the
constitution. Our interpretation of the constitution
is a result of more than 200 years of judicial
interpretation, which no, was not a power explicitly
given to the courts. It was given to the courts
after Marbury v Madison in 1803. Perhaps the
government at the time realized a little bit how
unclear the constitution is and realized that the
language of government would have to change

with its people and its society. Thats where the

views of our government come from: years of
judicial review, changes and improvements
(depending on who you ask), again, showing how
the slow changes that occurred in our country over
this long period of time dont make Americans stop
and think about what the country has become.
This is also why the role of the president has
changed. While none of our presidents have gone
off the deep end and declared themselves the
supreme ruler of America, the presidents
importance level has risen significantly. Its no
secret that the president gets credit for everything
that happens in the country, be it good or bad.
For example, President Obamas approval rating
went up because of the low gas prices. Not to long
ago, it was down because they were so high. The
truth is, the president has absolutely no control
over gas prices. OPEC has the power to change the
price of gas, which is a reflection on how high the
demand is and how much oil is available. With the
price lower, people will buy more gas, but OPEC is
going to notice the demand and increase the price.
When the price gets too high, people will cut back
and the price will fall again. Gas prices rise and fall
due to the rules of simple economics, not the
president.
The president gets a lot more credit and hatred
than he really deserves, but the reason for that is
best summed up with another point that was
present in 1984 and the socratic seminar. Its
easier to love or hate one person than to hate a

group. In 1984, that is the role that Big Brother

serves. Big Brother is probably just a figurehead for
all of the Party members to point to. In fact,
because Big Brother is only seen in posters and
talked about, yet is never actually shown as a real
character, there may not even really be a Big
Brother. Our president is similar to that. That is
the only person in our government that people do
show passion for. That is the big deal in many
peoples political world, voting for the president.
Actually, all of the really big decisions are made by
Congress, but there are more than 200 of them. Its
not easy to tell whos the weak link in that large
group of people, and nobody seems willing to do all
of that work. Truth be told, it seems that Americans
are content with giving all of the power given to
one guy, as long as we can vote him out when he
does a terrible job. Even the founding fathers
wanted a king, but they just wanted to pick him,
and change his name. That name became the
President of the United States.
Then, of course, it was impossible to describe the
novel without talking about the Ed Snowden story.
Snowden, the man who revealed that the
government is capable of and has been listening to
our phone calls, really brought up the comparisons
to 1984 (not to mention, the sales of the actual
book). Everybody went hysterical about this
revelation, worried that privacy had just been killed
in this country. People debated on whether or not
to call Snowden a whistleblowing hero or a traitor,
and a big deal was made from either side to get to
know more about this man and what he knew or to
catch him and bring him to justice.

Snowden may have given the government all the

attention in that realm, but the government isnt
the only entity that is capable of this type of
surveillance. Social media sites like Facebook have
been shown to be capable of similar feats. They
can save your information, what sites you visit,
what ads you pay attention to, and of course, we
turn over all kinds of personal information to these
sites from our names to even pictures of ourselves.
Not to mention that everything we post on the
Internet, whether it stays up or not, is always
stored somewhere. It never really goes away.
Somebody does pay attention to all of those
details, somebody sees it somewhere, somehow.
And yet, nobody is getting upset about it, despite
no indication that this behavior is stopping anytime
soon.
Much like The Party of 1984, outside forces seem
to control what the people are for or against, and
what they are concerned about. In the novel, The
Party told its citizens what country they were at
war against, always changing it for whatever
reason. One week it would be one country, and the
next, it would be another. The people went along
with it, and never questioned it. The news media
serves as a similar force in real life. Its the media
that starts up the hysteria for stories and then
pushes us along when something else comes
along, even if the story isnt resolved. Remember
the Malaysian airplane that crashed in the Indian
Ocean, and what a tragedy that was? Nobody
ever found that plane or the people, but it still
faded from our memories. Remember when Ebola
was supposed to wipe out the population? Its still

not eradicated, but nobody says anything

anymore. Remember Ed Snowden? Hes still on the
run, but we stopped caring about that. The
attention span of the people seems to grow shorter
and shorter each day, as we get pushed along to
whats of concern now. The last big news fiasco
was probably the Ferguson trials, but even thats
beginning to fade.
This, if anything, is the biggest parallel to the
societies of 1984 and 2015. There just seems to be
a lot of apathy, and not enough people willing to
change things for the better. In short, nobody
cares, and why should they? When has one person
ever made a difference in the world? What would it
matter if one person gripes about something or
another? The answers are never, and it doesnt.
Nobody ever single handedly changed the world
around them, or their societys way of thinking as a
whole, at least, not on their own. As much as
people like Martin Luther King and Mahatma
Gandhi are revered, they didnt make changes
happen on their own. Dr. King and Gandhi had
huge followings, people who actually listened to
them and shared their ideas. All they did was say,
Hey, I dont agree with this, and some people
came to their side, feeling the same way. So while
one person cant make a change on their own, one
person can get it started. It may not be easy to
stand against the grain, but if one person sticks
their neck out to express an idea, somebody is
going to share it. Despite the books bleak ending,
that seems to be what Orwell wanted the reader to
bring home. If you really want to improve your
world or stop it from going into a state of ignorance

like 1984, speak up. Somebody will listen to you,

and though it may take time, the changes that
have been brought upon the world were done so as
a result of time, patience and a desire to make the
world a better place.

AMERICANS ARE NOW LIVING IN A

SOCIETY THAT RIVALS ORWELLS
1984
mericans are now living in a society that in some cases is more
draconian, more invasive and more Orwellian than the
dystopian tyranny fictionalized in Orwells chilling
classic Nineteen Eighty-Four. On almost every front, American
citizens are under an equal or greater threat of abuse, control
and more pervasive and high-tech surveillance than anything
Winston Smith ever faced.

Compare life in Oceania to life in 2011 America, with quotes

from George Orwells 1984 appearing in italic.
In general you could not assume that you were much safer in
the country than in London. There were no telescreens, of
course, but there was always the danger of concealed

microphones by which your voice might be picked up and

recognized.
Americans will now too have their every utterance listened to
by Big Brother in public through surveillance-capable street
lights now being installed in major cities across the
country which can record private conversations. Just as the
citizens of Oceania could never be sure of their privacy,
Charlottes Deputy Homeland Security chief told the local Fox
network earlier this week that Americans would never
know whether or not the government was listening.
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the
roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away
again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping
into peoples windows.
America in 2011 is more advanced than Orwells Oceania in
that it doesnt have to rely on expensive helicopters to spy on
citizens. That job has now been entrusted to unmanned
drones that not only act as surveillance devices, they can also
carry tasers that deliver incapaciating electric shocks to
suspected criminals.
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when
you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen.
The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an
unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself
anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of
having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper
expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory
was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense.
There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was
called.
Facecrime is now a reality in 2011 with the aid of
behaviometrics a new omnipresent surveillance technology

developed for the US Air Force and destined to be used in law

enforcement to monitor suspicious behavior. The system
revolves around a camera that tracks facial movements
biometrically in order to build a psychological profile of the
individual under surveillance. The movements of the muscles in
your face will alert Big Brother, through the process of
behavior analysis, to your presence as a suspicious individual
who may be engaging in the act of thought crime, or God
forbid, planning a public protest.
It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of
their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week
passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph
describing how some eavesdropping little sneak child hero
was the phrase generally used had overheard some
compromising remark and denounced its parents to the
Thought Police.
As part of Homeland Securitys See Something, Say Something
program, Americans are being bombarded at every level, from
Wal-Mart, to football games, to hotel rooms, with messages
encouraging them t to report their fellow citizens for engaging
in suspicious activity, which as we have documented,
includes mundane behavior such as paying with cash, opposing
surveillance, using a video camera, talking to police officers,
wearing hoodies, driving vans, writing on a piece of paper, and
using a cell phone recording application.
Schools are also now training children to be eco-spies by
reporting on their parents bad recycling habits, encouraging
kids to re-educate them into compliance.

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Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures
which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The
voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror
which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall.
Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though
the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the
telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no
way of shutting it off completely.
Just as the citizens of Oceania were constantly bombarded with
propaganda from the state via telescreens, Americans are now
being subjected to the same onslaught in the form of spurious
alerts from the federal government that are delivered through
numerous platforms, including LED screens on the
Intellistreets lighting network, televisions at Wal-Mart
stores that play Janet Napolitanos See Something, Say
Something diatribe, FEMAs Emergency Alert System that can
hijack all conventional boradcast communications, and
mandatory government messages that will appear on all new
cellphones from the end of next year. And if that isnt enough,
the Washington Post today called for the Internet to also be
brought under the auspices of a government takeover switch.
Whereas Winston Smith only had to put up with Big Brother
lecturing him via telescreens, Americans will be peppered with
propaganda from every conceivable direction.
In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of
the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night.
Your name was removed from the registers, every record of
everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time
existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished,
annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
American citizens are not merely disappearing without a trial,
as happened those who had comitted thoughtcrime in 1984,

they are being directly assassinated via Predator drone strikes

with no oversight and no legal process whatsoever. As the case
of U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki shows, Americans are now at
risk of falling victim to a program of state-sponsored
assassination should they be designated terrorists. In Orwells
1984, miscreants were tortured and brainwashed, but they
were not murdered on a whim by government decree before at
least being given the opportunity to recant.
Dont you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow
the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime
literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to
express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be
expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined
and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
Illiteracy rates in many large states are rising. One in seven
Americans cannot read anything more challenging than a
childrens picture book.Americans are being dumbed-down by
an onslaught of fluoride in the water, cultural decay that
celebrates stupidity over intelligence, and a public school
system in terminal decline. Attention spans are shortening as
Americans are fed a constant diet of mind-numbing
entertainment. Vocabularies are shrinking as many
Americans can barely express themselves. Whereas in 1984,
higher-level thinking was destroyred directly by the state, in
2011 America the entertainment industry is doing just as good
a job if not better.
In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has
almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for
Science. The empirical method of thought, on which all the
scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to
the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even

technological progress only happens when its products can in

some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.
Technology is being used to crush human liberty and eviscerate
our privacy. Every technological advancement, from Facebook
to the IPhone, brings with it a further assault on privacy. The
U.S. judicial system is identifying ways to legalize constant
surveillance over every American, most recently with the effort
to give authorities the power to secretly track Americans
through clandestine global positioning systems attached to
their vehicles.
Only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate
the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind,
enthusiastic, and casual acceptance difficult to imagine today.
Orwells bellyfeel is our cognitive dissonance. This is the
process of having blind faith in an explanation or a fact so long
as it comes from the establishment the actual truth of the
matter bears no significance. Bellyfeel enables Americans to
unquestionably accept everything they are told without the
need for critical thinking. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq,69%
of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the
9/11 attacks, despite there being no evidence whatsoever that
it was true.
These are just a handful of examples that illustrate how
Americans and westerners in general are now living in a society
that rivals and in some cases outstrips the world of Winston
Smith in 1984. Smith was eventually made to love Big Brother
and accept that two plus two equals five if the authorities say it
does.
The question is, will Americans ever reclaim their sense of
dignity and freedom or like the Party members in Orwells
Oceania will they learn to love their servitude?
*********************