“We are the dead."
After the first few chapters I had to put it down for a few weeks. It’s not a book to read lightly, it requires a lot of our attention and focus. When I picked the book up again, it was the best thing I’ve ever done.
Orwell is a pseudonym for the author Eric Arthur Blair, a political essayist, English journalist and strong socialism supporter.
There’s something to keep in mind: Orwell lived through the Great Wars, including the Spanish Civil War, where he fought against the fascism. He was a democratic socialist, that fought fiercely against totalitarianism. In fact, that is the whole point of 1984 – the totalitarianism and its way to convert the masses into renounce their liberty.
I suggest, if you don’t know a bit about politics, that do a quick google search of socialism, totalitarianism, autocrats and capitalism (at least their definitions).
In 1984, we see a world divided in 3 super powerful governments: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. All under totalitarianism.
Winston Smith lives in Oceania and under the Big Brother’s oppression. He works in the Ministry of Truth, where he changes and forges all kind of files and articles in order to make them correspond to the current Big Brother’s decrees and ideas, ordered by the Party.
Although he’s not influenced by the Party, he never took action against it, until a certain event that makes him fight to end the oppression.
In all this narrative, we see an absolute control over the population though subtle systems of mind control, to that the obvious goes unnoticed. It goes from control over production or product outflow to influence lower class society’s life, for example.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
The scariest thing is the tenebrous similarity with nowadays with all the fake news, progressive ignorance towards social issues, lesser and lesser interpersonal communication. Man is more focused in what’s easier and practical, preserving consciously, or unconsciously ignorance when sees itself entertained by hard work to pay the bills at end of the month.
Winston’s fight for freedom of thought, for freedom of human emotion, the pain felt by seeing what’s happening around him and the consequences by a simple doublethink against the Big Brother.
This book is pain, this book is a prison and we’re relieved by having the change to close the book to get free.
It isn’t a light read, it isn’t a fluid reading but it’s a reading that’s addictive for all the shock of seeing a world like that and the similarity to ours, and for the genius way that Orwell was able to expose the political ideology that rules that world. It’s easy to get trapped in an hypothetical world where everything we know (actions, objects and ideologies) is unthinkably defiled.
It’s like a force of nature: it’s frightening but we can’t stop looking at it (in this case reading it)
It’s a must-read masterpiece.
1984 by George OrwellMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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