I remember first reading it at school and 1984 was still about a decade away so it was a truly chilling vision of the future.
Reread it again a few years ago and I was struck by the fact that I'd completely forgotten about the whole chapters of politics that are in there, they had been lost on me completely.
What are regrets? Just lessons we haven't learned yet - Beth Orton
As a high school student, I did not love the book, but I think it is very important. Orwell makes many points as to what the future withheld, such as being watched. This book is important because it teaches us that if we don't know what our past was like how do we know if we are better off now. Another thing that is important, is you need to know the past so the bad things don't repeat. Overall I thought this was an important book, and that you shouldn't just read it, you need to grasp to concept as well. I would recommend this book for someone in high school, as long as you get the lesson at hand you will like it!
I think that the book was extremly slow in the begining. It was boring and hard to get threw but toward the middle it got alot more exciting and easy to read. I give the second half two thumbs up.
Meh, the book is a fantasy, and not a particularly good one. The truth is, the world does not look like that, and that is merely a Western fantasy used to scare people into line - in application Orwell is used as justification for different agendas - namely, anti-North Korean movements in application today, but previously anti-Communist, and Chinese, and anti-Cuban movements as a way of both instilling fear, and othering people in the name of "freedom" (ironically, perhaps).Originally Posted by The Atheist
Truth be told, autocracy is hardly as simple, limited, or phantasmological as the Orwellian model. The book has been given too much credit - notably because of its simple prose style, and its ease in quotation, which makes every half-literate moron able to quote big brother and shout "totalitarianism, police state!"
If you want the real way the world works, I would recommend merely reading your newspaper, to find out the simple fact that the Orwellian model has never been the case, and the Innis model as outlined in The Bias of Communications is far more apt - or perhaps reading Chomsky, notably The Manufacture of Consent.
Really, the book is a tedious joke used by arrogant people (mostly bigots, and almost always antagonistic in baring) to bully others.
It did: Stalinist Russia in the 1930s. "Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" and duck-speak--yes, fanaticism does look like that. Arendt and Orwell assumed that there would be oligarchies who could control information and North Korea fits the bill to Orwellian perfection.
Did you grow up in Stalinist Russia in the 1930s? What about North Korea - I assume you not only have visited it, but have lived there and felt it first hand - how then can you know how everything fits so nicely?
I don't doubt that there were limitations on freedoms, and oppressive aspects in society, but does that really mean a fulfillment of an Orwellian diagram.
Western perspectives on power have always been a bit ambivalent - for instance, the First Emperor of China has always been looked favorably upon as a great achiever in Western historical scholarship - ironically though, he was the model for none other than Mao, a figure who sought to impose his practices on modern China, with similar success - how then is Mao viewed as a dictator, and Qing Shi Huang Di as a great ruler?
In the same sense, Western historiography has favored Chang Kai Chiek, despite him being a fascist dictator (he was a tyrant even before becoming a dictator of Taiwan, with the help of US handouts of course) and instilled crackdowns comparable to those committed on the mainland - the question of freedom of communications again was just as limited - which one then fits the Orwellian model better?
In that sense, the whole notion of freedom, notably in US policy, has made good use of Orwellian scare tactics as a means of imposing an Americanization - namely, you are free if you submit to us - policy. The real regimes though are hardly less free - are we to take, for instance, the US as the prime example of freedom, and North Korea as the opposite? Hell, the US handed over not only handouts, but supported the regime of Mobutu in Zaire (Congo) for the longest time, as a ward against communism, and its unfree policies. There's no problem taking down as oppressive a regime as Allende's in Chile, as it is clearly against freedom in all its forms, and sticking in a freedom loving Pinochet, no?
This is merely application, but the 1984 mythology is behind all of this - the goal of the presses in "democracy" as seen can easily be equated to a propaganda mill ripping on the "unfree" countries, ironically, tending in the case of American policy, to be the most free, or the ones most progressive. This fear of Orwellianism, and this zealous attempt at stopping Orwell's vision from being a reality has in truth warped into an almost farcical (however depressing) game of inverse practice - we justify creating Orwellian models on the grounds of destroying them (and ceasing oil and whatnot in the process).
But what is really working at hand here? It would seem that the communist states had been the ones with the largest underground movements and corruption - the so called Orwellian imaginations end up ironically being the places with the strongest sense of dissent - just reading Socialist Realism from Stalinist Russia paints a strange picture - ironically it would seem the most complacent and conquered viewpoints come from those places which we deem freest - think about it - people knew in those Soviet countries that the press was putting own propaganda - they knew not to trust it, and they knew the limitations of the truth, and therefore, we not as crushed into Orwellian complacency and acceptance as would seem - on the other hand, people in the US right now read the Times or the Post without much thought for its validity - or at least didn't until recently or in left-circles (dismissed of course as socialist propagandists) - which one then fits the totalitarian model more closely? The "free" country where people walk around without questioning and merely fall in line without any central control agency running things, or the "unfree" model, where people know the limitations of freedom, and question things, but merely realize that government centralization and control is a part of life.
In that sense, we use Orwell again in judging North Korea as a regime, but do we turn around and say, "with all our (meaning the US, and to a lesser extent other Western countries Canada in a minor sense included) freedom did we not hit them first, as in, when we pulled out of the Korean peninsula at the end of the Korean war, did we not target their crops starving millions of people because they were "communist" and therefore deserved to die? Who then is more complacent in that regard?
Perhaps if the Orwellian model worked, we would see these regimes countries being the most aggressive, or repressive - but, from my understanding of the world, it has been the free regimes - the US, England, France, the former British Empire, which have had countless aggressive actions, and have, historically, acted without questioning themselves. Which one is more Orwellian then? Just looking at the strength of the Polish underground presses from the Communist Era gives a sort of idea of the actual dialog that occurred there, questioning things.
I hate to say this, but Orwell merely was trying to explain a phenomenon of aggression, but simplified things as a means of constructing what was later interpreted as a "good and bad". The truth is, the world is far more complex, and there are a lot more things going on. It isn't a matter of a dictator repressing and suppressing - that isn't necessary - an Obama, or Reagan as a better example perhaps, is far craftier, and equally if not more effective in application. That is why I say it is a fantasy - because in application the book becomes a tool for people to justify the same policies that the book tries to explain as caused by this lack of freedom in the first place.
Actually, the situation in North Korea is worse than Orwellian. Winston could roam prole neighborhoods, visit a prostitute and rent a room there. This is not humanly possible in Pyongyang, where every minute of one's life is regimented and everyone has to be home before curfew, when the lights are turned off.
Everything in the book is based on what Orwell read, his discussions with refugees, and aspects of his life (BBC censorship, Ministry of Information as the architectural inspiration for Minitrue, etc.). It's not a fantasy, as you say, it's a reality that "unpersons" were airbrushed out of photographs in the USSR. He wasn't writing a prophetic "diagram". He wrote about the recent past and present.
And no, I did not grow up in Stalinist Russia. It's a dumb question.
So you admit that everything you have said lacks direct experience, as is filtered through other mediums.
In other words, your projection of North Korea is limited to what you know from reading your news paper reports - it is filtered, and modified to suit the agenda of the paper. How then can you verify its validity? Have you ever been to Pyongyang? Have you lived there? Have you spoken to people there? Very few people have visited there, and all of them seem to have come with agendas.
In retrospect, Stalinist newspapers were full of claims of tens of millions of Americans dying from famine caused by the Great Depression - are those accurate?
Or better yet, take my example of Mobutu, a much loved figure in his time in America, and his regime in the Congo - a country which is now, after his death, in a state of utter chaos beyond anything imaginable in North Korea.
Look at how Vietnamese people were portrayed prior and during and even after the Vietnam war.
Hell, look how Chinese people are portrayed today, especially in American newspapers - with the single most important theme of "Hey, we better watch out, they aren't playing by our rules and refuse to bend over and grease."
At what point then do you become suspicious of what you have heard? Perhaps, or at least it can be thought, that perhaps some people in North Korea have pride in their country, and have a sense of identity outside of oppressed people under a totalitarian regime - perhaps they feel a connection, not unlike a connection felt by Americans or Germans - you merely use the diagram to dehumanize the country, and limit it to the perspective of oppressed, controlled, pitiful waste land.
I am not saying the human rights record there is perfect, and I am not suggesting that the country is an ideal state - that isn't my point. What I am suggesting though is how we limit our understanding, and instead apply a model, in this case borrowed from Orwell to suit our agenda.
This is a country with many people in it, with both shared and diversified experiences. How then can we limit our understanding to that found in a book written more than half a century ago. The reason? Quite simple. It suits an agenda, and therefore is propagated.
JBI, among experts and international human rights organizations there is the firmest and broadest consensus that life in North Korea is really bad. Amnesty International's criticism of North Korea is not nationalist propaganda, even if it's used as such by hawkish Presidents and Neo-Cons. We don't fully understand the situation, that's true, but this is because North Korea is a closed state with control of virtually all activities within the nation and therefore the people of that nation are in no sense free.
Human rights organizations didn't use 1984 as a template for their moral evaluation, which would have been same if that novel had never been written. The details are shocking to anyone with a conscience:
linkAhn Myong-chol, now a banker in Seoul, spent a decade working as a guard in various camps. He can still recall the shock – “like a hammer” – on first seeing dwarf-like creatures milling about in filthy rags.
“They were walking skeletons of skin and bone, with faces covered in cuts and scars where they had been beaten. Most had no ears; they had been torn off in beatings."
R e m i n d e r
This is the OP of the thread:Please do not hijack it to pursue your own personal agendas.
Off-topic posts will be removed without any further notice.
~
"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
~
True. Orwell is one of the Fathers of the English Language. Not because he lived during a "Shakespearean age" when writers, most writers used the same styles and devices. Orwell, leaves behind the facility of creating a work that would be easy on his readers, to create a pool that both leaves people in a daze and increases a person's reflective nature: Lets be honest. You can't but stop to think of every line that book gives to us.
I'm not a native of the English Language. Therefore, the kind of English I'm used to is the modern, everyday English that most native speakers(and writes) of the language use.
I don't have the time to give to "1984" right now(too many other books to read) so, due to it's hard nature - the way the book is structured, mainly the language employed - I've set it apart for when I have time and the energy to read it.
I think that 1984 is an exceptional novel, and it's written so sadly, that it's still a great read. I think it's a necessity for students to read in school. Though Orwell is not correct in all his predictions, I think we all realize in some ways, he is right, and that, strangely, brings fear to them reading it. To sum this up, 1984 is a great book, and was pretty enjoyable to read!
Given the references to Russia by JBI I thought it might be interesting to mention the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin whose novel We is thought to have inspired Orwell's thinking when he was creating 1984.
A quick look at the blurb makes the similarities obvious:
We tells of persons known as numbers living in the One State. All numbers live by a rigid time-table, performing exactly the same motions in time with one another in their all-glass environment.
We is the story of D-503, who is aroused from acceptence of the system by a strange woman, E-330. His transformation from conformity to radical action, his revolt against the state, and his eventual defeat are vividly chronicled in his diary.
Sent into exile twice by the authorities before We was published in 1920, persecuted for his writing, he said "True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics". This did not curry favour with the new Russian regime and he was eventually allowed to leave the country by Stalin in 1931.
Since the ideas of Orwell and Zamyatin are so similar maybe 1984 has more real life kudos than we realise.
Last edited by neilgee; 11-26-2009 at 06:36 AM.
What are regrets? Just lessons we haven't learned yet - Beth Orton
I have to say 1984 turned out to be a better book than I first thought. I thought it started out a little slow but it soon picked up. By looking around at our world, especially in the US, many things that he predicted have come true. I think that we will see even more of his predictions coming true if we don't heed Orwell's warnings. I think that to be sure our world doesn't get to be like it is in 1984 we all need to be active citizens and remember that our opinion and vote will make a difference. If we all say that one vote doesn't matter then no one will be voting and we will end up with a government similar to the one Orwell created in 1984 with one person controlling everything and we will be stripped of our rights.
Overall I think the story is a good one. It gets the reader to think and compare the future Orwell saw to our own present and future.
Though it is a good story, I did find it hard to focus on due to how Orwell described certain things in detail -- especially The Book. For this reason I reccommend this to readers that enjoy older English writing as well as those who can focus well. But overall I liked the story and I'm beginning to see things differently.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote