1984 by George Orwell?

Post Reply New Topic

One of my favorites books, as you can probably guess.

Source? Orwell was extremely anti-communist, due in no small part to his bad experiences with Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War. He was also a critic of laissez-faire capitalism, but I'm fairly certain he saw Soviet brutality as by far the greater evil.

Besides that, 1984 is not even remotely about communism. It could much more easily be said to be about fascism. He even borrows some class-warfare ideas from communism in "The Book" from Goldstein.

Animal Farm is often underrated, I think. It seems like a simple anti-Soviet polemic at first, but there's more to it than that. I also think you should look at Fahrenheit 451, and ignore the lame cop-out interpretation that it's just about censorship.

I actually think Brave New World is much more realistic than 1984.

Brave New World is silly.

I once thought of writing it as a "Rocky Horror" type screenplay.

I'm not great on politics, so forgive my blunders but I got the feeling that there were a few similarities between 1984 and Stalinist Russia. Of course, I'm not sure that Stalinist Russia was communist in any way but name.

There's a lot of fascism in it ... true... I'd always thought that the extreme left and the extreme right would pass through communism and fascism respectively and eventually meet up in the middle as totalitarianism.

The Goldstein stuff feels sort of anti-semantic. Goldstein is quite a Jewish sounding name.

Ultimately, it says about as much about human nature as it does about politics.



Actually I have to confess that I found brave new world to be quite dull in comparison.

Certain things are closer, particularly our freedoms and the scientific aspects of the book but there's a lot of 1984 which has (or is) coming true.

You can't walk down the street without being filmed any more and the internet allows censorship of the news. I hate to say it but some of the things 1984 says about language are intriging too. Some are tempting. My son is struggling with English at school and sometimes I think that a newspeak dictionary would be easier.

The only thing preventing 1984 from being more accurate than Brave New World is the right (wrong) policitical climate.

One way of looking at 1984 is by comparison to Soviet Russia, so that interpretation is not far off at all.


Goldstein is a bit of a Christ figure, and Orwell used him to take a few shots at religion. Jesus was supposed to be the promised Messiah who would liberate the Jews from Roman oppression. Goldstein was a Jew who led a movement to end the oppression of the Party. But Goldstein doesn't actually exist, and in fact his movement is used as a tool of oppression by the ruling party. This is largely how Orwell saw religion operating.

You can compare the way Oceania is run to Soviet Russia, and you even liken some aspects in book to it such as Oceania's three year plan; Stalin had a five year plan for the Soviet Union.

I personally think the book is open to however you want to interpret it, it's very ambiguitious (is that a word?) and thats what i like about it.

It is funny those who use the term 'Orwellian' are often neo-cons. They don't realise that Orwell considered himself a socialist, as many of thing they are calling 'Orwellian' he would have no problem with.

I just finished reading 1984 for the second time.

Could a society whose leaders insist that the sun and stars orbit the earth, among other such assertions, survive in the long term, do you think? I suspect that a society based on such flagrant lies would fail eventually, despite the many measures the Party takes against failure.

And the book never tells you if the Party wins or loses in the end. Or even if there are any other rebels like Winston (this is if you are working to the assumption that O'Brien was faking rebellion the whole time). I don't think Julia really counts; I get the impression she only breaks the rules because she thinks it makes her big and clever.

Plenty of people with political power in my country believe that the world is only 6000 years old and that man and dinosaur co-existed.


The Party wins. That was obvious enough. The question is whether or not the Proles will eventually defeat the Party. There was no hope of true resistance from within the Party.

The weirdest thing about 1984 is that they don't police the proles much at all.

I could never understand how that would work but I guess it's based around the idea that the proles are really really stupid. I can't imagine a future where a very large group of people could be entirely as stupid as they're made out to be.

I know, I just can't picture a society where the masses are already sheepish and conformist, and the government grants them illusions of freedom, despite the fact they do exactly what the state wants them to, through institutionalisation...oh wait

It's hinted at a bit... they're controlled in somewhat similar a manner to people in Brave New World, but not to the same extent. The Proles are given sports and other diversions to obsess over, and the lottery is particularly popular even though no jackpots are ever actually paid out. Of course, the Proles will still receive indoctrination through the media. The reason there is nothing to fear from the Proles is explained in Goldstein's book: the Proles are the Low, from whom no rebellion need be feared because they are concerned primarily with surviving on a daily basis. Only the Middle (the Outer Party) needs to be kept on a tight leash, because they're the ones who will try to displace the High (the Inner Party).

Love this thread...

At least you have to think deep thoughts about 1984 ....

I dislike 1984, because the society it describes seems completely implausible to me. It is not sustainable.

It only occurred to me while typing this that Orwell himself may have had the vision to describe such a society, by describing his fears, but not have realised that the society he described could not last. We have the advantage of having seen more totalitarian regimes collapse (although when I first read and dismissed it, the Soviet Union was still intact, which clearly indicates I'm a prescient genius ) than he had.

I shall have to find a copy of We, which I haven't read, before I call the book a plagiarism of Swastika Night again, though.

But the people in your country are not actually forced to accept these lies as truth, though.



Yes, the Party wins against Winston, but what I mean is that we never find out if the regime fails in the end, or if it will be perpetual.

I'd say it would be perpetual. The Party controls the thought of the "Middle", and the "Low" are too dumb to recognise what's happening. The Party also keeps people seperated; how ca n a man revolt if he doesn't know other's want to as well?