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Although the website I found this quote from was relatively useless, I found this to be quite interesting;

"Interestingly, the torture room is called "Room 101"; 101 is always the basic course in which the fundamentals of a course are taught, so the essential fears are learned and then the prisoner is subjected to them."

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1984 rises to amazons best sellers xD

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George Orwell's tale of a sad, grim future, the book 1984, has experienced a recent resurgence, climbing to the top of Amazon.com's bestseller list of books.

The book, written in 1949, required reading for many in high school and college, was No. 1 on the list on Wednesday morning.

It's in such demand that publisher Penguin has ordered a 75,000-book reprint, CNN reported.

"That is a substantial reprint and larger than our typical reprint for '1984,'" a Penguin spokesman told CNN. Nielsen BookScan, CNN reported, said the book sold 47,000 copies since President Donald Trump's Nov. 8 election, which is up from last year.

Amazon.com's Best Seller list of books on Wednesday morning. (Photo: USA TODAY)

The book's plot, as Penguin puts it, features the omniscient Big Brother, mind-erasing, a new language and thought process in a post-nuclear-war world. The publisher said Orwell's "vision of an omni-present and ultra-repressive state is rooted in the ominous world events."

The Washington Post reported the book has earned popularity in recent years. It's not the first time the book has seen a boost in sales. In 2013, Amazon sales of the book jumped nearly 6,000% after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of a U.S. surveillance program to news outlets.

Many, including those on Twitter, are tying the book's recent uptick in sales to Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway's statement that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer used "alternative facts" in countering reports Trump's inauguration crowd was smaller than former President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009.
Follow Sean Rossman on Twitter: @SeanRossman
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George Orwell's '1984' leaps to top of Amazon bestseller list

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CLOSE George Orwell's tale of a sad, grim future, the book 1984, has experienced a recent resurgence, climbing to the top of Amazon.com's bestseller list of books. The book, written in 1949, required reading for many in high school and college, was No. 1 on the list on Wednesday morning.

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A general overview of some metaphor's found throughout the book

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Proof that almost everything in this book has a symbolic meaning.

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Although the responses to this question are from 'unqualified professionals', the opinions given about the warning behind the book are quite interesting to read.

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An insight as to what the book within the book is about.

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Definitions of "1984" terminology.

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Gives a clear definition of what fatalism is, and may provide insight into one of Winston Smith's most prominent character traits.

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1. Logical Fatalism: Aristotle's argument and the nature of truth

The classic argument for fatalism occurs in Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.), De Interpretatione, chapter 9. He addresses the question of whether in relation to all questions it is necessary that the affirmation or the negation is true or false.

What he says could be presented as an argument along the following lines.

Suppose that (i) p is true or p is false and (ii) not-p is true or not-p is false.

Then p is true or not-p is true.

Now suppose that in 1900 one person says that a sea-battle will take place on 1/1/2100, and another says that a sea-battle will not take place on 1/1/2100.

Then either what the first person says is true or what the second person says is true.

But, in that case, either it is necessary in 1900 that a sea-battle takes place on 1/1/2100, or it is necessary in 1900 that one does not take place.

But the date of the predictions is irrelevant, and it is irrelevant whether any prediction is actually made at all.

So it is necessary at all times that a sea-battle takes place on 1/1/2100, or that a sea-battle does not take place on 1/1/2100.

But the argument can evidently be generalised.

So, everything that happens, happens of necessity.

First of all we need to be clear about what is meant by "necessity" here. What is at issue here is not logical necessity. It is rather inevitability. When the occurrence of a sea-battle on 1/1/2100 is said to be necessary at a certain date, what is meant is that at that date nothing can prevent a sea-battle from taking place on 1/1/2100. In particular, no one has the power to prevent it. Now Aristotle accepts that "What is, necessarily is, when it is; and what is not, necessarily is not, when it is not." So, he accepts that, if a sea-battle is actually taking place on 1/1/2100, then on 1/1/2100 it is (in this sense) taking place of necessity. Nothing can then stop it happening, because it is happening. What this argument appears to establish, however, is that, if a sea-battle takes place on 1/1/2100, not only is it necessary then that a sea-battle takes place on 1/1/2100, but it was always necessary. No one could ever have prevented it. And the same applies to everything that can happen. So, in particular, no one ever has the power to do anything other that what they actually do.

So, is there anything wrong with the argument?

Well certainly there is a move which seems to require some explanation: the move from truth to necessity. Why should it follow from the fact that it was true in 1900 that a sea-battle would take place on 1/1/2100, that it was necessary that it should? This looks, indeed, suspiciously like a fallacious move from "Of necessity, if it is true that a sea-battle takes place on 1/1/2100, a sea-battle takes place on 1/1/2100" to "If it is true that a sea-battle takes place on 1/1/2100, a sea-battle takes place of necessity on 1/1/2100". But such suspicions are probably ill-founded. It is more likely that the move invokes a certain form of the correspondence theory of truth: if what someone says at a certain time is true, then the state of the world at that time must be such as to make it true. But since what is, necessarily is when it is, the state of the world will be necessary. So, anything that is true is necessarily true.

However, even if this crucial move does not rest on a simple fallacy, the idea that the truth of what someone says is determined by the state of the world at the time is questionable. We shall return to this point.

1.1 Aristotle's solution

First we should notice Aristotle's solution. Aristotle is in no doubt that not everything that happens, happens of necessity. He accepts indeed (19a23-5) that "What is, necessarily is, when it is; and what is not, necessarily is not, when it is not." But he goes on to say, "But not everything that is, necessarily is; and not everything that is not, necessarily is not." So what is his solution? Here it must be said that there is more than one view (Aristotle, Categories and De Interpretatione, 137-42). On one view he rejects the move from truth to necessity. That may indeed be the right move to make, but in what follows I shall take it that Aristotle actually offers a different solution, which, rightly or wrongly, I shall refer to as "the Aristotelian solution". On this view his solution is to deny that it is necessary that the affirmation or the negation is true or false when this relates to things that do not happen of necessity. That is to say, his solution is that neither what the first person said in 1900 ("There will be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100.") nor what the second person said ("There will not be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100.") was true. What each person said was in fact neither true nor false. So we may represent the Aristotelian solution as one which rejects the law of bivalence:

The law of bivalence: every proposition is either true or false.

It is to be rejected in particular in relation to such propositions as, "there will be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100"; that is, in relation to propositions about future contingents, about what is neither necessary nor impossible. (For the view that Aristotle does not reject the law of bivalence see Whitaker 1996.)

Though Aristotle does not explicitly say so, it seems that he would also accept that if a sea-battle takes place on 1/1/2100, then what the first person said would then be true, and if it does not, what the second person said would then be true. So we may represent the Aristotelian solution as holding the following:

Some propositions are true at some times and not at others.

Are there any objections to this solution?

One objection is that the solution appears to require the rejection of the law of the excluded middle in addition to the law of bivalence. Now it is true that it involves the rejection of one form of the law:

LEM1: in the case of any proposition, p, either p is true or not-p is true.

But another form of the law is:

LEM2: in the case of any proposition, p, either p or not-p.

Does it involve the rejection of this? One might think it does, on the grounds that " p" is equivalent to " p is true". So LEM1 and LEM2 stand or fall together. Or one might think like this: " p or q" can be true only if either p is true or q is true (or both are). But, where p is a proposition about a future contingent it is not true, whether the contingent state of affairs comes about or not; neither is its negation true; so the disjunction, " p or not- p " is not true.

As a matter of fact, though, this is not what Aristotle seems to have thought. He says (19a28-32):

Everything necessarily is or is not, and will be or will not be; but one cannot divide and say that one or the other is necessary. I mean, for example: it is necessary for there to be or not to be a sea-battle tomorrow; but it is not necessary for a sea-battle to take place tomorrow, nor for one not to take place.

So, on the assumption that he would have accepted that "there will or will not be a sea-battle tomorrow" is equivalent to "there will be a sea-battle tomorrow or there will not be a sea-battle tomorrow", he would, it seems, have accepted LEM2. How could this be? Well, what stops its being true that there will be a sea-battle tomorrow is that there is nothing yet to determine that it is true. But there is something to determine that there will be or will not be a sea-battle tomorrow; in the nature of things one or the other must occur. So it is now true that there will be a sea-battle tomorrow or there will not be a sea-battle tomorrow.

This suggests adopting the following rule for determining the truth-value of complex propositions some of whose constituents are neither true nor false. One considers in turn each of the possible ways in which things may turn out, and works out what truth-value the complex proposition would then have. If it turns out to be true in every case, it is true; if it turns out to be false in every case, it is false; otherwise it is neither true nor false (van Fraassen 1966).

Of course this is not a wholly cost free line to take. Apart from the fact that it means that " p" and " p is true" are not in general interchangeable, it also creates problems for truth-functionality. We normally think of "or", "and" and "not" as being truth-functional. That is to say, we think that the truth-values of " p or q", " p and q" and "not- p" are determined by the truth-values of " p" and " q". But if we adopt the Aristotelian solution, and accept the way outlined just now of determining the truth-value of a complex proposition, "or", for instance, will not be truth functional. In some case " p or q" will be true when neither p nor q is true (when, for instance, " q" is "not- p"), and in some case it will not be (if, say, " p" is "there will be a sea-battle tomorrow" and " q" is "there will be a football match tomorrow"). (If one thinks in terms of there being a third truth-value, indeterminacy, say, in addition to truth and falsity, the position will be that, when p and q are both indeterminate, sometimes " p or q" is true, and sometimes it is indeterminate.). Similarly " p and q " will be false in the one case and indeterminate in the other.

However, this objection might not seem very pressing compared with the threat of fatalism. If accepting a lack of equivalence between " p" and " p is true" and a failure of truth-functionality for "or" and "and" were the only alternative to accepting fatalism, most people would find it easier to accept these theoretical oddities, if oddities they are.

But there is another objection to the Aristotelian solution which makes it harder to accept - the way we treat bare predictions. If someone had said in 1972, "Red Rum will win the Grand National next year", surely, we would think, he was right. Not right in 1973, but right in 1972. That is to say, surely what he said was true, when he said it; not just later. Of course, we would not have known in 1972 that what he said was true; nor, presumably did he. Nor, of course would we have supposed that there was anything inevitable about the victory; these things, we naturally suppose, are a matter of chance. But, of course, this objection to the Aristotelian solution is also an objection to the argument for fatalism which was based on the assumption of bivalence. We are, effectively, rejecting the idea that if what someone says at a time is true at that time, then the state of the world at the time must determine that it is true. What we seem to be quite prepared to accept instead is the idea that for what is said to be true at a time it is sufficient if the state of the world will sometime be such as to determine that it is true.

There is another problem about the theory of truth which the Aristotelian argument seems to be invoking. If the theory really is that the truth of what is said depends on the state of the world at the time of the saying, does not that raise a problem for statements about the past? Suppose someone says that a dinosaur stood on this spot millions of years ago. For this to be true, must the present state of the world be such as to determine that it is? Some people have indeed thought this; and they have thought that, just as some propositions that were not true come to be true, so also some that were true cease to be true (Łukasiewicz 1967). But this is even further from what we are naturally inclined to say. A more attractive alternative, if we wished to retain something like this theory of truth, would be to say that what happened in the past counts as part of the present state of the world, because the past, like the present, is necessary. But it is not clear why that should be enough to make it part of the present state of the world. Perhaps it would be better to take the view simply that something is true at a time only if it is necessary at that time. But then we would need some argument for this position which went beyond the simple thought that what is said is made true by the way the world is at the time it is said.

It is worth noticing some other solutions which are closely related to the Aristotelian solution, but avoid some of the problems.

1.2 Related solutions

1. (Prior 1967). One could agree with Aristotle that "there will be a sea-battle tomorrow" is not true, even if it turns out that there is a sea battle; but instead of saying that it is neither true nor false, one could say that it is false. What is more, one could say that the negation, "there will not be a sea-battle tomorrow" is true. Then we could retain the law of bivalence, and the equivalence between " p" and " p is true". Effectively we would be treating " p" as equivalent to "it is necessary that p ". And we would, no doubt, distinguish between "there will not be a sea-battle tomorrow", where this is the negation of "there will be a sea-battle tomorrow" and "there will be no sea-battle tomorrow" which, like "there will be a sea-battle tomorrow", is false. One might even say that "there will not be a sea-battle tomorrow" is ambiguous; it could be equivalent to "it is not necessary that there will be sea-battle tomorrow" or it could be equivalent to "it is necessary that there will be no sea-battle tomorrow". Certainly it is in favour of this view that one would retain the law of bivalence and also the truth-functionality of "or" and "and". But there would be a heavy price to pay. Now we should have to say what the person said about Red Rum was false.

2. (Lucas 1986) One could make use of Reichenbach's distinction between the time of the utterance of a proposition, the time of the reference point and the time of the event (Reichenbach 1947). One could then say that the truth of what is said depends not on the state of the world at the time of the utterance, but on the state of the world at the time of the reference point. One may then say that the reference point of the utterance in 1972 of "Red Rum will win the Grand National next year" is 1973, not 1972. So, it was true. (Whereas, if someone had said "Red Rum is going to win the Grand National next year", the use of "is going to" rather than "will" might perhaps have meant that the reference point was the time of the utterance, rather than the time of next year's Grand National. So what was said would not have been true.)

3. (Tooley 1997) One could distinguish between truth at a time, which depends on the state of the world at the time, and truth simpliciter, which does not. One could then allow that the prediction about Red Rum was true, as long as we are talking about truth simpliciter. Also, where truth simpliciter was at issue, we could retain the law of bivalence and the equivalence between " p" and " p is true".

1.3 Rejection of the theory of truth

But finally we should not forget that, even if we wish to retain a correspondence theory of truth, we can reject the idea that truth depends on the state of the world at the time of the utterance of a proposition or even the state of the world at the time of the reference point. We can say that it depends on the state of the world at the time of the event spoken of; or, more generally, that it depends on the state of the world at the times spoken of, if any (Westphal 2006). The solution we prefer is, however, likely to be related to the view we take about the nature of time.

1.4 A-theories and B-theories of time

On a B-theory of time an event's being past, present or future is simply a relational matter; it is simply a matter of its occurring at a time which is earlier than, or simultaneous with, or later than some time which is taken as the reference point - the time at which I am having this thought, say. On an A-theory, on the other hand, that this time (or this event) is now is an absolute (if temporary) fact about it. But, in addition, a B-theory will typically hold that all times are equally real, whereas, typically, an A-theory will hold either that only the present and the past are real (type 1), or that only the present is real (type 2). So, on a B-theory, there can be future facts to make propositions about the future true; but, on an A-theory of type 1, a proposition about the future can be made true only by present and past facts together with timeless facts; and, on an A-theory of type 2, propositions both about the future and about the past, can be made true only by present facts together with timeless facts. And, evidently, on either type of A-theory a proposition may be true at one time, but not true at another, depending on what facts exist at the time. (For a fuller description of the A-theory and B-theory, see the Section 5 of the entry on time.)

Suppose, then, that we hold a correspondence view of truth, and that we espouse a version of the A-theory of time which says that there are no future facts. In that case we will naturally be attracted by the Aristotelian solution. If, on the other hand, we espouse a version of the B-theory which allows that there are future facts, we will naturally reject this solution.

1.5 Truth and fatalism

Aristotle's problem seemed to have arisen as a result of a theory of truth according to which, if a statement is true at a time, there has to be a state of the world at that time which makes it true. However, it has been argued that, if every meaningful statement is either true or false (once and for all), that alone implies fatalism; the very fact that a statement is true is enough to make what it describes unavoidable (Taylor 1983, Chapter 6). Suppose, for example, that John shaved one morning. Then the statement, "John shaved that morning", is true. But, it is argued, that means that John did not have the power not to shave; because to have that power would be to have the power to render a true statement false. But no one has such a power; no one has ever succeeded in making a true statement false.

Now the final claim is certainly true, on the assumption that meaningful statements have just one truth-value. No one has ever brought about a situation in which a statement which was true is false; that is, a situation in which (a) there is a statement which was true and (b) that statement is now false. However, to have the power to render a true statement false, one does need to have the power to bring about such a situation. It is enough that (a) there should be a statement which is true, and that one has the power merely to bring about a situation in which (b) that statement is (and always was) false instead. So for John to have had the power to render false the true statement, "John shaved that morning", it is enough that he should have had the power not to shave instead of shaving. Of course, he did not exercise that power; but, in the absence of some other argument to the contrary, presumably he could have done; in which case he would have made the statement, "John shaved that morning" false instead of true. So, it seems that there is no simple move from truth to fatalism.

2. Logical fatalism: Diodorus Cronus and the necessity of the past

Diodorus Cronus (late 4th - early 3rd centuries B.C.E.) had an argument for fatalism, known as "The Master Argument". Its conclusion was, "the possible is that which either is or will be". We know the premisses but, unfortunately we do not know the intermediate steps. The premisses were (1) "Everything that is past and true is necessary", (2) "The impossible does not follow from the possible" (Kneale and Kneale 1962, 119).

I shall not try to reconstruct the way the argument actually went, but consider an argument to it which might have been akin, which argues for fatalism on the basis of the necessity of the past. The argument goes:

What is true of the past is necessary.

Suppose that there is a sea-battle on 1/1/2100.

Then it was true in 1900 that there would be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100.

Then it was true of the past that there would be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100.

So it is necessary that there will be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100.

Therefore, if there is a sea-battle on 1/1/2100, it is necessary that there will be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100 (and impossible that there should not be).

Is anything wrong with this argument?

2.1 An Aristotelian solution

We could certainly make an Aristotelian objection to the argument. We could deny that if a sea-battle takes place on 1/1/2100, it was true in 1900 that a sea-battle would take place.

2.2 An Ockhamist solution

We could also question either the first premiss or the application of it.

Is what is true of the past necessary? Well certainly pretty well everyone thinks that what happened in the past cannot be undone. The past cannot now be altered. For if one were to undo the past, that would mean that something which did happen did not happen; or, at the very least, that it was true that something happened and then later was not true that it happened. Most people (but not such a large majority) also think that something else is impossible, namely affecting what happened in the past or causing something to have happened in the past. (This is not the same thing, of course, as altering the past. If one caused something to have happened, one would not thereby bring it about that something that did not happen did happen.) But it is one thing to think that one cannot make it true that there was a sea-battle yesterday, and quite another thing to think that one cannot make it true yesterday that there will be a sea-battle tomorrow.

This might be called the Ockhamist solution to the problem. What Ockham (c1285-1347) says is:

Some propositions are about the present as regards both their wording and their subject matter (secundum vocem et secundum rem). Where such [propositions] are concerned, it is universally true that every true proposition about the present has [corresponding to it] a necessary one about the past... Other propositions are about the present as regards their wording only and are equivalently about the future, since their truth depends on propositions about the future. (Ockham,Predestination, God's Foreknowledge and Future Contingents, 46-7)

In the spirit of this we may say that some propositions about the past are really (at any rate in part) about the future. And in these cases they are not necessary. And we may then apply this to "it was true in 1900 that there would be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100." This, we may say, is (in part) really about 1/1/2100.

Propositions which are in this way verbally about one time, t, but are really (in part) about a later time, are often said to express "soft facts" about t. Unfortunately it is not at all clear quite how the notion of a soft fact should be made precise. One might, for instance, say that if a proposition about t logically entails a proposition about a later time, it expresses a soft fact about t. But if that is the correct account, it seems that many propositions expressing soft facts about the past will be necessary, even when they are partly about the future. For instance, a proposition which conjoins some plausibly necessary proposition about the past with a law of nature to the effect that in these circumstances something in the future will ensue would seem to entail something about the future; but since it is a conjunction of two plausibly necessary propositions, it seems to be necessary itself.

However it seems there is one variety of proposition which presumably expresses a soft fact about the past, but is very plausibly not necessary, namely a proposition which is equivalent to a conjunction where one of the conjuncts is plausibly wholly about the future, and where the other conjunct does not entail it. And, if the Aristotelian solution is wrong, our example seems to fit this bill. The proposition, "it was true in 1900 that there would be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100" is plausibly equivalent to "there was such a time as 1900 and there will be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100." And this proposition will not be necessary, if it is not necessary that there will be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100.

Notice that this does not show that the fatalist is wrong. It could still be that the proposition that there will be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100 is necessary. But it does seem to show that this argument does not show that fatalism is correct. The position seems to be that, either the argument does not work, because the Aristotelian solution is correct, or the argument does not work because, in the absence of an independent reason to suppose that the proposition that there will be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100 is necessary, we have no reason to suppose that the proposition, "it was true in 1900 that there would be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100" is a necessary proposition.

3. Logical fatalism: Richard Taylor's argument and the conditions of power

Richard Taylor argues that certain commonly accepted presuppositions yield a proof of fatalism (Taylor 1962). The presuppositions are:

1. Any proposition whatever is either true, or if not true, false.

2. If any state of affairs is sufficient for, though logically unrelated to, the occurrence of some further condition at the same time or any other time, then the former cannot occur without the latter occurring also.

3. If the occurrence of any condition is necessary for, though logically unrelated to, the occurrence of some other condition at the same time, or any other time, then the latter cannot occur without the former occurring also.

4. If one condition or set of conditions is sufficient for (ensures) another, then the other is necessary (essential) for it, and conversely, if one condition or set of conditions is necessary (essential) for another, then that other is sufficient for (ensures) it.

5. No agent can perform any given act if there is lacking, at the same time or any other time, some condition necessary for the occurrence of that act.

6. Time is not by itself "efficacious"; that is, the mere passage of time does not augment or diminish the capacities of anything and, in particular, it does not enhance or decrease an agent's powers or abilities.

He then produces an argument to show (what most of us believe) that either it is not in my power to read a headline saying that there was a sea-battle yesterday or it is not in my power to read a headline saying that there was no sea-battle yesterday, at any rate if we make some obvious assumptions about the relation between the headlines and what took place. Letting S be the act of reading a headline that there was a sea-battle, and S′ be the act of reading a headline that there was no sea-battle; and letting P and P ′ be the propositions that there was and was not such a battle, the argument goes:

If P is true, then it is not in my power to doS′ (for if P is true, then there is, or was, lacking a condition essential for my doingS′, the condition, namely, of there being no sea-battle yesterday).
But if P′ is true, then it is not in my power to do S (for a similar reason).

But either P is true or P ′ is true

So, either it is not in my power to do S or it is not in my power to do S ′.

The argument, he claims is sound, given the six presuppositions.

But suppose, his argument continues, we let O and O′ be the act of ordering a sea-battle and the act of ordering no sea-battle, and Q and Q′ be the propositions that there will and will not be such a battle; and we substitute O and O′ for S and S′, and Q and Q′ for P and P ′, and "tomorrow" for "yesterday" in the argument above, then (if we make some obvious assumptions about the relation between what we order and what happens) we have a parallel argument which goes:

If Q is true, then it is not in my power to doO′ (for if Q is true, then there is, or will be, lacking a condition essential for my doingO′, the condition, namely, of there being no sea-battle tomorrow).
But if Q′ is true, then it is not in my power to do O (for a similar reason).

But either Q is true or Q ′ is true

So, either it is not in my power to do O or it is not in my power to do O ′.

And this argument seems equally sound. And evidently it can be generalised to yield the fatalist conclusion that it is never in our power to do anything other than what we actually do.

Are there any objections to his argument?

Well, one might certainly object to presupposition 6, on the grounds that it does indeed seem to be the passage of time which makes a difference to my power to bring about or prevent a sea-battle on a certain day. Till the day is over, I may have the power, but after the day, I have not. However, presupposition 6 does not in fact seem to play a significant role in the parallel arguments. So that cannot be the whole story.

3.1 An Aristotelian solution

The objection that Taylor himself suggests is the Aristotelian one: we reject presupposition 1 (and also, presupposition 6, since we embrace the idea that a proposition may fail to be either true or false at one time and come to be true or false later, as a result of the mere passage of time). We would also, presumably, need to amend presupposition 5, so that it was not the lack of a necessary condition for an act which was problematical, but the existence of a condition which was sufficient for the non-performance of the act.

Is that the only objection? Must we accept the Aristotelian solution if we wish to escape the fatalistic conclusion?

3.2 The conditions of power

It seems that there is an alternative to the Aristotelian solution, because Taylor's presupposition 5 seems dubious. A symptom of this is that it seems to yield the fatalist conclusion a bit too easily. For supposing that I do not perform act S (whatever it is), then it follows immediately that there is lacking a necessary condition for my performing S, namely the occurrence of S. So, if presupposition 5 is right, it follows immediately that I never have the power to perform any act which I do not actually perform. Of course, that does not show that this conclusion is wrong; but it enough to make one question the presupposition which entails it. And one might suggest that not only is this presupposition false, but that it seems true because it is easily confused with another much more plausible proposition (equivalent to Hasker's PEP5; see Hasker 1989, 115):

5′. No agent can perform any given act if there is lacking, at the same time or any other time, some condition which is necessary for the occurrence of that act and which it is not in his power to bring about.

And if we substitute that for Taylor's presupposition 5, the parallel argument is no longer sound.

4. The necessity of the past and Aristotelian solutions

It is possible, it seems, to reply to the arguments for fatalism which we have considered so far, without appealing to the Aristotelian solution. We can reject the theory of truth which is crucial to Aristotle's argument; we can reject the idea that all statements which are about the past are necessary; we can reject Taylor's account of the conditions of power. And we can do this without questioning the idea that we cannot affect the past, except, at any rate, in the rather ill-defined collection of cases to which Ockham draws our attention. However, it is open to the fatalist to argue that we have no good reason for making the distinction we do between affecting the past and affecting the future. So, if we accept that we cannot affect the past, we ought also to accept that we cannot affect the future. Of course, this cuts both ways. We might equally come to the conclusion, in the absence of a good reason for making the distinction, that since we can affect the future we can also affect the past; or, if that seems outrageous, we could affect the past if natural laws did not prevent our doing so.

This objection by the fatalist is surely right about one thing. If we cannot affect the past, it would be good to know why we cannot. One possible answer would be that which an A-theorist of time might give, namely that there is a fundamental ontological difference between the future on the one hand and the present and past on the other, which consists in the fact that the present and past are real or actual, while the future is not. And it is this fact, that the future is not real or actual, which means that it is open, can be affected by what happens now; and it is the fact that the present and past are real or actual which means that they cannot be affected by what happens now (Lucas 1989a, Tooley 1997).

Such accounts, as we have noted above, seem to support the Aristotelian solution. But they are not the only accounts. On some accounts there is no such fundamental ontological difference between the future and the present and past; the impossibility of affecting the past lies not in the fact that the passage of time puts a constraint on what can be caused, but rather in the fact that it is the direction of causation which determines the direction of time (Swinburne 1994, Mellor 1981 and 1998). On yet other accounts the impossibility is simply a fundamental metaphysical fact which is not open to further analysis or explanation.

It is, of course, possible that the fatalist challenge about the difference between the future and the present and past cannot be successfully met. For instance, it could be argued (a) that the only successful answer would be one which appealed to a fundamental ontological distinction between the future and the present and past, but that (b) there is in fact no such distinction (Shanks 1994; discussed in Oaklander 1998). But, as we have noted, even if this challenge cannot be met, it does not show that the fatalist is correct. The possibility remains that we can, in principle, affect the past.

5. Theological Fatalism: Pike's argument and God's omniscience

A problem which has been much discussed by philosophers, at least since the time of Augustine (354-430), is whether divine omniscience is compatible with free will, and in particular with our having the power to do other than we do.

One way of arguing for this incompatibility is due to Pike (Pike 1965).

Let us suppose that being omniscient involves being infallible, and believing that p if and only if it is true that p.

Let us also suppose that God existed in 1900, and that omniscience is part of his essence.

Now, suppose that Jones mowed his lawn on 1/1/2000.

Then God believed in 1900 that Jones would mow his lawn on 1/1/2000.

Did Jones have the power to refrain from mowing his lawn?

No. Because that would mean either (1) that he had the power to do something which would have brought it about that God had a false belief in 1900, or (2) that he had the power to do something which would have brought it about that God did not believe in 1900 that Jones would mow his lawn on 1/1/2000, or (3) that he had the power to do something which would have brought it about that God did not exist in 1900. And each of these alternatives is impossible.

Are there any objections to this argument?

Naturally it would be possible to object to some of the suppositions about the existence and nature of God. I will return to them.

First we should notice that the argument depends on a certain principle about power which is very similar to the plausible amended version of Taylor's presupposition 5:

If it is in S's power to do something which would bring it about thatp, and p entails q, andq is false, then it is in S's power to do something which would bring it about thatq .

This seems plausible. One might, though, prefer to avoid all mention of bringing about, and to rephrase the argument in terms of counterfactuals. So, one would say instead, "...that would mean either (1) that he had the power so to act that God would have had a false belief in 1900, or ..." (Fischer 1989, 8-11) However, the argument seems at least as plausible when rephrased in this way.

Since, given Pike's assumptions about the existence and nature of God, it would have been impossible for Jones to act in such a way that God would have had a false belief or would not have existed, we can confine our attention to the question of whether he had the power so to act that God would not have believed in 1900 that he would mow the lawn on 1/1/2000.

Plantinga (1974a, Part 1, b) claims that the argument fails to show that Jones did not have the power to refrain from mowing since there is a possible world in which he refrained from mowing, and so a possible world in which he acted in such a way that God would not have believed that he would mow. Pike replies (Pike 1977) that the fact that there is such a possible world is not enough to show that Jones had the power to refrain; he cites the fact that there is a possible world in which he jumps ten feet, but says that that does not mean that he has the power to jump ten feet.

It seems that, if Plantinga were right, there would be a ready answer to the claim that powerlessness to do anything other than what we actually do follows from causal determnism; in particular to the claim that, if Jones's mowing were causally determined by circumstances, natural or supernatural, prior to his birth, he would not have the power to refrain. The answer would be that there was a possible world in which the circumstances before his birth were such as not to prevent Jones from mowing.

However, it is beyond the scope of this entry to discuss the question of whether the power to do anything other than what we actually do is compatible with causal determinism. Let us, therefore, consider whether there is any other reason for thinking that Jones might have had the power to act in such a way that God would not have believed that he would mow the lawn on 1/1/2000.

5.1 An Aristotelian solution

One might object to the conclusion that God believed in 1900 that Jones would mow his lawn on 1/1/2000, on the grounds that propositions about future contingents are not true. So if God is omniscient in the way assumed, he would not hold this belief.

5.2 An Ockhamist solution

Ockham's answer to the problem of divine foreknowledge was to invoke the difference between propositions which are really about the past (those that express "hard" facts about the past) and those which are verbally about the past but which are really in part about the future (those that express "soft" facts about the past). The crucial point was that, even if someone lacked the power to do something inconsistent with a hard fact about the past, one might have the power to do something inconsistent with a soft fact about the past. To make such a solution work in the case of the problem posed by Pike's argument, it would be necessary to show, or at any rate to make it plausible, that to act in a way which was inconsistent with God's belief that Jones would mow the lawn in 1/1/2000 was in fact open to Jones, because what he would be bringing about would be inconsistent with a soft fact about the past, not a hard fact. The difficulty for this strategy, though, is to give an account of soft facts about the past, or at least a species of soft facts about the past, which meets two conditions: (1) it makes it true that what Jones would be bringing about would be inconsistent with a soft fact of the right sort, and also (2) it is such that it is plausible (at any rate in advance of any fatalist proofs to the contrary) that in the case of soft facts of that sort it is in principle possible at a later date to bring things about which are inconsistent with them. (The Introduction to Fischer 1989, and many of the articles in it are relevant to these issues.)

It is easy enough to give an account of soft facts which fails, apparently, to meet the second condition. For instance we might say that the following makes it a soft fact that God believes that Jones will mow the lawn: given the nature of God, the fact that God believes that Jones will mow the lawn entails and is entailed by the fact that Jones will mow the ;awn. But that would not help us to see how it would be possible to act in a way which is inconsistent with a soft fact of this sort, if we did not already have an answer to Pike's argument.

It is also, as we have seen in connexion with logical fatalism, easy enough to delineate a species of soft facts about the past which meet the second condition. We have already met an example of one such species: "it was true in 1900 that there would be a sea-battle on 1/1/2100." Another example is: "it was true in 1900 that Jones would mow the lawn in 1/1/2000." These are cases where the truth of the propositons is constituted, in part, by a fact about the future. But it is difficult to see how the truth that God believes that Jones will mow the lawn is constituted, in part, by the fact that Jones mows the lawn. Another species of soft fact that would meet the second condition is exemplified by, "the construction of Stonehenge predated Jones's mowing of the lawn." The truth of this is constitued by a relation the first element of which does not necessitate the second element, and the second element of which is a future event (the relation of temporal prioriy, of course). But it is difficult to see how the truth that God believes that Jones will mow the lawn is constituted by a relation which something bears to Jones's mowing without necessitating it.

This is not to say that there could not be a solution in terns of soft facts, but it is not at all obvious what such a solution would look like.

Of course, the prospects of providing a solution would be satisfying if it could be made plausible that in some cases it is in people's powers to do things which are inconsistent with hard facts about the past, not just soft facts. But to take that approach is, in effect, to abandon the idea of an Ockhamist solution, and to move on to the next solution.

5.3 Affecting the past

One possible solution is to suggest that Pike's second alternative is possible, without any appeal to softness of facts. According to this solution, in some cases people have the power do things which are inconsistent with the actual facts about the past, even though they are hard facts. That is to say, in some cases people have the power to affect the past. In particular the suggestion is that Jones had the power to do something which would have brought it about that God did not believe in 1900 that he would mow the lawn (Anglin 1990). The plausibility of such a solution will depend largely on the strength of the arguments for the impossibility of affecting the past.

Now some such arguments seek merely to demonstrate this impossibility without offering any further explanation for it. And it may be contended that most of the arguments of this sort which are at all compelling involve appealing to the obvious impossibility that an event might prevent its own occurrence, and to the slightly less obvious impossibility that an event might bring about its own occurrence. But, in reply to such arguments, it may be claimed that these impossibilities are not sufficient to rule out the possibility that one event might bring about an earlier event, as long as the world is so organised as to avoid these impossible outcomes. If so, it is not clear why God should not have so organised it. And in particular it is not clear why God should not have so organised things that it is possible for us to do things which affect what beliefs he holds.

However, as we have seen, other arguments for the impossibility of affecting the past go further, and incorporate an explanation for the impossibility. A successful defence against theological fatalism which appealed to the possibility of affecting the past would have to deal with these further issues.

5.4 A Boethian solution

Boethius (c480-524) offered a solution to the problem which in effect denied the supposition that God existed in 1900 or believed anything in 1900 (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V). God is, on this view, outside time; he is timelessly eternal. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) also offered this solution (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Article 13). The idea behind the solution is, of course, that if God's knowledge is not temporal there is no reason why Jones should not have the power to bring it about that God knows that he refrains from mowing the lawn on 1/1/2000 instead of knowing that he mows the lawn then, since possessing that power would not require having the power to affect the past.

There may be a number of problems about whether a personal God could be timeless, and how, if at all, he could relate to a temporal world, but it is worth noting one particular problem. The problem is that, although this solution does not appeal to the possibility of affecting the past, it may be vulnerable to some of the considerations which would tell against that possibility. For suppose that we are unable to affect the past, and that the explanation for this inability is that, whereas the future is not real, not actual, the past and present are real and actual. Then it would seem that we would not be able to affect a timeless God's beliefs because, not being future, they would be as real as any past beliefs (Adams 1987, 1135; Zagzebski 1991, 61). Or suppose instead that the explanation for our inability to affect the past is that, if our action brings anything about, that in itself would constitute our action's being earlier than the thing brought about. Then it might seem that the idea that we could bring about a timeless belief would have to be dismissed; the very fact that a belief was brought about would make it later than whatever brought it about, and so not timeless. (Though there would be some logical space, perhaps, for a view that, whereas it was true of temporal events that, if they were brought about, they must be later than what brought them about, this was not true of events in general.)

Of course, such considerations need not be fatal to the Boethian solution, because the view that the future is unreal, and the view that the temporal order is determined by the causal order are both controversial. What it does seem to mean, though, is that there is less room than one might have supposed for the success of the solution if it is impossible to affect the past.(Rice 2006)

It is worth noticing a further potential awkwardness for the Boethian solution. If it is really impossible to affect the past, then, even if the Boethian solution would mean that God could know that Jones would mow the lawn on 1/1/2000 without compromising Jones's power to refrain, he could not, on the basis of this knowledge, bring about events in the world before 1/1/2000, which he would not have brought about if Jones had refrained; for if he did, this would mean that Jones had the power so to act that things would have been different before 1/1/2000; that is, he would have had the power to affect the past.

5.5 The nature of God's knowledge

Pike's argument rests on the supposition that God's omniscience involves having beliefs. But this may be questioned (Alston 1986). Instead his knowledge, in particular of our actions, may be thought of as Russellian acquaintance knowledge; that is, as consisting of a simple cognitive relation between the knower and what is known (Russell 1912, Chapter 5). The idea would be that, although in humans acquaintance knowledge gives rise to beliefs, God has just the cognitive relation to what he knows, without any consequent beliefs. This seems to have been the way Boethius and Aquinas thought of it (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, Prose 6; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Article 13).

How would this view about God's knowledge affect the question of whether divine omniscience entails fatalism?

Both Boethius and Aquinas thought of God as outside time, but this view about God's knowledge could also be combined with the view that he is inside time. In that case it seems that it would be be possible to adopt an Ockhamist account of how his knowledge in 1900 might be dependent on what Jones does on 1/1/2000. Certainly it looks as if "God was aware in 1900 of Jones's mowing the lawn on 1/1/2000" is partly about 1/1/2000. And "was aware of" like "predated" expresses a relation the first element of which does not necessitate the second. We should notice, however, that the same awkwardness could arise in connection with God's use of his knowledge as arose for the Boethian solution. If it is impossible to affect the past, then God could not make use of his knowledge that Jones would mow the lawn on 1/1/2000 to bring something about before that date, if Jones had the power to refrain from mowing.

There is no reason, of course, why this account of the nature of God's knowledge should not be combined with the view that the future is unreal. In that case God would not come to know of Jones's mowing of the lawn before 1/1/2000, because there would as yet be no fact for him to be aware of. But this would not compromise his omniscience, since, presumably, on this account of knowledge, omniscience would be a matter of knowing all the facts.

For that matter, the account could also be combined with both the view that God is outside time and the view that the future is unreal - as long as these two views themselves are indeed compatible. In that case it would not be true before 1/1/2000 that God timelessly knows the Jones mows the lawn, but would be true on 1/1/2000 and thereafter. Of course, a timeless being cannot change, but this would not involve a change in God, but merely a change in what he is related to. (The number 10 does not change when I refer to it.)

5.6 Must God be omniscient?

Of course the threat of fatalism, when it arises from God's existence, could be averted by denying that God exists. But it could also be averted by denying that God needs to be thought of as omniscient - at any rate if omniscience involves infallible knowledge of all facts. It could be argued that God's perfection does not require the infallible knowledge of all facts, but at most such knowledge of all facts that could possibly be known infallibly. So, if it is logically impossible for someone to have infallible knowledge that Jones will mow the lawn and for Jones to have the power to refrain, it is no imperfection in God if he lacks such knowledge (Swinburne 1977, 172-8). It could also be argued that there is no need to attribute infallible knowledge to God at all (Lucas 1986 and 1989b).

6. Theological Fatalism: Molina, Plantinga and middle knowledge

Some philosophers, notably Luis de Molina (1535-1600) and Alvin Plantinga, have held that God knows not only what actual people will freely do in the future, but what each possible free creature would have freely done in each set of possible circumstances, if fully specific; and that he had this knowledge at the creation. (An action is free in the required sense if not causally determined and not predetermined by God.) Propositions about what a creature would do in a set of circumstances (possible as well as actual) are commonly called "counterfactuals of freedom", and God's knowledge of them is called "middle knowledge" (Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge (Part IV of the Concordia); Plantinga 1974, IX).

If God's knowledge of actual future actions would constitute a fatalistic threat, his middle knowledge could not be less threatening, since, given middle knowledge, he would have knowledge of actual actions on the basis of his knowledge of the circumstances. In fact it seems that it is more threatening.

Of course, one way of avoiding the threat would be to deny that there are in general any facts about what people would have freely done in circumstances that have not actually arisen; there may be facts about what they might have done, or what they would very probably have done; but not what they would have done (Adams 1977; Hasker 1989, 20-9). Indeed this seems to be quite plausible if we really think of people's actions as undetermined. It may help us to see this if we consider the tossing of a coin. Let us suppose that a coin is tossed on some occasion, and it comes down heads; and suppose we then ask if it would have come down heads again if we had tossed it again in exactly the same circumstances. It seems plausible, if we think that how it landed was undetermined, that the right answer is that it might have come down heads and it might have come down tails, but that it is not the case that it would have come down heads, nor the case that it would have come down tails.

So one solution to the fatalistic threat posed by middle knowledge is akin to the Aristotelian solution. Since there are no facts of the relevant sort, God cannot have knowledge of them. But, because there are no such facts, God's lack of knowledge of how free creatures would freely act is no bar to his omniscience.

Are there any other solutions?

It is difficult to see how there could be. In the case of actual actions, the solutions depended on suggesting ways in which it might have been possible for Jones to do something which would bring it about that some fact about God was different; that is to say that they depended on showing how some fact about God might be dependent on what Jones did. Now in the case of middle knowledge we know how such a dependence would have to operate; it would have to operate by way of God's knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom. So, could the truth of counterfactuals of freedom related to Jones be dependent on Jones's actions? It seems that they could not be, because the facts that make them true were available to God at the creation, before he had decided to create anything, let alone Jones. So the facts, like God's decision, must have been ontologically prior, it seems, to any act of Jones's. So it seems that it could not be in Jones's power so to act that any actually true counterfactual of freedom relating to him would not have been true (Hasker 1989, 39-52; see Hasker et al. 2000 for a collection of writings on middle knowledge).

7. The Idle Argument

Aristotle mentions, as a corollary of the conclusion that everything that happens, happens of necessity, that "there would be no need to deliberate or to take trouble (thinking that if we do this, this will happen, but if we do not, it will not)." (Aristotle, De Interpretatione, 18b31-3)

This thought was spelt out in what was known as "the Idle Argument" (Bobzien 1998, Section 5). It went like this:

If it is fated that you will recover from this illness, then, regardless of whether you consult a doctor or you do not consult a doctor you will recover.

But also, if it is fated that you will not recover from this illness, then, regardless of whether you consult a doctor or you do not consult a doctor you will not recover.

But either it is fated that you will recover from this illness or it is fated that you will not recover.

Therefore it is futile to consult a doctor.

The thought, presumably, is that it is futile, because what you do will have no effect. If so, the reply given by Chrysippus (c280-c206 B.C.E.) to this argument seems exactly right (Bobzien 1998, 5.2). The conclusion does not follow, because it may have been fated that you will recover as a result of seeing the doctor. The corresponding reply would be equally apt if we substituted "necessary" for "fated".

Some versions of the argument omit "it is fated that" (Bobzien 1998, 189). It goes without saying that the corresponding version of Chrysippus's reply would deal with those versions of the argument.

This is not to say that fatalism does not pose any problem at all for the rationality of deliberation. It is just to say that the Idle Argument does not show that it poses a problem.

The idle argument as originally presented was designed to show, not that fatalism was correct or incorrect, but that it would have a certain consequence. However, a generalised form of the version that omitted "it is fated that" would, if sound, seem to threaten to establish something akin to fatalism: not, indeed, that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do, but that acting is futile. Although it seems that Chrysippus's reply would show that such an argument would not in fact be sound, it is not at all clear where exactly it would go wrong. A detailed discussion of this question can be found in Bledin 2020.

8. Conclusion

There are a number of arguments for fatalism, and it seems that one way of countering all of them would be to adopt the Aristotelian solution, or something akin to it. It would be neat if it could be made out that this was the only solution, so that the fate of fatalism was inextricably linked to the fate of the Aristotelian solution. But it does not seem that this is so, except possibly, on the assumption that an omniscient God exists, in relation to middle knowledge. But even then, the solution is only a poor relation to the Aristotelian solution.

So it is possible that both fatalism and the Aristotelian solution are wrong. And it is, of course, always possible, for all that has been said, that fatalism is correct.

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The classic argument for fatalism occurs in Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.), De Interpretatione, chapter 9. He addresses the question of whether in relation to all questions it is necessary that the affirmation or the negation is true or false. What he says could be presented as an argument along the following lines.

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Shows how the past is re-written within 1984. As well this the warnings George Orwell gave to the future are also shown.

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One of the issues raised in 1984 is the idea that history is mutable or changeable, that truth is what the Party deems it to be, and that the truths found in hi

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Gives an insight into the "insanity" of Winston and Macbeth. Winston believing in the truth of the past and Macbeth believing in the witches.

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Similarities Between George Orwell's '1984' and 'Animal Farm'

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Similarities Between George Orwell's '1984' and 'Animal Farm'

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For those who did English with Mr. Clohessy in Year 11, certain similarities between George Orwell's two books may have been identified. This article simply analyses the similarities between the two books

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by
Julia Hones
'1984' is a dystopian novel about a country called "Oceania" that is constantly at war, but its citizens do not know why it is at war. They do support it, though, because anybody who is not a supporter is considered a traitor. Hatred and rage fuel the support of this endless war.

Anyone who dares to oppose the dictator's principles or think differently is vilified and will disappear. Those who work for the party are instructed to manipulate the truth as needed. In fact, nobody really knows the truth and nobody should care to reflect on it because their lives would be at stake if they did. Physical movements and facial expressions are closely monitored by telescreens in people's homes, political prisoners are treated worse than criminals and love does not exist; hatred and fear condition everybody's behavior. Blind obedience to Big Brother is what matters. Torture and starvation await anybody who dares to challenge the system in any way.

Another strategy of the ruling Party is to destroy words. "We're cutting the language down to the bone. Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?" "There will be no thought as we understand it now. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

Winston is a thirty-nine year-old man who works for the Ministry of Truth. He helps to change the historical facts but, in reality, he is a free thinking person who would like to sabotage Big Brother's dictatorship. He falls in love with a woman, Julia, and they both challenge the system by loving each other and having secret encounters that they must plan in advance.

When Winston becomes a political prisoner a member of the inner Party confesses to him, "Our civilization is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy-everything. Already we have destroyed the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.

"The Party seeks power entirely 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. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power".
Animal Farm
'Animal Farm' is a satire about a group of farm animals that is oppressed by their owner, Mr. Jones. They work long hours, are ill-treated, and when they no longer serve their master's purpose they are slaughtered. The critical situation in which they live is followed by a revolution organized by the pigs to set all the animals free and lead a peaceful existence in which everybody gets their fair share as a result of their work. Pig Napoleon and Snowball lead the revolution. Eventually, however, there is a conflict between these two leaders and Napoleon wins the battle.

At the beginning everybody enjoys the outcome of the revolution, but the benefits of it do not last long. Paradoxically, when Napoleon takes over the farm the animals become oppressed once again: they work long hours and get very little in return, while the powerful pigs enjoy unique privileges that are not allowed to the rest of the animals. This time, however, all the animals accept their situation and do not confront Napoleon who is considered to be "always right". The truth is distorted to meet the leader's interests, and conformity becomes the rule.
Both 'Animal Farm' and '1984' are grounded on conformist societies that are designed to disregard critical thinking and to believe blindly in their infallible leaders. In both cases lies become systematized and statistical data are falsified to keep the leader in power. The authority is not to be questioned, and those who dare do it are punished and labeled as "traitors". George Orwell portrays the dynamics of these societies with striking details.
Their political leaders' strategies are characterized by:

-Fanaticism
-Repetitive slogans
-The destruction of language
-Use of songs and ceremonies to venerate the leaders.
-Patriotism.

Another interesting similarity between the two stories is that the dictators always project the collective anger on a specific enemy in order to distract the masses and become more powerful themselves. The enemy is used as a "scapegoat" by the political leader. In 'Animal Farm', Mr Jones is always mentioned when pig Napoleon needs support to violate the rules that were set as part of the revolution and, subsequently, Snowball and other neighboring farms become the enemies to be despised and attacked. In '1984' Goldstein is the enemy who wants to sabotage the system created by Big Brother, and Oceania is always at war with either Eastasia or Eurasia.

In both stories the past is mutable. It only exists in the minds of the citizens, and the government can manipulate their minds by rewriting the historical facts and changing the data to keep the dictator in power. The omnipotence of the dictator can only be preserved through lies.

In Oceania the proletarians-also called "the proles"- are the majority of the population. The Party claimed to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines, (women still did work in the coal mines) children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But Big Brother taught the proles that they were inferior beings who must be kept in subjection. It was not necessary to learn much about the proles. "So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern". "All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations".

Contradictions and ambiguity are at the heart of these stories. In '1984' the Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. In 'Animal Farm' the seven commandments that made up the foundation of the revolution were all violated by pig Napoleon.

Even though Orwell carried the features of these societies to the extreme, the reader may find them familiar. The question that lingers in my mind is whether these totalitarian leaders succeed because of the ignorance of the masses or the conformism of the intellectuals. I think it is a combination of both. As Albert Einstein said, "Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."

About Author

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George Orwell's '1984' and 'Animal Farm'

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by Julia Hones '1984' is a dystopian novel about a country called "Oceania" that is constantly at war, but its citizens do not know why it is at war. They do support it, though, because anybody who is not a supporter is considered a traitor. Hatred and rage fuel the support of this endless war.

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This SparkNotes page analyses and discusses the various themes, motifs and symbols that can be found when reading 1984.

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A summary of Themes in George Orwell's 1984. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of 1984 and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.

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THE MESSAGE FOR TODAY IN ORWELL'S '1984'

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THE MESSAGE FOR TODAY IN ORWELL'S '1984'

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A reflection of the truth of the novel in the year 1984

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The survival of each of the three Orwellian States was based on the following interior and exterior strategies: the State had to subdue its citizens into a mindless mass which executed the will of Big Brother; the State had to fuel the hatred of the population against its enemy through a constant state of limited war; at all times the State should have the capacity to destroy the other States so that each one's military strength would be a deterrent to all-out war; and, finally, the States should periodically change their alliances to prevent the union of two States against the third.

Today, on the threshold of the real year 1984, we ask ourselves how much of Orwell's fictional world has become reality and what the prospects are for a more sensible world.

In our 1984, Big Brother will not conquer the world. However, the warnings of George Orwell are more than ever relevant. Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia do not exist and Big Brother did not succeed in destroying individual thought. However, in a large part of our world, he did succeed, through the management of the news and the censorship of the written and spoken word, in severely impairing man's ability to think freely. Even in the free world, many maintain, inroads have been made: commercial interests try to doctor the news and sometimes succeed, elected officials are tempted to misrepresent the truth, Government agencies attempt to and sometimes do invade the privacy of the individuals, and military leaders feel compelled to hide some of their activities.

It is the vigilance of the citizens that has prevented Big Brother from starting his reign in the free world. This vigilance, Orwell would say today, may not relent if freedom is to be saved.

Orwell's imaginary States do not exist, but the world order of 1984 resembles in some ways the world of ''1984.'' Indeed, there are two major world powers with a third one on the rise. They seem to divide the world into three zones of influence.

The Eastern totalitarian states govern their people and their satellites with iron hands; governments and individuals must please their masters in all they do, write and ''think aloud.'' The survival of these regimes, they believe, rests on the blind obedience of the citizens.

The Western zone, called the free world, lives in the shadow of the military and economic might of the United States. It does not resemble Oceania in which Winston lived. Governments and people of the Western world are free to disagree, to criticize and to act independently. But the free countries know very well that, in the end, limits are placed on their freedom. Their freedom and prosperity depends in a large measure on their allegiance to the world power of the West. Why, indeed, would European countries agree to have nuclear missiles placed on their soil, knowing very well that the Soviet Union would retaliate; why did Japan agree to ''voluntary'' reductions in exports and liberalization of its import regulations, knowing that these measures would hurt their own economy?

The relationship between the major powers also has its Orwellian side. Balance of power between the world leaders is still considered the best prevention against war. Did we not hear recently that more and better weapons mean a more secure world peace? China tries desperately to catch up with the other powers by acquiring nuclear capability. The United States places missiles in Europe to respond to the nuclear arsenal in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union counters with an increase in nuclear warheads all over the world. (Did the world of today replace Big Brother's slogan ''War is Peace'' with ''Nuclear Arms is Peace''?) Changing alliances have always been the diplomatic game that nations play around the world, often to facilitate conquest, sometimes to strengthen their defenses. Today, the nations of the world continue that game: friendship with China serves to counter the egomaniac dreams of a former ally.

In the real 1984, world powers do not rule the world, their carefully designed world order is marred by the erratic behavior of a number of young nations that pride themselves on being called ''non-aligned.'' Some of them have been able to interfere in the global plans of the world powers or to endanger the economic health of the industrialized nations. Some of these countries are so unstable that they threaten not only the peace in their region but also the tenuous harmony between the great powers. Their instability could be a greater threat to world peace than the cold war that pitches the great powers against each other.

When the United Nations convened for the first time in 1945, it was the hope of its founders that the organization would build a new order of peace and end all warfare in the world. The signers of the Charter stated that they were ''determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.'' After 40 years, the record of the U.N. can be called outstanding in many areas but dismal in the prevention of war. The great world powers, it is true, have not made use of their nuclear arms against each other, but their nuclear arsenals have grown immensely and other countries have joined the ''elite'' group of nuclear powers.

Furthermore, in these four decades, conventional wars have brought death to millions of people, destruction and misery to large areas of the world. Two years after the signing of the Charter, China was engulfed in a civil war, Hindus and Moslems fought each other in India and Pakistan, and Arabs and Jews began their chronic battles in Israel. Since then, few years have passed without armed confrontations. The United Nations has not been able to free humanity from the horrors of war.

The United Nations is not a world government, it is a forum in which nations can air their grievances, seek redress of the wrongs they have suffered, and hope that the major powers will not veto the organization's decision to separate fighting factions. The effective power of our local and national governments lies in the fact that they have the means to enforce the laws through their police. The United Nations does not have such means.

To become a world government, the Security Council of the United Nations must be transformed in an executive body that can call on the armed forces of its member states to impose its will, deter the nations from violence, and return the national borders as they were before the conflict. It must also have means to regulate economic relations between nations so that poverty does disappear and a more equitable partition of the world's wealth can be achieved. Unfortunately, this is not a realistic expectation for the forseeable future. Few countries, if any, are willing to abdicate part of their sovereignty to a world government that has the means to impose its decisions on them. Few, if any, of the rich nations are willing to share their wealth or their technology with underdeveloped countries.

World order and peace cannot be established if the nations of the world are not willing to solve their conflicts without the use of violence; if the world powers are not willing to abandon their expansionist aims to reduce simultaneously their nuclear arsenal, and reverse the buildup of conventional weapons; if the industrial nations are not willing to transfer some of their technological know-how to underdeveloped countries, if the people and their leaders are not willing to moderate their religious, ethnic, cultural and national fervor for the well-being of the others and the peaceful coexistence of all the peoples of the world.

Perhaps, one day, in the 21st century, the people of the world will agree that the time has come to establish a new world order. In the meantime nations and people can only continue the dialogue that is going on in different parts of the world and in the United Nations and that keeps the hope for peace and justice alive. And citizens can continue to heed the warnings of ''1984.''

Dr. Edmond van den Bossche of Bronxville is an associate professor of French and director of the International Studies Program at Manhattan College in Riverdale.

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THE MESSAGE FOR TODAY IN ORWELL'S '1984'

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The survival of each of the three Orwellian States was based on the following interior and exterior strategies: the State had to subdue its citizens into a mindless mass which executed the will of Big Brother; the State had to fuel the hatred of the population against its enemy through

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Information is given in regards to the history of the "Cold War" and atomic warfare. This gives an indication of what was relevant at the time of the books publication.

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During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as allies against the Axis powers. However, the relationship between the two

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We: The Novel That Inspired George Orwell’s 1984

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We: The Novel That Inspired George Orwell’s 1984

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George Orwell's inspiration to write "1984". Shows similarities between the two books, "We" and "1984", and indicates Orwell's ideology is shared by others.

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In January 1946, George Orwell published a review of a fairly obscure Russian novel titled We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, in the Tribune. Originally released in New York in 1921 after being banned prior to publication in Russia, We had recently been translated into French, in which Orwell was fluent. As the recent author of Animal Farm and a writer for whom fiction and politics belonged together, Orwell seemed a natural choice to examine this dystopian work.

We tells the story of D-503, a man living in a dystopian city of the future in which people no longer have Christian names and are known instead by a letter followed by a series of numbers. In this city, citizens are subjected to constant surveillance by a branch of government called the Bureau of Guardians, with an all-powerful leader called the Well-Doer ("the Benefactor" in some translations). At a point early on, D-503 notices a particular woman showing up wherever he goes. Filled with suspicion, he first hates her, but soon falls in love with her. She inspires him to commit acts of rebellion against the state.

In his review, Orwell praised the book's "intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism." Three years after writing those words, Orwell published 1984, a dystopian novel about a man named Winston living in a dystopian city of the future. In this city, citizens are subjected to constant surveillance by a branch of government called the Thought Police, with an all-powerful leader called Big Brother. At a point early on, Winston notices a particular woman showing up wherever he goes. Filled with suspicion, he first hates her, but soon falls in love with her. She inspires him to commit acts of rebellion against the state. Sound familiar?

Orwell never acknowledged having borrowed from We for his masterpiece, but the timing of his reading it, along with some of the uncanny similarities between the two novels, make it hard to conclude otherwise. Along with the basics of the plot outlined above, both D-503 and Winston (DOUBLE SPOILER ALERT) ultimately find themselves subjected to procedures that remove their ability to reject the government's philosophy, after which both men find that they no longer care for their former lovers. In both novels, freedom is considered by the state to be an evil and the enemy of a proper life. In We, this idea manifests in statements about "when human beings still lived in the state of freedom, that is, in an unorganized primitive state." In 1984, it is most clearly illustrated in the Party's oft-repeated slogan:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The two books share certain smaller details in common as well. In both, the protagonist keeps a diary that he is composing at great risk and which he hopes will be read by future generations. Both feature public executions as a means of rousing frenzied loyalty to their respective leaders by the citizenry. In both, the 12-hour clock is no longer in use. In We, D-503 writes:

There is but one truth, and there is but one path to it; and that truth is: four, and that path is: two times two.

In 1984, Winston writes in his diary:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.

To be fair, Orwell was not the only writer to borrow copiously from We. For all of its lack of recognition with the general population, many 20 th century authors of literary dystopian novels have considered We to be something of a benchmark-Ayn Rand is said to have taken inspiration from it, as had Vladimir Nabokov, who apparently read it before he wrote Invitation to a Beheading. In his own review of A Brave New World, Orwell suggests that Aldous Huxley may have borrowed his novel's plot from Zamyatin. Kurt Vonnegut alludes to this in an interview with Playboy when he mentions Player Piano's debt to We, saying, "I cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We." For his part, Huxley claimed to have written his own dystopian novel before he'd ever come across We.

There are differences between We and 1984, of course. The United State (One State in some translations) in We is an imaginary city that seems to have been built from scratch, while the London of 1984, now located within "Airstrip One" rather than Great Britain, features "rotting 19 th century houses" and a layout that would be recognizable to readers familiar with that city. In We there is a single class to which all but government officials belong. In 1984, the Inner Party members represent the upper class, the Outer Party members a sort of middle class, and the proles the lower. In We, the entire city is made of glass, which enables the constant surveillance. In 1984, telescreens installed in every home and public place do so. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, rewriting documents in order to alter the historical record to the Party's specifications. D-503 is the lead engineer on the Integral, a spaceship with which to conquer other planets.

And then there's the biggest difference: that 1984 became one of the most important novels ever written in terms of political and societal influence while We fell into obscurity. Here, the reasons become a little harder to pinpoint. 1984 is better written; Orwell's ability to inhabit Winston's daily life and have the reader experience his horror at the oppression imposed on him as if firsthand give 1984 an immediacy that We sometimes lacks. And Orwell never loses sight of his own story, while there are sections of We in which Zamyatin meanders in his depiction of the very world he has imagined, leaving the reader puzzled.

In addition, Orwell was wise to set his dystopia in a recognizable location and in a near future that might hit close to home for readers. We, on the other hand, is set in the 26 th century and in a city that no reader would directly relate to as their own gone wrong. Zamyatin, who as a dissident writer found himself persecuted by the Soviet regime-he was imprisoned and eventually exiled to France-likely aimed to instill his novel with a milieu not identifiably Soviet, but universal in nature. But the move creates a distance between the reader's world and the world in the novel, a gap that 1984 closes with aplomb.

Orwell endowed Winston with a barely contained contempt for the political system in which he is trapped from the outset, creating a tension that compels the plot forward. Zamyatin's D-503, on the other hand, believes in the system and acts against it only after being convinced to do so by the woman with whom he has fallen helplessly-and ruinously, it turns out-in love. Hers are the actions that drive the plot, while D-503, though the protagonist, never manages to become truly sympathetic.

Still, the reaction to We in Russia suggests that it was an important book there: Soviet censors banned publication of the book-it didn't officially appear in Russia until 1988. But a Russian publisher in Prague printed the novel in its original Russian in 1927 and copies were smuggled back into Russia, passing from reader to reader. Had the book not struck a nerve, it would have been a different story. Zamyatin was certainly onto something with his dystopian novel, and the Soviets' efforts to thwart its publication only confirm that fact. We successfully takes the emergent ideology of his time to a terrifying logical endpoint.

If Zamyatin came up with the template for the 20 th century dystopian novel, then Orwell perfected it. Art always builds upon art that came before it, but rarely does such an overt appropriation remain so little known. 1984 showed just how valuable literature can be for the collective conscience, but failure to acknowledge its debt to We resembles the very kind of obliteration of history that Winston performs every day at work in 1984.

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We : The Novel That Inspired George Orwell's 1984

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In January 1946, George Orwell published a review of a fairly obscure Russian novel titled We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, in the Tribune. Originally released in New York in 1921 after being banned prior to publication in Russia, We had recently been translated into French, in which Orwell was fluent.

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'The Golden Country' is an allusion to the Garden of Eden from the Bible

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'The Golden Country' is an allusion to the Garden of Eden from the Bible

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This presentation briefly discusses the connection that can be made between 'The Golden Country', in 1984, and the Garden of Eden from the Bible.

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Allusions in George Orwell's 1984 By Rab Hunter and Sydney Holland What is an Allusion? An allusion is a reference that is made to someone or something that is assumed to be well known. Setting Allusions Allusions to People Other Allusions Sources 'The Golden Country' is an allusion to the Garden of Eden from the Bible.

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This article shows that people are recognising the similarities between today and the book, 1984. Was George Orwell predicting the future?

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Since last week's revelations of the scope of the United States' domestic surveillance operations, George Orwell's "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 he'd been guided by Orwell's pen. But what will all the new readers and rereaders of Orwell's 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 re-education 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 people's 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 Party's 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 wasn't much of a leap to imagine him and his colleagues working in some version of Oceania's 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 Orwell's 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 his interview with the Guardian, Snowden could be channelling the novel's narrator, or at least delivering a spirited synopsis of the book:

If living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept, and I think many of us are, it's 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 that's the world that you helped create, and it's 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 doesn't matter what the outcome is, so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.

Are we living in "Nineteen Eighty-Four"? The technological possibilities of surveillance and data collection and storage surely surpass what Orwell imagined. Oceania's 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 calls-even if a person is not saying anything interesting or controversial, and even if no one is actually monitoring our communication, the notion that one's personal digital messages would remain inviolably private forever, or that they would not be saved or stored, was probably naïve. Regardless of the actual scope of the government's 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 legal-leading to something of a parallel language that rivals Orwell's Newspeak for its soulless, obfuscated meaning. And, indeed, there has been a hint of something vaguely Big Brotherian in Obama's 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 beneficence-which 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 outré of political thinkers would have to grant that we are far from the crushing, violent, single-party totalitarian regime of Orwell's imagination. In one of the more chilling passages in the novel, the evil Party hack O'Brien 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 presumably-or at least hopefully-less so in the thoughts themselves. The war on terror has been compared to Orwell's 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 government's means, nor is it clear that the ends will remain as generally benevolent as they seem today. But Orwell's central image of unrestrained political power, a "boot stamping on a human face-forever," is not the reality of our age.

While it's tempting to hold the present moment up beside Orwell's 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 literature-a 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 follows-they go to the countryside, like Adam and Eve attempting to push their way back into Eden. Later, they keep a small flat. The Party's stamping out of sex is an essential mode of control. But love, it seems, may exist in a place beyond the government's 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 found-love 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 don't feel the same toward the other person any longer."
"No," he said, "you don't feel the same."

Were this just a novel, rather than an 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 Winston's 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.

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Since last week's revelations of the scope of the United States' domestic surveillance operations, George Orwell's "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.

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Provides the meanings of the quotes within the 1984 book.

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Book One, Chapter I: Doublethink

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

These words are the official slogans of the Party, and are inscribed in massive letters on the white pyramid of the Ministry of Truth, as Winston observes in Book One, Chapter I. Because it is introduced so early in the novel, this creed serves as the reader's first introduction to the idea of doublethink. By weakening the independence and strength of individuals' minds and forcing them to live in a constant state of propaganda-induced fear, the Party is able to force its subjects to accept anything it decrees, even if it is entirely illogical-for instance, the Ministry of Peace is in charge of waging war, the Ministry of Love is in charge of political torture, and the Ministry of Truth is in charge of doctoring history books to reflect the Party's ideology.

That the national slogan of Oceania is equally contradictory is an important testament to the power of the Party's mass campaign of psychological control. In theory, the Party is able to maintain that "War Is Peace" because having a common enemy keeps the people of Oceania united. "Freedom Is Slavery" because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail. By the same token, "Slavery Is Freedom," because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want. "Ignorance Is Strength" because the inability of the people to recognize these contradictions cements the power of the authoritarian regime.

Book One, Chapter III: Party Control of History

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

This Party slogan appears twice in the novel, once in Book One, Chapter III, when Winston is thinking about the Party's control of history and memory, and once in Book Three, Chapter II, when Winston, now a prisoner in the Ministry of Love, talks to O'Brien about the nature of the past. The slogan is an important example of the Party's technique of using false history to break down the psychological independence of its subjects. Control of the past ensures control of the future, because the past can be treated essentially as a set of conditions that justify or encourage future goals: if the past was idyllic, then people will act to re-create it; if the past was nightmarish, then people will act to prevent such circumstances from recurring. The Party creates a past that was a time of misery and slavery from which it claims to have liberated the human race, thus compelling people to work toward the Party's goals.

The Party has complete political power in the present, enabling it to control the way in which its subjects think about and interpret the past: every history book reflects Party ideology, and individuals are forbidden from keeping mementos of their own pasts, such as photographs and documents. As a result, the citizens of Oceania have a very short, fuzzy memory, and are willing to believe anything that the Party tells them. In the second appearance of this quote, O'Brien tells Winston that the past has no concrete existence and that it is real only in the minds of human beings. O'Brien is essentially arguing that because the Party's version of the past is what people believe, that past, though it has no basis in real events, has become the truth.

Book One, Chapter VII: 2 + 2 = 5

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

This quote occurs in Book One, Chapter VII, as Winston looks at a children's history book and marvels at the Party's control of the human mind. These lines play into the theme of psychological manipulation. In this case, Winston considers the Party's exploitation of its fearful subjects as a means to suppress the intellectual notion of objective reality. If the universe exists only in the mind, and the Party controls the mind, then the Party controls the universe. As Winston thinks, "For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable-what then?" The mathematical sentence 2 + 2 = 5 thus becomes a motif linked to the theme of psychological independence. Early in the novel, Winston writes that "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four." The motif comes full circle at the end of the novel after the torture Winston suffers in the Ministry of Love breaks his soul; he sits at the Chestnut Tree Café and traces "2 + 2 = 5" in the dust on his table.

Book One, Chapter VIII: Rewriting History

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 standard against which it could be tested.

This quote from Book One, Chapter VIII, emphasizes how one's understanding of the past affects one's attitude about the present. Winston has just had a frustrating conversation with an old man about life before the Revolution, and he realizes that the Party has deliberately set out to weaken people's memories in order to render them unable to challenge what the Party claims about the present. If no one remembers life before the Revolution, then no one can say that the Party has failed mankind by forcing people to live in conditions of poverty, filth, ignorance, and hunger. Rather, the Party uses rewritten history books and falsified records to prove its good deeds.

Book Three, Chapter VI: Pain Trumps Moral Convictions

And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.

Julia speaks these lines to Winston in Book Three, Chapter VI, as they discuss what happened to them in Room 101. She tells him that she wanted her torture to be shifted to him, and he responds that he felt exactly the same way. These acts of mutual betrayal represent the Party's final psychological victory. Soon after their respective experiences in Room 101, Winston and Julia are set free as they no longer pose a threat to the Party. Here, Julia says that despite her efforts to make herself feel better, she knows that in order to save herself she really did want the Party to torture Winston. In the end, the Party proves to Winston and Julia that no moral conviction or emotional loyalty is strong enough to withstand torture. Physical pain and fear will always cause people to betray their convictions if doing so will end their suffering.

Winston comes to a similar conclusion during his own stint at the Ministry of Love, bringing to its culmination the novel's theme of physical control: control over the body ultimately grants the Party control over the mind. As with most of the Party's techniques, there is an extremely ironic strain of doublethink running underneath: self-love and self-preservation, the underlying components of individualism and independence, lead one to fear pain and suffering, ultimately causing one to accept the principles of anti-individualist collectivism that allows the Party to thrive.

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1984: Important Quotes Explained | SparkNotes

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Explanation of the famous quotes in 1984, including all important speeches, comments, quotations, and monologues.

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An opinion about how "1984" elements are applied to society today.

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opinion: we're living '1984' today - cnn

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Opinion: We're living '1984' today - CNN

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Lewis Beale says it's no wonder that Orwell's prescient book has seen a spike in sales. It's fictional surveillance state is alarmingly recognizable in our modern society

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This websites discusses the similarities between the Party in the book, 1984, and Stalin's ruling of the Soviet Union for over two decades

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Teachers Network: 1984, by George Orwell: Compare 1984 Human Rights Violations

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Teachers Network is an major, non-profit education organization offering online multimedia professional development and teacher education packages in order to improve student achievement.

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A clear definition of capitalism is given, and it is explained how capitalism fits into certain aspects of society.

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"Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man's rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man's right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control." - AYN RAND

Capitalism is a social system based on the principle of individual rights.

Politically, it is the system of laissez-faire (freedom).

Legally it is a system of objective laws ( rule of law as opposed to rule of man).

Economically, when such freedom is applied to the sphere of production its result is the free-market.

Under capitalism the state is separated from economics (production and trade), just like the state is separated from religion.

Recommended Reading:
What is Capitalism? by Ayn Rand (ARI Campus)

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"Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force.

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Brief rundown on Goldstein and Big Brother.

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Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein are the conceptual leaders of the opposing forces in Oceania: Big Brother is the titular head of Oceania, and Goldstein is th

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Firsthand reasoning behind the book and its themes

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The Masterpiece that killed George Orwell

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The Masterpiece that killed George Orwell

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Insight into Orwell's health and mindset when writing the book.

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"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition.

Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, a story that remains eternally fresh and contemporary, and whose terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "newspeak" have become part of everyday currency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature.

"Orwellian" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, "The Last Man in Europe", had been incubating in Orwell's mind since the Spanish civil war. His novel, which owes something to Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian fiction We, probably began to acquire a definitive shape during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard. Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was "convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world" at Tehran.

Orwell had worked for David Astor's Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent. The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency", and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm. As the war drew to a close, the fruitful interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated "fairy tale". It's clear from his Observer book reviews, for example, that he was fascinated by the relationship between morality and language.

There were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell's flat was wrecked by a doodlebug. The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became integral to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow. In March 1945, while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anaesthesia during a routine operation.

Suddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his Islington lodgings, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife's premature death. In 1945, for instanc e, he wrote almost 110,000 words for various publications, including 15 book reviews for the Observer.

Now Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura, next to Islay. There was a house, Barnhill, seven miles outside Ardlussa at the remote northern tip of this rocky finger of heather in the Inner Hebrides. Initially, Astor offered it to Orwell for a holiday. Speaking to the Observer last week, Richard Blair says he believes, from family legend, that Astor was taken aback by the enthusiasm of Orwell's response.

In May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long and arduous journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was "almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage".

It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century. Postwar Britain was bleaker even than wartime, and he had always suffered from a bad chest. At least, cut off from the irritations of literary London, he was free to grapple unencumbered with the new novel. "Smothered under journalism," as he put it, he told one friend, "I have become more and more like a sucked orange."

Ironically, part of Orwell's difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm. After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. "Everyone keeps coming at me," he complained to Koestler, "wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc - you don't know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again."

On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "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 by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is 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 personality." Then that famous Orwellian coda. "Good prose is like a window pane."

From the spring of 1947 to his death in 1950 Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable. Privately, perhaps, he relished the overlap between theory and practice. He had always thrived on self-inflicted adversity.

At first, after "a quite unendurable winter", he revelled in the isolation and wild beauty of Jura. "I am struggling with this book," he wrote to his agent, "which I may finish by the end of the year - at any rate I shall have broken the back by then so long as I keep well and keep off journalistic work until the autumn."

Barnhill, overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world.

Orwell, a gentle, unworldly sort of man, arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs and a few pots and pans. It was a spartan existence but supplied the conditions under which he liked to work. He is remembered here as a spectre in the mist, a gaunt figure in oilskins.

The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father "could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father's time on Jura recognise how essential she was."

Once his new regime was settled, Orwell could finally make a start on the book. At the end of May 1947 he told his publisher, Fred Warburg: "I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time because I really have been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can't quite shake it off."

Mindful of his publisher's impatience for the new novel, Orwell added: "Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job." Still, he pressed on, and at the end of July was predicting a completed "rough draft" by October. After that, he said, he would need another six months to polish up the text for publication. But then, disaster.

Part of the pleasure of life on Jura was that he and his young son could enjoy the outdoor life together, go fishing, explore the island, and potter about in boats. In August, during a spell of lovely summer weather, Orwell, Avril, Richard and some friends, returning from a hike up the coast in a small motor boat, were nearly drowned in the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool.

Richard Blair remembers being "bloody cold" in the freezing water, and Orwell, whose constant coughing worried his friends, did his lungs no favours. Within two months he was seriously ill. Typically, his account to David Astor of this narrow escape was laconic, even nonchalant.

The long struggle with "The Last Man in Europe" continued. In late October 1947, oppressed with "wretched health", Orwell recognised that his novel was still "a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely".

He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with "inflammation of the lungs" and told Koestler that he was "very ill in bed". Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.

A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing." In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US.

Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works."

As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible."

Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive."

This is one of Orwell's exceedingly rare references to the theme of his book. He believed, as many writers do, that it was bad luck to discuss work-in-progress. Later, to Anthony Powell, he described it as "a Utopia written in the form of a novel". The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably bad" manuscript the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. It was, he told his agent, "extremely long, even 125,000 words". With characteristic candour, he noted: "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB."

And he was still undecided about the title: "I am inclined to call it NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE," he wrote, "but I might just possibly think of something else in the next week or two." By the end of October Orwell believed he was done. Now he just needed a stenographer to help make sense of it all.

It was a desperate race against time. Orwell's health was deteriorating, the "unbelievably bad" manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming. Warburg promised to help, and so did Orwell's agent. At cross-purposes over possible typists, they somehow contrived to make a bad situation infinitely worse. Orwell, feeling beyond help, followed his ex-public schoolboy's instincts: he would go it alone.

By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done.

Now Orwell, the old campaigner, protested to his agent that "it really wasn't worth all this fuss. It's merely that, as it tires me to sit upright for any length of time, I can't type very neatly and can't do many pages a day." Besides, he added, it was "wonderful" what mistakes a professional typist could make, and "in this book there is the difficulty that it contains a lot of neologisms".

The typescript of George Orwell's latest novel reached London in mid December, as promised. Warburg recognised its qualities at once ("amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read") and so did his colleagues. An in-house memo noted "if we can't sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot".

By now Orwell had left Jura and checked into a TB sanitorium high in the Cotswolds. "I ought to have done this two months ago," he told Astor, "but I wanted to get that bloody book finished." Once again Astor stepped in to monitor his friend's treatment but Orwell's specialist was privately pessimistic.

As word of Nineteen Eighty-Four began to circulate, Astor's journalistic instincts kicked in and he began to plan an Observer Profile, a significant accolade but an idea that Orwell contemplated "with a certain alarm". As spring came he was "having haemoptyses" (spitting blood) and "feeling ghastly most of the time" but was able to involve himself in the pre-publication rituals of the novel, registering "quite good notices" with satisfaction. He joked to Astor that it wouldn't surprise him "if you had to change that profile into an obituary".

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone.

The news was broadcast on the BBC the next morning. Avril Blair and her nephew, still up on Jura, heard the report on the little battery radio in Barnhill. Richard Blair does not recall whether the day was bright or cold but remembers the shock of the news: his father was dead, aged 46.

David Astor arranged for Orwell's burial in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He lies there now, as Eric Blair, between HH Asquith and a local family of Gypsies.

Orwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984), or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", which is set in 1984.

In his edition of the Collected Works (20 volumes), Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this. Davison also argues that the date 1984 is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, 1944, and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in 1980, 1982 and finally, 1984. There's no mystery about the decision to abandon "The Last Man in Europe". Orwell himself was always unsure of it. It was his publisher, Fred Warburg who suggested that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a more commercial title.

The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on our cultural and linguistic landscape has not been limited to either the film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, with its Nazi-esque rallies and chilling soundtrack, nor the earlier one with Michael Redgrave and Edmond O'Brien.

It is likely, however, that many people watching the Big Brother series on television (in the UK, let alone in Angola, Oman or Sweden, or any of the other countries whose TV networks broadcast programmes in the same format) have no idea where the title comes from or that Big Brother himself, whose role in the reality show is mostly to keep the peace between scrapping, swearing contestants like a wise uncle, is not so benign in his original incarnation.

Apart from pop-culture renditions of some of the novel's themes, aspects of its language have been leapt upon by libertarians to describe the curtailment of freedom in the real world by politicians and officials - alarmingly, nowhere and never more often than in contemporary Britain.
Orwellian
George owes his own adjective to this book alone and his idea that wellbeing is crushed by restrictive, authoritarian and untruthful government.
Big Brother (is watching you) Room 101
A term in common usage for a scarily omniscient ruler long before the worldwide smash-hit reality-TV show was even a twinkle in its producers' eyes. The irony of societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell.
Thought Police
Some hotels have refused to call a guest bedroom number 101 - rather like those tower blocks that don't have a 13th floor - thanks to the ingenious Orwellian concept of a room that contains whatever its occupant finds most impossible to endure. Like Big Brother, this has spawned a modern TV show: in this case, celebrities are invited to name the people or objects they hate most in the world.
Thoughtcrime
An accusation often levelled at the current government by those who like it least is that they are trying to tell us what we can and cannot think is right and wrong. People who believe that there are correct ways to think find themselves named after Orwell's enforcement brigade.
Newspeak
See "Thought Police" above. The act or fact of transgressing enforced wisdom.
Doublethink
For Orwell, freedom of expression was not just about freedom of thought but also linguistic freedom. This term, denoting the narrow and diminishing official vocabulary, has been used ever since to denote jargon currently in vogue with those in power.

Hypocrisy, but with a twist. Rather than choosing to disregard a contradiction in your opinion, if you are doublethinking, you are deliberately forgetting that the contradiction is there. This subtlety is mostly overlooked by people using the accusation of "doublethink" when trying to accuse an adversary of being hypocritical - but it is a very popular word with people who like a good debate along with their pints in the pub. Oliver Marre

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1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell

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"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever.

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This article discusses the evolution of 'Big Brother' and how it is now used in today's society

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WELL that was a surprise. Or maybe it wasn't. No, come to think of it, that wasn't much of a surprise at all.
News.com.au just took to the streets of Australia to see if people who watch the TV show Big Brother know why it's actually called Big Brother.

The response of the random individuals we interviewed? Donut. Bagel. *Frisbee. Zero. Not a single person of the 20 or so we spoke to had the faintest idea of the reason behind the show's name.

If you're in that boat too, this story is for you. Read it to the end. Because Big Brother says you should.

The show Big Brother takes its title from the famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

Published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four is universally regarded as one of the great novels of the 20th century, not to mention a spookily prescient view of the future.

In Orwell's imagined dystopian hell, England (now called Airstrip One) is part of a larger geopolitical entity called Oceania which is run by a totalitarian regime. Thinking original thoughts is a crime. Love is a crime. Basically everything worth living for is a crime in a world whose every last corner is surveilled by cameras and spies.

Controlling all this is a figure known only as Big Brother. Think Kim Jong-un without a boyish face, or without any face really, because Big Brother may or may not even exist. The spectre of him, the very idea of Big Brother, is in many ways more frightening than the reality of Big Brother.

The only other thing you need to know, by way of historical reference, is that Orwell wrote the book after witrnessing the tyrannical regimes of Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia.

OK, so there's your background. Now here's where this gets interesting.

In the late 1990s when a bunch of Dutch TV producers conceived the first series of a show which would go on to be franchised in as many as 70 countries, they came up with the name "Big Brother" as a reference to the round-the-clock, round-the-world surveillance of Orwell's fictional world. The TV character of Big Brother represented the all-seeing eye behind the cameras, and there was a slightly dark, unnerving overtone to that.

These days, things have changed. The character and indeed the concept of TV's Big Brother has no such negative connotations.

In Orwell's novel, we cheer for Winston Smith, the staunch individualist who fights Big Brother before ultimately capitulating to him. On the TV show Big Brother, most of us cheer for Big Brother himself as he ritually humiliates the tryhards competing for public profile and future jobs as radio hosts on regional FM stations no one has heard of.

And if you think about it, this shift mirrors a shift in society's attitude. In the late 1990s, surveillance was still regarded as something a little dark and wrong. Today, surveillance is a readily accepted part of life - from security cameras in the street to the trails we leave online at our every cyberstep.

In other words, Big Brother probably hasn't changed that much, but our attitude towards him has. Which is kind of interesting when you think about it.

*Anyway, now you know why the show is called Big Brother. Oh, and when we used the image of a frisbee to suggest the number zero, obviously we meant one of those Frisbees with a hole in it.

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WELL that was a surprise. Or maybe it wasn't. No, come to think of it, that wasn't much of a surprise at all. News.com.au just took to the streets of Australia to see if people who watch the TV show Big Brother know why it's actually called Big Brother.

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Discusses Orwells intention in writing 1984 with reference to what was happening in the world

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David Aaronovitch considers how a decade of political chaos shaped George Orwell's vision of a totalitarian future which featured in his novel Nineteen Eighty-four.

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provides a clear definition of totalitarianism, what that type of government stands for, and examples of this regime throughout history.

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Definition of Totalitarianism

The essence of totalitarianism can be found in its very name; it is a form of rule in which the government attempts to maintain 'total' control over society, including all aspects of the public and private lives of its citizens.

There are several characteristics that are common to totalitarian regimes, including:

Rule by a single party

Total control of the military

Total control over means of communication (such as newspapers, propaganda, etc...)

Police control with the use of terror as a control tactic

Control of the economy

However, even though there were common characteristics of the different totalitarian regimes, it didn't look the same in all countries in which it was employed. So how did totalitarianism look? Let's go over a couple of examples below.

Nazi Germany

Perhaps the most famous example of totalitarianism is Nazi Germany under the rule of Adolf Hitler. Hitler came to power in 1933 after being elected by the German people. However, he illegally assumed more power than was granted under German law. By doing so, he held complete control of the government, both national and local.

Under Hitler's regime, if a citizen spoke against the government then they would be arrested and often sent to a concentration camp. Concentration camps were part of a system used for the imprisonment and murder of people the Nazis deemed undesirable. The concentration camps were used in the Holocaust and held millions of Jews, political prisoners, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally handicapped, and any other person the Nazis deemed undesirable before they were sent or worked to their deaths.

The Nazis also made stipulations as to what people were allowed to do in their daily lives. For example, artists had to create paintings portraying Nazi values, jazz music was banned, and books written by people deemed undesirable under the Hitler regime were burned. Youth organizations indoctrinated girls and boys with Nazi ideology from a young age, and the Nazi police organization, known as the SS, intimidated and terrorized people in an attempt to control them.

The final quality of Hitler's regime that signaled the Nazi government held total control was the extensive use of propaganda. Hitler's picture was everywhere, newspapers were censored, and radio broadcasts were controlled by the government.

Stalinist Soviet Union

Another famed example of a totalitarian regime is the leadership of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin. Stalin came to power following the death of Vladimir Lenin. Stalin gained control by blackmailing many of the leaders in the communist government and eventually murdered his main rival, Leon Trotsky.

Artists painted pictures and authors wrote novels that glorified Stalin, and people were expected to have a picture of him in their homes, often replacing former pictures of Jesus and other religious figures. He took on the nickname 'Uncle Joe' in an effort to give off a kind and friendly personality. In reality, Stalin ran a country in which he held total, oppressive control.

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characteristics & examples - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Totalitarianism: Definition, Characteristics & Examples - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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The essence of totalitarianism can be found in its very name; it is a form of rule in which the government attempts to maintain 'total' control over society, including all aspects of the public and private lives of its citizens.

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This website has been chosen because it gives a brief overview on the book. Anyone who wants to start reading the book can grasp the information and have a small idea of what is happening throughout the book.

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A short summary of George Orwell's 1984. This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of 1984.

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The significance of the glass paperweight made clear.

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The old glass paperweight sold to Winston by Mr. Charrington represents the past. The level of craftsmanship required to make it is no longer achievable, since production standards have dropped and the Party has abolished beauty for its own sake. The tiny fragment of coral embedded in the paperweight represents the fragility of human relationships, particularly the bond between Julia and Winston, which is destroyed by O'Brien as easily and remorselessly as the paperweight is smashed by the Thought Police. The paperweight also symbolizes the room in Mr. Charrington's house that becomes a private sanctuary for the lovers, imagined by Winston as a separate world, frozen in time.

The Glass Paperweight Quotes in 1984

The 1984 quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Glass Paperweight. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

).

What appealed to [Winston] about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one. The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any glass that he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge. It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.

Related Characters: Winston Smith, Mr. Charrington

Related Symbols: The Glass Paperweight

Explanation and Analysis:

He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

Related Characters: Winston Smith (speaker), Julia/The Dark-Haired Girl

Related Symbols: The Glass Paperweight

Explanation and Analysis:

Now that [Winston and Julia] had a secure hiding place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr. Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal.

Related Characters: Winston Smith, Julia/The Dark-Haired Girl, Mr. Charrington

Related Symbols: The Glass Paperweight

Explanation and Analysis:

There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearthstone. The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!

Related Characters: Winston Smith, Julia/The Dark-Haired Girl, Mr. Charrington

Related Symbols: The Glass Paperweight

Explanation and Analysis:

The Glass Paperweight Symbol Timeline in 1984

The timeline below shows where the symbol The Glass Paperweight appears in 1984. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

...bought the diary. The owner, an intelligent prole named Mr. Charrington, shows him a glass paperweight with a piece of coral inside, which Winston buys, and a print of an old...(full context)

...it another day. As they ready to leave the room, Winston gazes into the glass paperweight, imagining that it is the room they are in, and that the coral inside is...(full context)

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Get everything you need to know about The Glass Paperweight in 1984. Analysis, related quotes, timeline.

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Plently of content in the comments section allowing for a more clear and general understanding of some key aspects. xD

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Read 117k reviews from the world's largest community for readers. A masterpiece of rebellion and imprisonment where war is peace freedom is slavery and Big...

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You wouldn't actually use this but it's a good sample of what a Padlet post looks like.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984) is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian state in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism, and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.

The story takes place in an imagined future in an unspecified year believed to be 1984, when much of the world is in perpetual war. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by Big Brother, a dictatorial leader supported by an intense cult of personality manufactured by the Party's Thought Police. The Party engages in omnipresent government surveillance and, through the Ministry of Truth, historical negationism and constant propaganda to persecute individuality and independent thinking.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent mid-level worker at the Ministry of Truth who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. Smith keeps a forbidden diary. He begins a relationship with a colleague, Julia, and they learn about a shadowy resistance group called the Brotherhood. However, their contact within the Brotherhood turns out to be a Party agent, and Smith and Julia are arrested. He is subjected to months of psychological manipulation and torture by the Ministry of Love and is released once he has come to love Big Brother.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It also popularised the term " Orwellian" as an adjective, with many terms used in the novel entering common usage, including "Big Brother", " doublethink", "Thought Police", " thoughtcrime", " Newspeak", and " 2 + 2 = 5". Parallels have been drawn between the novel's subject matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other themes. Orwell described his book as a " satire", and a display of the "perversions to which a centralised economy is liable," while also stating he believed "that something resembling it could arrive." included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005, and it was placed on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list, reaching number 13 on the editors' list and number 6 on the readers' list. In 2003, it was listed at number eight on The Big Read survey by the BBC.

The Orwell Archive at University College London contains undated notes about ideas that evolved into Nineteen Eighty-Four. The notebooks have been deemed "unlikely to have been completed later than January 1944", and "there is a strong suspicion that some of the material in them dates back to the early part of the war".

In one 1948 letter, Orwell claims to have "first thought of [the book] in 1943", while in another he says he thought of it in 1944 and cites 1943's Tehran Conference as inspiration: "What it is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into 'Zones of Influence' (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran Conference), and in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism". Orwell had toured Austria in May 1945 and observed manoeuvering he thought would likely lead to separate Soviet and Allied Zones of Occupation.

In January 1944, literature professor Gleb Struve introduced Orwell to Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 dystopian novel . In his response Orwell expressed an interest in the genre, and informed Struve that he had begun writing ideas for one of his own, "that may get written sooner or later." In 1946, Orwell wrote about the 1931 dystopian novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in his article "Freedom and Happiness" for the Tribune, and noted similarities to We. By this time Orwell had scored a critical and commercial hit with his 1945 political satire Animal Farm, which raised his profile. For a follow-up he decided to produce a dystopian work of his own.

In a June 1944 meeting with Fredric Warburg, co-founder of his British publisher Secker & Warburg, shortly before the release of Animal Farm, Orwell announced that he had written the first 12 pages of his new novel. He could only earn a living from journalism, however, and predicted the book would not see a release before 1947. Progress was slow going; by the end of September 1945 Orwell had written some 50 pages. Orwell became disenchanted with the restrictions and pressures involved with journalism and grew to detest city life in London. His health also suffered, with the harsh winter worsening his case of bronchiectasis and a lesion in one lung.

The novel was completed at Barnhill, Jura.

In May 1946, Orwell arrived on the Scottish island of Jura. He had wanted to retreat to a Hebridean island for several years, to which David Astor recommended he stay at Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the island that his family owned. Barnhill had no electricity or hot water, but it was here where Orwell intermittently drafted and finished Nineteen Eighty-Four. His first stay lasted until October 1946, during which time he made little progress on the few already completed pages and at one point, did no work on it for three months. After spending the winter in London, Orwell returned to Jura; in May 1947 he reported to Warburg that despite progress being slow and difficult, he was roughly a third of the way through. He sent his "ghastly mess" of a first draft manuscript to London where Miranda Christen volunteered to type a clean version. Orwell's health took a turn in September, however, and he was confined to bed with inflammation of the lungs. He lost almost two stone (28 pounds or 12.7 kg) in weight and had recurring night sweats, but he decided not to see a doctor and continued writing. On 7 November 1947, he completed the first draft in bed and subsequently travelled to East Kilbride near Glasgow for medical treatment at Hairmyres Hospital, where a specialist confirmed a chronic and infectious case of tuberculosis.

Orwell was discharged in the summer of 1948, after which he returned to Jura and produced a full second draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he finished in November. He asked Warburg to have someone come to Barnhill and retype the manuscript, which was so untidy that the task was only considered possible if Orwell was present, as only he could understand it. The previous volunteer had left the country and no other could be found at short notice, so an impatient Orwell retyped it himself at a rate of roughly 4,000 words a day during bouts of fever and bloody coughing fits. On 4 December 1948, Orwell sent the finished manuscript to Secker & Warburg and left Barnhill for good in January 1949. He recovered at a sanitarium in the Cotswolds.

Shortly before completion of the second draft, Orwell hesitated between two titles for the novel: The Last Man in Europe, an early title, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Warburg suggested the latter, which he took to be a more commercially viable choice. There has been a theory - doubted by Dorian Lynskey (author of a 2019 book about Nineteen Eighty-Four) - that 1984 was chosen simply as an inversion of the year 1948, the year in which it was being completed. Lynskey says the idea was "first suggested by Orwell's US publisher", and it was also mentioned by Christopher Hitchens in his introduction to the 2003 edition of Animal Farm and 1984, which also notes that the date was meant to give "an immediacy and urgency to the menace of totalitarian rule". However, Lynskey does not believe the inversion theory:

This idea ... seems far too cute for such a serious book. ... Scholars have raised other possibilities. [His wife] Eileen wrote a poem for her old school's centenary called 'End of the Century: 1984.' G. K. Chesterton's 1904 political satire The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which mocks the art of prophecy, opens in 1984. The year is also a significant date in The Iron Heel. But all of these connections are exposed as no more than coincidences by the early drafts of the novel ... First he wrote 1980, then 1982, and only later 1984. The most fateful date in literature was a late amendment."

A 1947 draft manuscript of the first page of Nineteen Eighty-Four, showing the editorial development

In the run up to publication, Orwell called the novel "a beastly book" and expressed some disappointment towards it, thinking it would have been improved had he not been so ill. This was typical of Orwell, who had talked down his other books shortly before their release. Nevertheless, the book was enthusiastically received by Secker & Warburg, who acted quickly; before Orwell had left Jura he rejected their proposed blurb that portrayed it as "a thriller mixed up with a love story." He also refused a proposal from the American Book of the Month Club to release an edition without the appendix and chapter on Goldstein's book, a decision which Warburg claimed cut off about £40,000 in sales.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 in the UK; Orwell predicated earnings of around £500. A first print of 25,575 copies was followed by a further 5,000 copies in March and August 1950. The novel had the most immediate impact in the US, following its release there on 13 June 1949 by Harcourt Brace, & Co. An initial print of 20,000 copies was quickly followed by another 10,000 on 1 July, and again on 7 September. By 1970, over 8 million copies had been sold in the US and in 1984, it topped the country's all-time best seller list.

In June 1952, Orwell's widow Sonia Bronwell sold the only surviving manuscript at a charity auction for £50. The draft remains the only surviving literary manuscript from Orwell, and is presently held at the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

In 1984, civilisation has been ravaged by world war, civil conflict, and revolution. Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain) is a province of Oceania, one of the three totalitarian super-states that rule the world. It is ruled by "The Party" under the ideology of " Ingsoc" (a Newspeak shortening of "English Socialism") and the mysterious leader Big Brother, who has an intense cult of personality. The Party brutally purges out anyone who does not fully conform to their regime, using the Thought Police and constant surveillance through telescreens (two-way televisions), cameras, and hidden microphones. Those who fall out of favour with the Party become "unpersons", disappearing with all evidence of their existence destroyed.

In London, Winston Smith is a member of the Outer Party, working at the Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites historical records to conform to the state's ever-changing version of history. Winston revises past editions of , while the original documents are destroyed after being dropped into ducts known as memory holes, which lead to an immense furnace. He secretly opposes the Party's rule and dreams of rebellion, despite knowing that he is already a " thought-criminal" and is likely to be caught one day.

While in a prole neighbourhood he meets Mr. Charrington, the owner of an antiques shop, and buys a diary where he writes criticisms of the Party and Big Brother. To his dismay, when he visits a prole quarter he discovers they have no political consciousness. As he works in the Ministry of Truth, he observes Julia, a young woman maintaining the novel-writing machines at the ministry, whom Winston suspects of being a spy, and develops an intense hatred of her. He vaguely suspects that his superior, an Inner Party official O'Brien, is part of an enigmatic underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood, formed by Big Brother's reviled political rival Emmanuel Goldstein.

One day, Julia secretly hands Winston a love note, and the two begin a secret affair. Julia explains that she also loathes the Party, but Winston observes that she is politically apathetic and uninterested in overthrowing the regime. Initially meeting in the country, they later meet in a rented room above Mr. Charrington's shop. During the affair, Winston remembers the disappearance of his family during the civil war of the 1950s and his tense relationship with his estranged wife Katharine. Weeks later, O'Brien invites Winston to his flat, where he introduces himself as a member of the Brotherhood and sends Winston a copy of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Goldstein. Meanwhile, during the nation's Hate Week, Oceania's enemy suddenly changes from Eurasia to Eastasia, which goes mostly unnoticed. Winston is recalled to the Ministry to help make the necessary revisions to the records. Winston and Julia read parts of Goldstein's book, which explains how the Party maintains power, the true meanings of its slogans, and the concept of perpetual war. It argues that the Party can be overthrown if proles rise up against it. However, Winston never gets the opportunity to read the chapter that explains 'why' the Party is motivated to maintain power.

Winston and Julia are captured when Mr. Charrington is revealed to be an undercover Thought Police agent, and they are separated and imprisoned at the Ministry of Love. O'Brien also reveals himself to be a member of the Thought Police and a member of a false flag operation which catches political dissidents of the Party. Over several months, Winston is starved and relentlessly tortured to bring his beliefs in line with the Party. O'Brien tells Winston that he will never know whether the Brotherhood actually exists and that Goldstein's book was written collaboratively by him and other Party members. For the final stage of re-education, O'Brien takes Winston to Room 101, which contains each prisoner's worst fear. When confronted with rats, Winston denounces Julia and pledges allegiance to the Party.

Winston is released into public life and continues to frequent the Chestnut Tree café. He encounters Julia, and both reveal that they have betrayed the other and are no longer in love. Back in the café, a news alert celebrates Oceania's supposed massive victory over Eurasian armies in Africa. Winston finally accepts that he loves Big Brother.

Winston Smith - the 39-year old protagonist who is a phlegmatic everyman harbouring thoughts of rebellion and is curious about the Party's power and the past before the Revolution.

Julia - Winston's lover who publicly espouses Party doctrine as a member of the fanatical Junior Anti-Sex League. Julia enjoys her small acts of rebellion and has no interest in giving up her lifestyle.

O'Brien - A mysterious character, O'Brien is a member of the Inner Party who poses as a member of The Brotherhood, the counter-revolutionary resistance, to catch Winston. He is a spy intending to deceive, trap, and capture Winston and Julia.

Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford - former members of the Inner Party whom Winston vaguely remembers as among the original leaders of the Revolution, long before he had heard of Big Brother. They confessed to treasonable conspiracies with foreign powers and were then executed in the political purges of the 1960s. In between their confessions and executions, Winston saw them drinking in the Chestnut Tree Café-with broken noses, suggesting that their confessions had been obtained by torture. Later, in the course of his editorial work, Winston sees newspaper evidence contradicting their confessions, but drops it into a memory hole. Eleven years later, he is confronted with the same photograph during his interrogation.

Ampleforth - Winston's one-time Records Department colleague who was imprisoned for leaving the word "God" in a Kipling poem as he could not find another rhyme for "rod"; Winston encounters him at the Ministry of Love. Ampleforth is a dreamer and intellectual who takes pleasure in his work, and respects poetry and language, traits which cause him disfavour with the Party.

Charrington - an undercover officer of the Thought Police masquerading as a kind and sympathetic antiques dealer amongst the proles.

Katharine Smith - the emotionally indifferent wife whom Winston "can't get rid of". Despite disliking sexual intercourse, Katharine married Winston because it was their "duty to the Party". Although she was a "goodthinkful" ideologue, they separated because the couple could not conceive children. Divorce is not permitted, but couples who cannot have children may live separately. For much of the story Winston lives in vague hope that Katharine may die or could be "got rid of" so that he may marry Julia. He regrets not having killed her by pushing her over the edge of a quarry when he had the chance many years previously.

Tom Parsons - Winston's naïve neighbour, and an ideal member of the Outer Party: an uneducated, suggestible man who is utterly loyal to the Party, and fully believes in its perfect image. He is socially active and participates in the Party activities for his social class. He is friendly towards Smith, and despite his political conformity punishes his bullying son for firing a catapult at Winston. Later, as a prisoner, Winston sees Parsons is in the Ministry of Love, as his daughter had reported him to the Thought Police, saying she heard him speak against Big Brother in his sleep. Even this does not dampen his belief in the Party, and he states he could do "good work" in the hard labour camps.

Mrs. Parsons - Parsons's wife is a wan and hapless woman who is intimidated by her own children.
The Parsons children - a nine-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. Both are members of the Spies, a youth organisation that focuses on indoctrinating children with Party ideals and training them to report any suspected incidents of unorthodoxy. They represent the new generation of Oceanian citizens, without memory of life before Big Brother, and without family ties or emotional sentiment; the model society envisioned by the Inner Party.

Syme - Winston's colleague at the Ministry of Truth, a lexicographer involved in compiling a new edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Although he is enthusiastic about his work and support for the Party, Winston notes, "He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly." Winston predicts, correctly, that Syme will become an unperson.

Additionally, the following characters, mentioned in the novel, play a significant role in the world-building of 1984. Whether these characters are real or fabrications of Party propaganda is something that neither Winston nor the reader is permitted to know:

Winston Smith's memories and his reading of the proscribed book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, reveal that after the Second World War, a Third World War broke out in the early 1950s in which nuclear weapons destroyed hundreds of cities in Europe, western Russia and North America (though not stated, it is implied this was a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union). Colchester was destroyed, and London also suffered widespread aerial raids, leading Winston's family to take refuge in a London Underground station.

During the war, the Soviet Union invaded and absorbed all of Continental Europe, while the United States absorbed the British Commonwealth and later Latin America. This formed the basis of Eurasia and Oceania respectively. Due to the instability perpetuated by the nuclear war, these new nations fell into civil war, but who fought whom is left unclear (there is a reference to the child Winston having seen rival militias in the streets, each one having a shirt of a distinct colour for its members). Meanwhile, Eastasia, the last superstate established, emerged only after "a decade of confused fighting". It includes the Asian lands conquered by China and Japan. Although Eastasia is prevented from matching Eurasia's size, its larger populace compensates for that handicap.

However, due to the fact that Winston only barely remembers these events as well as the Party's constant manipulation of historical records, the continuity and accuracy of these events are unknown, and exactly how the superstates' ruling parties managed to gain their power is also left unclear. If the official account was accurate, Smith's strengthening memories and the story of his family's dissolution suggest that the atomic bombings occurred first, followed by civil war featuring "confused street fighting in London itself" and the societal postwar reorganisation, which the Party retrospectively calls "the Revolution". It is very difficult to trace the exact chronology, but most of the global societal reorganisation occurred between 1945 and the early 1960s.

In 1984, there is a perpetual war between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, the superstates that emerged from the global atomic war. The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, explains that each state is so strong that it cannot be defeated, even with the combined forces of two superstates, despite changing alliances. To hide such contradictions, the superstates' governments rewrite history to explain that the (new) alliance always was so; the populaces are already accustomed to doublethink and accept it. The war is not fought in Oceanian, Eurasian or Eastasian territory but in the Arctic wastes and a disputed zone comprising the sea and land from Tangiers (Northern Africa) to Darwin (Australia). At the start, Oceania and Eastasia are allies fighting Eurasia in northern Africa and the Malabar Coast.

That alliance ends, and Oceania, allied with Eurasia, fights Eastasia, a change occurring on Hate Week, dedicated to creating patriotic fervour for the Party's perpetual war. The public are blind to the change; in mid-sentence, an orator changes the name of the enemy from "Eurasia" to "Eastasia" without pause. When the public are enraged at noticing that the wrong flags and posters are displayed, they tear them down; the Party later claims to have captured the whole of Africa.

Goldstein's book explains that the purpose of the unwinnable, perpetual war is to consume human labour and commodities so that the economy of a superstate cannot support economic equality, with a high standard of life for every citizen. By using up most of the produced goods, the proles are kept poor and uneducated, and the Party hopes that they will neither realise what the government is doing nor rebel. Goldstein also details an Oceanian strategy of attacking enemy cities with atomic rockets before invasion but dismisses it as unfeasible and contrary to the war's purpose; despite the atomic bombing of cities in the 1950s, the superstates stopped it for fear that it would imbalance the powers. The military technology in the novel differs little from that of World War II, but strategic bomber aeroplanes are replaced with rocket bombs, helicopters were heavily used as weapons of war (they were very minor in World War II) and surface combat units have been all but replaced by immense and unsinkable Floating Fortresses (island-like contraptions concentrating the firepower of a whole naval task force in a single, semi-mobile platform; in the novel, one is said to have been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands, suggesting a preference for sea lane interdiction and denial).

The three fictional superstates of the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are Oceania (Black), Eurasia (Red), and Eastasia (Yellow). 'Disputed territories' are indicated in grey.

Three perpetually warring totalitarian superstates control the world in the novel:

Oceania (ideology: Ingsoc, known in Oldspeak as English Socialism), whose core territories are "the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, including the British Isles, Australasia and the southern portion of Africa".

Eurasia (ideology: Neo-Bolshevism), whose core territories are "the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmass from Portugal to the Bering Strait".

Eastasia (ideology: Obliteration of the Self, also known as Death-Worship), whose core territories are "China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands, and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet".

The perpetual war is fought for control of the "disputed area" lying between the frontiers of the superstates. The majority of the disputed territories form "a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong", including Equatorial Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, Indian subcontinent and Indonesia. Fighting also takes place along the unstable Eurasian-Eastasian border, over various islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean, as well as around the North Pole.

In London, the capital city of Airstrip One, Oceania's four government ministries are in pyramids (300 m high), the façades of which display the Party's three slogans - "WAR IS PEACE", "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY", "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH". As mentioned, the ministries are deliberately named after the opposite ( doublethink) of their true functions: "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation." (Part II, chapter IX - "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" (by Emmanuel Goldstein)).

While a ministry is supposedly headed by a minister, the ministers heading these four ministries are never mentioned. They seem to be completely out of the public view, Big Brother being the only, ever-present public face of the government. Also, while an army fighting a war is typically headed by generals, none are ever mentioned by name. News reports of the ongoing war assume that Big Brother personally commands Oceania's fighting forces and give him personal credit for victories and successful strategic concepts.

The Ministry of Peace maintains Oceania's perpetual war against either of the two other superstates:

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognised and not recognised by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work.

The Ministry of Plenty rations and controls food, goods, and domestic production; every fiscal quarter, it claims to have raised the standard of living, even during times when it has, in fact, reduced rations, availability, and production. The Ministry of Truth substantiates the Ministry of Plenty's claims by manipulating historical records to report numbers supporting the claims of "increased rations". The Ministry of Plenty also runs the national lottery as a distraction for the proles; Party members understand it to be a sham in which all the larger prizes are "won" by imaginary people. Only small amounts are actually paid out.

The Ministry of Truth controls information: news, entertainment, education, and the arts. Winston Smith works in the Records Department, "rectifying" historical records to accord with Big Brother's current pronouncements so that everything the Party says appears to be true.

The Ministry of Love identifies, monitors, arrests and converts real and imagined dissidents. This is also the place where the Thought Police beat and torture dissidents, after which they are sent to Room 101 to face "the worst thing in the world"-until love for Big Brother and the Party replaces dissension.

Big Brother is a fictional character and symbol in the novel. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party Ingsoc wields total power "for its own sake" over the inhabitants. In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens (with the exception of the proles). The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan "Big Brother is watching you": a maxim that is ubiquitously on display.

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The Principles of Newspeak is an academic essay appended to the novel. It describes the development of Newspeak, an artificial, minimalistic language designed to ideologically align thought with the principles of Ingsoc by stripping down the English language in order to make the expression of "heretical" thoughts (i.e. thoughts going against Ingsoc's principles) impossible. The idea that a language's structure can be used to influence thought is known as linguistic relativity.

Whether or not the Newspeak appendix implies a hopeful end to Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a critical debate. Many claim that it does, citing the fact that it is in standard English and is written in the past tense: "Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised" (p. 422). Some critics ( Atwood, Benstead, Milner, Pynchon) claim that for Orwell, Newspeak and the totalitarian governments are all in the past.

Thoughtcrime describes a person's politically unorthodox thoughts, such as unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc (English Socialism), the dominant ideology of Oceania. In the official language of Newspeak, the word crimethink describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of the Party controls the speech, the actions, and the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania. In contemporary English usage, the word thoughtcrime describes beliefs that are contrary to accepted norms of society, and is used to describe theological concepts, such as disbelief and idolatry, and the rejection of an ideology.

Nineteen Eighty-Four expands upon the subjects summarised in Orwell's essay " Notes on Nationalism" about the lack of vocabulary needed to explain the unrecognised phenomena behind certain political forces. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party's artificial, minimalist language 'Newspeak' addresses the matter.

Positive nationalism: For instance, Oceanians' perpetual love for Big Brother. Orwell argues in the essay that ideologies such as Neo-Toryism and Celtic nationalism are defined by their obsessive sense of loyalty to some entity.

Negative nationalism: For instance, Oceanians' perpetual hatred for Emmanuel Goldstein. Orwell argues in the essay that ideologies such as Trotskyism and Antisemitism are defined by their obsessive hatred of some entity.

Transferred nationalism: For instance, when Oceania's enemy changes, an orator makes a change mid-sentence, and the crowd instantly transfers its hatred to the new enemy. Orwell argues that ideologies such as Stalinism and redirected feelings of racial animus and class superiority among wealthy intellectuals exemplify this. Transferred nationalism swiftly redirects emotions from one power unit to another. In the novel, it happens during Hate Week, a Party rally against the original enemy. The crowd goes wild and destroys the posters that are now against their new friend, and many say that they must be the act of an agent of their new enemy and former friend. Many of the crowd must have put up the posters before the rally but think that the state of affairs had always been the case.

O'Brien concludes: "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

In the book, Inner Party member O'Brien describes the Party's vision of the future:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always-do not forget this, Winston-always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever.

-  Part III, chapter III, Nineteen Eighty-Four

One of the most notable themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four is censorship, especially in the Ministry of Truth, where photographs and public archives are manipulated to rid them of "unpersons" (people who have been erased from history by the Party). On the telescreens, almost all figures of production are grossly exaggerated or simply fabricated to indicate an ever-growing economy, even during times when the reality is the opposite. One small example of the endless censorship is Winston being charged with the task of eliminating a reference to an unperson in a newspaper article. He also proceeds to write an article about Comrade Ogilvy, a made-up party member who allegedly "displayed great heroism by leaping into the sea from a helicopter so that the dispatches he was carrying would not fall into enemy hands."

In Oceania, the upper and middle classes have very little true privacy. All of their houses and apartments are equipped with telescreens so that they may be watched or listened to at any time. Similar telescreens are found at workstations and in public places, along with hidden microphones. Written correspondence is routinely opened and read by the government before it is delivered. The Thought Police employ undercover agents, who pose as normal citizens and report any person with subversive tendencies. Children are encouraged to report suspicious persons to the government, and some denounce their parents. Citizens are controlled, and the smallest sign of rebellion, even something as small as a suspicious facial expression, can result in immediate arrest and imprisonment. Thus, citizens are compelled to obedience.

According to Goldstein's book, almost the entire world lives in poverty; hunger, thirst, disease, and filth are the norms. Ruined cities and towns are common: the consequence of perpetual wars and extreme economic inefficiency. Social decay and wrecked buildings surround Winston; aside from the ministries' headquarters, little of London was rebuilt. Middle class citizens and proles consume synthetic foodstuffs and poor-quality "luxuries" such as oily gin and loosely-packed cigarettes, distributed under the "Victory" brand, a parody of the low-quality Indian-made "Victory" cigarettes, which British soldiers commonly smoked during World War II.

Winston describes something as simple as the repair of a broken window as requiring committee approval that can take several years and so most of those living in one of the blocks usually do the repairs themselves (Winston himself is called in by Mrs. Parsons to repair her blocked sink). All upper-class and middle-class residences include telescreens that serve both as outlets for propaganda and surveillance devices that allow the Thought Police to monitor them; they can be turned down, but the ones in middle-class residences cannot be turned off.

In contrast to their subordinates, the upper class of Oceanian society reside in clean and comfortable flats in their own quarters, with pantries well-stocked with foodstuffs such as wine, real coffee, real tea, real milk, and real sugar, all denied to the general populace. Winston is astonished that the lifts in O'Brien's building work, the telescreens can be completely turned off, and O'Brien has an Asian manservant, Martin. All upper class citizens are attended to by slaves captured in the "disputed zone", and "The Book" suggests that many have their own cars or even helicopters.

However, despite their insulation and overt privileges, the upper class are still not exempt from the government's brutal restriction of thought and behaviour, even while lies and propaganda apparently originate from their own ranks. Instead, the Oceanian government offers the upper class their "luxuries" in exchange for them maintaining their loyalty to the state; non-conformant upper-class citizens can still be condemned, tortured, and executed just like any other individual. "The Book" makes clear that the upper class' living conditions are only "relatively" comfortable, and would be regarded as "austere" by those of the pre-revolutionary élite.

The proles live in poverty and are kept sedated with pornography, a national lottery whose winnings are rarely paid out, and gin, "which the proles were not supposed to drink". At the same time, the proles are freer and less intimidated than the upper classes: they are not expected to be particularly patriotic and the levels of surveillance that they are subjected to are very low; they lack telescreens in their own homes. "The Book" indicates that because the middle class, not the lower class, traditionally starts revolutions, the model demands tight control of the middle class, with ambitious Outer-Party members neutralised via promotion to the Inner Party or "reintegration" by the Ministry of Love, and proles can be allowed intellectual freedom because they are deemed to lack intellect. Winston nonetheless believes that "the future belonged to the proles".

The standard of living of the populace is extremely low overall. Consumer goods are scarce, and those available through official channels are of low quality; for instance, despite the Party regularly reporting increased boot production, more than half of the Oceanian populace goes barefoot. The Party claims that poverty is a necessary sacrifice for the war effort, and "The Book" confirms that to be partially correct since the purpose of perpetual war is to consume surplus industrial production. As "The Book" explains, society is in fact designed to remain on the brink of starvation, as "In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."

Nineteen Eighty-Four uses themes from life in the Soviet Union and wartime life in Great Britain as sources for many of its motifs. Some time at an unspecified date after the first American publication of the book, producer Sidney Sheldon wrote to Orwell interested in adapting the novel to the Broadway stage. Orwell wrote in a letter to Sheldon (to whom he would sell the US stage rights) that his basic goal with Nineteen Eighty-Four was imagining the consequences of Stalinist government ruling British society:

[ Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

According to Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor, the author's A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) has "essentially the same plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four ... It's about somebody who is spied upon, and eavesdropped upon, and oppressed by vast exterior forces they can do nothing about. It makes an attempt at rebellion and then has to compromise".

A 1931 poster for the [first five-year plan of the Soviet Union by Yakov Guminer ru] reading "The arithmetic of an industrial-financial counter-plan: 2 + 2 plus the enthusiasm of the workers = 5"

The statement " 2 + 2 = 5", used to torment Winston Smith during his interrogation, was a communist party slogan from the second five-year plan, which encouraged fulfilment of the five-year plan in four years. The slogan was seen in electric lights on Moscow house-fronts, billboards and elsewhere.

The switch of Oceania's allegiance from Eastasia to Eurasia and the subsequent rewriting of history ("Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete"; ch 9) is evocative of the Soviet Union's changing relations with Nazi Germany. The two nations were open and frequently vehement critics of each other until the signing of the 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression. Thereafter, and continuing until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, no criticism of Germany was allowed in the Soviet press, and all references to prior party lines stopped-including in the majority of non-Russian communist parties who tended to follow the Russian line. Orwell had criticised the Communist Party of Great Britain for supporting the Treaty in his essays for Betrayal of the Left (1941). "The Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 reversed the Soviet Union's stated foreign policy. It was too much for many of the fellow-travellers like Gollancz [Orwell's sometime publisher] who had put their faith in a strategy of construction Popular Front governments and the peace bloc between Russia, Britain and France."

The description of Emmanuel Goldstein, with a "small, goatee beard", evokes the image of Leon Trotsky. The film of Goldstein during the Two Minutes Hate is described as showing him being transformed into a bleating sheep. This image was used in a propaganda film during the Kino-eye period of Soviet film, which showed Trotsky transforming into a goat. Like Goldstein, Trotsky was a formerly high-ranking party official who was ostracized and then wrote a book criticizing party rule, The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936.

The omnipresent images of Big Brother, a man described as having a moustache, bears resemblance to the cult of personality built up around Joseph Stalin.

The news in Oceania emphasised production figures, just as it did in the Soviet Union, where record-setting in factories (by " Heroes of Socialist Labour") was especially glorified. The best known of these was Alexei Stakhanov, who purportedly set a record for coal mining in 1935.

The tortures of the Ministry of Love evoke the procedures used by the NKVD in their interrogations, including the use of rubber truncheons, being forbidden to put your hands in your pockets, remaining in brightly lit rooms for days, torture through the use of their greatest fear, and the victim being shown a mirror after their physical collapse.

The Thought Police is based on the NKVD, which arrested people for random "anti-soviet" remarks.

The confessions of the "Thought Criminals" Rutherford, Aaronson, and Jones are based on the show trials of the 1930s, which included fabricated confessions by prominent Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to the effect that they were being paid by the Nazi government to undermine the Soviet regime under Leon Trotsky's direction.

The song " Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree" ("Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me") was based on an old English song called "Go no more a-rushing" ("Under the spreading chestnut tree, Where I knelt upon my knee, We were as happy as could be, 'Neath the spreading chestnut tree."). The song was published as early as 1891. The song was a popular camp song in the 1920s, sung with corresponding movements (like touching one's chest when singing "chest", and touching one's head when singing "nut"). Glenn Miller recorded the song in 1939.

The "Hates" (Two Minutes Hate and Hate Week) were inspired by the constant rallies sponsored by party organs throughout the Stalinist period. These were often short pep-talks given to workers before their shifts began (Two Minutes Hate), but could also last for days, as in the annual celebrations of the anniversary of the October Revolution (Hate Week).

Orwell fictionalised "newspeak", "doublethink", and "Ministry of Truth" based on both the Soviet press, and British wartime usage, such as "Miniform". In particular, he adapted Soviet ideological discourse constructed to ensure that public statements could not be questioned.

Winston Smith's job, "revising history" (and the "unperson" motif) are based on censorship of images in the Soviet Union, which airbrushed images of "fallen" people from group photographs and removed references to them in books and newspapers. In one well-known example, the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia had an article about Lavrentiy Beria. After his fall from power and execution, subscribers received a letter from the editor instructing them to cut out and destroy the three-page article on Beria and paste in its place enclosed replacement pages expanding the adjacent articles on F. W. Bergholz (an 18th-century courtier), the Bering Sea, and Bishop Berkeley.

Big Brother's "Orders of the Day" were inspired by Stalin's regular wartime orders, called by the same name. A small collection of the more political of these have been published (together with his wartime speeches) in English as On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin. Like Big Brother's Orders of the day, Stalin's frequently lauded heroic individuals, like Comrade Ogilvy, the fictitious hero Winston Smith invented to "rectify" (fabricate) a Big Brother Order of the day.

The Ingsoc slogan "Our new, happy life", repeated from telescreens, evokes Stalin's 1935 statement, which became a CPSU slogan, "Life has become better, Comrades; life has become more cheerful."

During World War II, Orwell believed that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war. The question being "Would it end via Fascist coup d'état from above or via Socialist revolution from below?" Later, he admitted that events proved him wrong: "What really matters is that I fell into the trap of assuming that 'the war and the revolution are inseparable'."

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) share themes of the betrayed revolution, the individual's subordination to the collective, rigorously enforced class distinctions (Inner Party, Outer Party, proles), the cult of personality, concentration camps, Thought Police, compulsory regimented daily exercise, and youth leagues. Oceania resulted from the US annexation of the British Empire to counter the Asian peril to Australia and New Zealand. It is a naval power whose militarism venerates the sailors of the floating fortresses, from which battle is given to recapturing India, the "Jewel in the Crown" of the British Empire. Much of Oceanic society is based upon the USSR under Joseph Stalin- Big Brother. The televised Two Minutes Hate is ritual demonisation of the enemies of the State, especially Emmanuel Goldstein ( viz Leon Trotsky). Altered photographs and newspaper articles create unpersons deleted from the national historical record, including even founding members of the regime (Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford) in the 1960s purges ( viz the Soviet Purges of the 1930s, in which leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were similarly treated). A similar thing also happened during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror in which many of the original leaders of the Revolution were later put to death, for example Danton who was put to death by Robespierre, and then later Robespierre himself met the same fate.

In his 1946 essay " Why I Write", Orwell explains that the serious works he wrote since the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) were "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism". Nineteen Eighty-Four is a cautionary tale about revolution betrayed by totalitarian defenders previously proposed in Homage to Catalonia (1938) and Animal Farm (1945), while Coming Up for Air (1939) celebrates the personal and political freedoms lost in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Biographer Michael Shelden notes Orwell's Edwardian childhood at Henley-on-Thames as the golden country; being bullied at St Cyprian's School as his empathy with victims; his life in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and the techniques of violence and censorship in the BBC as capricious authority.

Other influences include Darkness at Noon (1940) and The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) by Arthur Koestler; The Iron Heel (1908) by Jack London; 1920: Dips into the Near Future by John A. Hobson; Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley; (1921) by Yevgeny Zamyatin which he reviewed in 1946; and The Managerial Revolution (1940) by James Burnham predicting perpetual war among three totalitarian superstates. Orwell told Jacintha Buddicom that he would write a novel stylistically like A Modern Utopia (1905) by H. G. Wells.

Extrapolating from World War II, the novel's pastiche parallels the politics and rhetoric at war's end-the changed alliances at the " Cold War's" (1945-91) beginning; the Ministry of Truth derives from the BBC's overseas service, controlled by the Ministry of Information; Room 101 derives from a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House; the Senate House of the University of London, containing the Ministry of Information is the architectural inspiration for the Minitrue; the post-war decrepitude derives from the socio-political life of the UK and the US, i.e., the impoverished Britain of 1948 losing its Empire despite newspaper-reported imperial triumph; and war ally but peace-time foe, Soviet Russia became Eurasia.

The term "English Socialism" has precedents in Orwell's wartime writings; in the essay " The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (1941), he said that "the war and the revolution are inseparable... the fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a textbook word into a realisable policy"-because Britain's superannuated social class system hindered the war effort and only a socialist economy would defeat Adolf Hitler. Given the middle class's grasping this, they too would abide socialist revolution and that only reactionary Britons would oppose it, thus limiting the force revolutionaries would need to take power. An English Socialism would come about which "will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word."

In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, "English Socialism" (or " Ingsoc" in Newspeak) is a totalitarian ideology unlike the English revolution he foresaw. Comparison of the wartime essay "The Lion and the Unicorn" with Nineteen Eighty-Four shows that he perceived a Big Brother regime as a perversion of his cherished socialist ideals and English Socialism. Thus Oceania is a corruption of the British Empire he believed would evolve "into a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics".

When it was first published, Nineteen Eighty-Four received critical acclaim. V. S. Pritchett, reviewing the novel for the New Statesman stated: "I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down." P. H. Newby, reviewing Nineteen Eighty-Four for The Listener magazine, described it as "the most arresting political novel written by an Englishman since Rex Warner's The Aerodrome." Nineteen Eighty-Four was also praised by Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster and Harold Nicolson. On the other hand, Edward Shanks, reviewing Nineteen Eighty-Four for The Sunday Times, was dismissive; Shanks claimed Nineteen Eighty-Four "breaks all records for gloomy vaticination". C. S. Lewis was also critical of the novel, claiming that the relationship of Julia and Winston, and especially the Party's view on sex, lacked credibility, and that the setting was "odious rather than tragic".

On its publication, many American reviewers interpreted the book as a statement on British Prime Minister Clement Attlee's socialist policies, or the policies of Joseph Stalin. Serving as prime minister from 1945 to 1951, Attlee implemented wide-ranging social reforms and changes in the British economy following World War II. American trade union leader Francis A. Hanson wanted to recommend the book to his members but was concerned with some of the reviews it had received, so Orwell wrote a letter to him. In his letter, Orwell described his book as a satire, and said:

I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will necessarily arrive, but I believe (allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive...[it is] a show...[of the] perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realisable in communism and fascism.

-  George Orwell, Letter to Francis A. Hanson

Throughout its publication history, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been either banned or legally challenged as subversive or ideologically corrupting, like the dystopian novels (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler, (1940) by Karin Boye, and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury.

On 5 November 2019, the BBC named Nineteen Eighty-Four on its list of the 100 most influential novels.

According to Czesław Miłosz, an exile from Stalinist Poland, the book also made an impression behind the Iron Curtain. Writing in The Captive Mind, he stated "[a] few have become acquainted with Orwell's 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well ... Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life." Writer Christopher Hitchens has called this "one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever bestowed upon another ... Only one or two years after Orwell's death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party."

In the same year as the novel's publishing, a one-hour radio adaptation was aired on the United States' NBC radio network as part of the NBC University Theatre series. The first television adaptation appeared as part of CBS's series in September 1953. BBC Television broadcast an adaptation by Nigel Kneale in December 1954. The first feature film adaptation, 1984, was released in 1956. A second feature-length adaptation, Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed in 1984, a reasonably faithful adaptation of the novel. The story has been adapted several other times to radio, television, and film; other media adaptations include theater (a musical and a play), opera, and ballet.

Nineteen Eighty-Four Russian version published in the Soviet Union in 1984. A limited edition, only for members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, when the first publicly available Russian version in the country, translated by Vyacheslav Nedoshivin, was published in Kodry, a literary journal of Soviet Moldavia. In 1989, another Russian version, translated by Viktor Golyshev, was also published. Outside the Soviet Union, the first Russian version was serialised in the emigre magazine Grani in the mid-1950s, then published as a book in 1957 in Frankfurt. Another Russian version, translated by Sergei Tolstoy from French version, was published in Rome in 1966. These translations were smuggled into the Soviet Union, which became quite popular among dissidents. Some underground published translations also appeared in the Soviet Union, for example, Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov translated the novel from German version into a Russian version.

For Soviet elite, as early as 1959, according to the order of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the Foreign Literature Publishers secretly issued a Russian version of the novel, for the senior officers of the Communist Party.

In the People's Republic of China, the first Simplified Chinese version, translated by Dong Leshan, was serialised in the periodical Selected Translations from Foreign Literature in 1979, for senior officials and intellectuals deemed politically reliable enough. In 1985, the Chinese version was published by Huacheng Publishing House, as a restricted publication. It was first available to the general public in 1988, by the same Publisher. Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom of The Atlantic stated in 2019 that the book is widely available in Mainland China for several reasons: the general public by and large no longer reads books; because the elites who do read books feel connected to the ruling party anyway; and because the Communist Party sees being too aggressive in blocking cultural products as a liability. The authors stated "It was-and remains-as easy to buy 1984 and Animal Farm in Shenzhen or Shanghai as it is in London or Los Angeles." They also stated that "The assumption is not that Chinese people can't figure out the meaning of 1984, but that the small number of people who will bother to read it won't pose much of a threat." British journalist Michael Rank argued that it is only because the novel is set in London and written by a foreigner that the Chinese authorities believe it has nothing to do with China.

By 1989, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been translated into 65 languages, more than any other novel in English at that time.

"Happy 1984" (in Spanish or Portuguese) stencil graffito, denoting mind control via a PlayStation controller, on a standing piece of the Berlin Wall, 2005

The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on the English language is extensive; the concepts of Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police, thoughtcrime, unperson, memory hole (oblivion), doublethink (simultaneously holding and believing contradictory beliefs) and Newspeak (ideological language) have become common phrases for denoting totalitarian authority. Doublespeak and groupthink are both deliberate elaborations of doublethink, and the adjective "Orwellian" means similar to Orwell's writings, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four. The practice of ending words with "-speak" (such as mediaspeak) is drawn from the novel. Orwell is perpetually associated with 1984; in July 1984, an asteroid was discovered by Antonín Mrkos and named after Orwell.

References to the themes, concepts and plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four have appeared frequently in other works, especially in popular music and video entertainment. An example is the worldwide hit reality television show Big Brother, in which a group of people live together in a large house, isolated from the outside world but continuously watched by television cameras.

In November 2012, the US government argued before the US Supreme Court that it wants to continue utilising GPS tracking of individuals without first seeking a warrant. In response, Justice Stephen Breyer questioned what that means for a democratic society by referencing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Justice Breyer asked, "If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States. So if you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like Nineteen Eighty-Four... "

The book touches on the invasion of privacy and ubiquitous surveillance. From mid-2013 it was publicised that the NSA has been secretly monitoring and storing global internet traffic, including the bulk data collection of email and phone call data. Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four increased by up to seven times within the first week of the 2013 mass surveillance leaks. The book again topped the Amazon.com sales charts in 2017 after a controversy involving Kellyanne Conway using the phrase " alternative facts" to explain discrepancies with the media.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was number three on the list of "Top Check Outs Of All Time" by the New York Public Library.

Nineteen Eighty-Four entered the public domain on 1 January 2021, 70 calendar years after Orwell's death, in much of the world. It is still under copyright in the US until 95 years after publication, or 2044.

Brave New World comparisons

In October 1949, after reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley sent a letter to Orwell in which he argued that it would be more efficient for rulers to stay in power by the softer touch by allowing citizens to seek pleasure to control them rather than use brute force. He wrote:

Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

...

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

In the decades since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, there have been numerous comparisons to Huxley's Brave New World, which had been published 17 years earlier, in 1932. They are both predictions of societies dominated by a central government and are both based on extensions of the trends of their times. However, members of the ruling class of Nineteen Eighty-Four use brutal force, torture and harsh mind control to keep individuals in line, while rulers in Brave New World keep the citizens in line by drugs, hypnosis, genetic conditioning and pleasurable distractions. Regarding censorship, in Nineteen Eighty-Four the government tightly controls information to keep the population in line, but in Huxley's world, so much information is published that readers do not know which information is relevant, and what can be disregarded.

Elements of both novels can be seen in modern-day societies, with Huxley's vision being more dominant in the West and Orwell's vision more prevalent with dictatorships, including those in communist countries (such as in modern-day China and North Korea), as is pointed out in essays that compare the two novels, including Huxley's own Brave New World Revisited.

Comparisons with later dystopian novels like The Handmaid's Tale, Virtual Light, The Private Eye and The Children of Men have also been drawn.

In 1955, an episode of BBC's The Goon Show, 1985, was broadcast, written by Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes and based on Nigel Kneale's television adaptation. It was re-recorded about a month later with the same script but a slightly different cast. 1985 parodies many of the main scenes in Orwell's novel.

In 1970, the American rock group Spirit released the song "1984" based on Orwell's novel.

In 1973, ex-Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper released an album called 1984 on the Columbia label (UK), consisting of instrumentals with Orwellian titles such as "Miniluv", "Minipax", "Minitrue", and so forth.

In 1974, David Bowie released the album Diamond Dogs, which is thought to be loosely based on the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It includes the tracks "We Are The Dead", "1984" and "Big Brother". Before the album was made, Bowie's management (MainMan) had planned for Bowie and Tony Ingrassia (MainMan's creative consultant) to co-write and direct a musical production of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Orwell's widow refused to give MainMan the rights.

In 1977, the British rock band The Jam released the album This Is the Modern World, which includes the track "Standards" by Paul Weller. This track concludes with the lyrics "...and ignorance is strength, we have God on our side, look, you know what happened to Winston."

In 1984, Ridley Scott directed a television commercial, "1984", to launch Apple's Macintosh computer. The advert stated, "1984 won't be like 1984", suggesting that the Apple Mac would be freedom from Big Brother, i.e., the IBM PC.

An episode of , called "The God Complex", depicts an alien ship disguised as a hotel containing Room 101-like spaces, and also, like the novel, quotes the nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons".

The two part episode Chain of Command on Star Trek: The Next Generation bears some resemblances to the novel.

Radiohead's 2003 single "2 + 2 = 5", from their album Hail to the Thief, is Orwellian by title and content. Thom Yorke states, "I was listening to a lot of political programs on BBC Radio 4. I found myself writing down little nonsense phrases, those Orwellian euphemisms that [the British and American governments] are so fond of. They became the background of the record."

In September 2009, the English progressive rock band Muse released The Resistance, which included songs influenced by Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In Marilyn Manson's autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, he states: "I was thoroughly terrified by the idea of the end of the world and the Antichrist. So I became obsessed with it... reading prophetic books like... 1984 by George Orwell..."

English band Bastille references the novel in their song "Back to the Future", the fifth track on their 2022 album Give Me the Future, in the opening lyrics: "Feels like we danced into a nightmare/We're living 1984/If doublethink's no longer fiction/We'll dream of Huxley's Island shores."

Released in 2004, KAKU P-Model/Susumu Hirasawa's song Big Brother directly references 1984, and the album itself is about a fictional dystopia in a distant future.

Aubrey, Crispin; Chilton, Paul, eds. (1983). Nineteen Eighty-four in 1984: Autonomy, Control, and Communication (repr. ed.). London: Comedia Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-906890-42-4.

Bloom, Harold, George Orwell's 1984 (2009), Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 978-1-4381-1468-2

Di Nucci, Ezio and Storrie, Stefan (editors), 1984 and Philosophy: Is Resistance Futile? (2018), Open Court Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-8126-9985-2

Goldsmith, Jack and Nussbaum, Martha, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future (2010), Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-2664-3

Hillegas, Mark R. (1967). The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-0676-3

Howe, Irving, ed. (1983). 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century. New York: Harper Row. ISBN 978-0-06-080660-6.

Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. A novel. London: Secker & Warburg.

Orwell, George (1984). Davison, Peter (ed.). Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Facsimile Manuscript. London, United Kingdom: Secker & Warburg. ISBN 978-0-436-35022-1 - via Internet Archive.

Orwell, George (1977). 1984. Erich Fromm (foreword) (reissue ed.). Signet Classics. ISBN 978-0-451-52493-5.

Orwell, George. 1984 (Vietnamese edition), translation by Đặng Phương-Nghi, French preface by Bertrand Latour ISBN 978-0-9774224-5-6.

Plank, Robert, George Orwell's Guide Through Hell: A Psychological Study of 1984 (1994), Borgo Pres. ISBN 978-0-89370-413-1

Smith, David; Mosher, Michael (1984). Orwell for Beginners (1st ed.). [London], England: Writers and Readers Pub. Cooperative. ISBN 978-0-86316-066-0.

Steinhoff, William R. (1975). George Orwell and the Origins of 1984. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-87400-2.

Taylor, D. J. On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography (2019), Abrams. ISBN 978-1-68335-684-4

Tuccille, Jerome (1975). Who's Afraid of 1984? The case for optimism in looking ahead to the 1980s. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House Publishers. ISBN 978-0-87000-308-0 - via Internet Archive.

Waddell, Nathan (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (2020), Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-84109-2

West, W. J. (1992). The Larger Evils - Nineteen Eighty-Four: the Truth Behind the Satire. Edinburgh: Canongate Press. ISBN 978-0-86241-382-8.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984 ) is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society.