Are we Trapped in Orwell’s ‘1984’? By Robert Hassan
"Either power politics must yield to common
decency, or the world must go spiralling down into a nightmare into which we
can already catch some dim glimpses": George Orwell, 1943
'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.' As novel-openers go, they don’t come much better than this one in George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four. See how the unexpected “striking thirteen” runs powerfully into the beginnings of characterisation and world-building in just two arresting sentences. Written as the Cold War became entrenched, 1984 was meant as a warning on the nature of state power. Understanding this power is even more important today. Orwell knew that words could both grip the attention and change the mind. He wrote the book as the Cold War was becoming entrenched, and it was meant as an explicit warning on the nature of state power at that time.
The book still sells
by the thousands, and is read by students who are compelled to do so. But it
can be read voluntarily and profitably, and it can tell us a lot about
contemporary politics and power, from Donald Trump to Facebook. Nineteen Eighty-Four
became an instant classic when published in 1949. People could see in it a
world that could easily become a reality. The memory of Nazi dictatorship was
still fresh, the Soviet Union had erected the Iron Curtain, and the USA had the
atomic bomb.
The novel’s setting is
a dystopian Britain, which has become a part of Oceania, a region in perpetual
war with the other super-regions of Eurasia and Eastasia. Oppression,
surveillance and control are facts of life in a society ruled by the Party and
its four Ministries of Truth, Peace, Plenty and Love.
It is a world of
“doublespeak” where things are the opposite of what they appear; there is no
truth, only lies – only war and only privation.
One of Orwell’s
innovations is to introduce us to a new political lexicon, a “Newspeak” where
he shows how words can be used and abused as a form of power. Words like
“Thoughtcrime”, where it is illegal to have thoughts that are in opposition to
the Party; or “unperson”, meaning someone who has been executed by the Party
(e.g. for Thoughtcrime) will have all record of his or her existence erased. Not only do we use
many of these words today, but the manipulative function that Orwell described
is still intact. For example, when Kellyanne Conway, advisor to US president
Donald Trump, stated in 2017 that the Administration has its own “alternative
facts”, she was indulging in “doublethink”: an attempted psychological control
of reality through words.
Nineteen
Eighty-Four became
an Amazon bestseller following the election of Trump and the airing of
this interview... read more:
https://www.juancole.com/2019/05/trapped-orwells-1984.html
