Nineteen Eighty-Four

[Ferris]

I've been reading my George Orwell compendium for the last few months, inspired (if that's the right word) by the rise of authoritarianism across the globe and the constant invoking of 1984/Animal Farm by idiots online who have never read the novels. A recent re-read of Watchmen also helped inform my choice of novel.

I enjoyed Animal Farm (it's a scathing takedown of a political party that no longer exists, and a collectivist philsophy that never really did) but I was really affected by 1984. I haven't read it in close to 20 years so a lot of the finer detail was safely forgotten - it's a brilliant book. Grimy and real and haunting, frankly. Bits of it keep floating up in my subconscious weeks after finishing it.

Not a particularly novel inspiration for a thread - like I say, every berk with a dodgy opinion in a comments section brings it up - but I've been ruminating on it for a few weeks and wanted to talk about it. In my experience, very few works of fiction keep nudging their way into my frame of reference so long after consuming them.

Have you sold someone under a chestnut tree? Read samizdat political philosophy in the alcove of your bedsit? Had your teeth knocked out by some heavies in a totalitarian government facility? All that, plus more Orwell/Blair* chat should go in here.

_{*not that one}

[jamiefairlie]

I've been reading my George Orwell compendium for the last few months, inspired (if that's the right word) by the rise of authoritarianism across the globe and the constant invoking of 1984/Animal Farm by idiots online who have never read the novels. A recent re-read of Watchmen also helped inform my choice of novel.

I enjoyed Animal Farm (it's a scathing takedown of a political party that no longer exists, and a collectivist philsophy that never really did) but I was really affected by 1984. I haven't read it in close to 20 years so a lot of the finer detail was safely forgotten - it's a brilliant book. Grimy and real and haunting, frankly. Bits of it keep floating up in my subconscious weeks after finishing it.

Not a particularly novel inspiration for a thread - like I say, every berk with a dodgy opinion in a comments section brings it up - but I've been ruminating on it for a few weeks and wanted to talk about it. In my experience, very few works of fiction keep nudging their way into my frame of reference so long after consuming them.

Have you sold someone under a chestnut tree? Read samizdat political philosophy in the alcove of your bedsit? Had your teeth knocked out by some heavies in a totalitarian government facility? All that, plus more Orwell/Blair* chat should go in here.

_{*not that one}

" enjoyed Animal Farm (it's a scathing takedown of a political party that no longer exists, and a collectivist philsophy that never really did) "

I'd argue it's a far more general critique  of all revolutionary movements that get power and become as bad if not worse than those they replace

[famethrowa]

It is a brilliant book, and I normally wouldn't like stories that are so relentlessly grim, but certain things from it will stay with me forever, the tooth thing, Comrade Ogilvy, etc etc. Even enjoyed the 80s movie despite the Eurythmics, John Hurt is a good Winston.

[13 schoolyards]

I first read it in my teens and it really did a number on me - the grim future (well, it wasn't the future by the time I was reading it) seemed so well thought out there seemed no possible escape for those inside it. Even the usual getout of the postscript sneakily revealing that NewSpeak never actually replaced English wasn't much consolation.

Then I read it again a few years ago and what struck me that time was all the bits that weren't the grim future - the desperate, doomed romance angle, the way that presumably for the Proles everything was basically business as usual in a way we'd recognise, and the realisation that all the stuff about how IngSoc was unbeatable was coming from inside IngSoc.

Sure, there's the possibility that the rest of the world is still pretty much normal and it's just the UK that's gone all North Korea. But even if the world is as we're told, with all the purges and editing people out of newspapers and so on, there must be a bunch of rival factions jockeying for power out of Smith's sight. You'd expect that eventually one pack of chumps or another would get in control and want to make big changes - or just let important stuff fall to shit - and it'd all be over

[Pink Gregory]

Went through a period of reading Down and Out/Wigan Pier/Catalonia before reading Nineteen Eighty-Four and I think more people should, because the context of his experiences and thinking pre-war are crucial.  Even then, critiques exist of those experiences and his attitudes.

Thing is with Orwell he's beloved of right-wingers and conspiracy theorists because of that lack of context.  Nineteen Eighty-Four isn't a simple anti-government or anticommunist tract but it's often read as such because, well, that's allegorical writing for you.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

It inspired Bowie's Diamond Dogs.  It being the reason we have the tracks Sweet Thing and Candidate is reason alone to celebrate it.

[FeederFan500]

A lot of it is very good but I'm not a fan of the long explanatory section in the middle.

[inajarbesidethebed]

If you want to explore the book's legacy some more you could check out Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth

[Terry Torpid]

I found it a bit dull to be honest, but that's mainly because dickheads have been going on and on about it for yonks, so I already knew most of the book before I'd read it. I know it's not the book's fault, but so much of its surface ideas now clog up the comments sections of online newspapers, and phone-in radio shows.

They've put up water charges? It's like something out of 1984!

They've banned some prick from some social media site for doing a bad racism? 1984 wasn't meant to be an instruction manual!

Mask mandates in the shops? Orwell would be spinning in his grave!

It's impossible for me to read it on its own merits any more. Completely tainted by assorted libertarians, gammons and ratlickers.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

Big Brother's meaning has been inverted from observation of the general public from a central hub into observation of a central hub by them.

[All Surrogate]

It's one of my favourite books. I would recommend reading We by Yevgeny Zamyatin as well; there's a lot of influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[touchingcloth]

I remember it being an affecting book when I read it, also about twenty years ago. I wasn't very politically aware when I did, but the book has rung more and more true over the years as I've become so.

He didn't get much wrong, except minorly the way surveillance doesn't need to rely on literal hidden cameras these days, because he was unprepared for the internet and innovations like the Great Firewall.

The most glaring error in hindsight is that of how Winston and Julia end up. I think dissidents are made of sterner stuff than that, and oppressive states know it and so don't bother with a likely futile rodent-based reëducation programme when it's cheaper, easier, and more effective to disappear malcontents and/or put a bullet in their heads.

[famethrowa]

The most glaring error in hindsight is that of how Winston and Julia end up. I think dissidents are made of sterner stuff than that, and oppressive states know it and so don't bother with a likely futile rodent-based reëducation programme when it's cheaper, easier, and more effective to disappear malcontents and/or put a bullet in their heads.

I think O'Brien pledged they would do that eventually anyway?

[touchingcloth]

[famethrowa]

Chief.

[Ferris]

The most glaring error in hindsight is that of how Winston and Julia end up. I think dissidents are made of sterner stuff than that, and oppressive states know it and so don't bother with a likely futile rodent-based reëducation programme when it's cheaper, easier, and more effective to disappear malcontents and/or put a bullet in their heads.

Actually I disagree, I thought that really lent power to the whole thing. O'Brien even speaks to precisely that during the interrogation:

Spoiler alert

"The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant; in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And, above all, we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed."

Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as though Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.

"You are thinking," he said, "that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference—in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?"

"Yes," said Winston.

O'Brien smiled slightly. "You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was 'Thou shalt not.' The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt.' Our command is 'Thou art.' No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed — Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford — in the end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering, groveling, weeping — and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean."

[close]

Reading it through, I mis-remembered that they shot him at the end of his processing at the Ministry of Love. I was quite surprised by the little coda ending where he's allowed back out but is completely broken.

[Red82]

I've read Orwell's complete works. He's ok. A genuinely brave man. as were many people of that era.  Many on the Left will take issue with him for a whole plethora of reasons. Some of them valid, some of them less valid.

[Pranet]

The most glaring error in hindsight is that of how Winston and Julia end up. I think dissidents are made of sterner stuff than that, and oppressive states know it and so don't bother with a likely futile rodent-based reëducation programme when it's cheaper, easier, and more effective to disappear malcontents and/or put a bullet in their heads.

It would have been written off the back of the Stalinist show trials where lots of people confessed all sorts of things and dobbed in their mates and then got shot/went to Siberia for 30 years anyway. Don't want to bum you out but we are all very human and torture us in the right way most of us will do anything.

[Ferris]

It would have been written off the back of the Stalinist show trials where lots of people confessed all sorts of things and dobbed in their mates and then got shot/went to Siberia for 30 years anyway. Don't want to bum you out but we are all very human and torture us in the right way most of us will do anything.

The section I quoted a few posts back directly references Stalinist show trials, as a comparison for what O'Brien and co are up to.

The Party understood that previous regimes allowing dissidents to die as heretics gave them a moral victory in death. The Ministry of Love converts people utterly before executing them, if they even bother to execute them.

Agree on the torture too, that was the section I found hardest to get through. You read it and go "yeah fair enough I'd fold under all that as well".

[Ferris]

How To Be Very Far Right (In A World Gone Wrong).

[badaids]

It's one of my favourite books. I would recommend reading We by Yevgeny Zamyatin as well; there's a lot of influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

We is indeed great too.

A State of Denmark by Derek Raymond is his more recent take on 1984 and is very different but perhaps even more horribly bleak as the protagonist is reeled in.

[touchingcloth]

Reading it through, I mis-remembered that they shot him at the end of his processing at the Ministry of Love. I was quite surprised by the little coda ending where he's allowed back out but is completely broken.

Yeah, it's that coda that doesn't ring true.

When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.

I think you can torture people into the appearance of things ("the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue"), but not the heart and soul. States know this, so they don't bother trying and failing to break people before releasing them back into the wild, they just quietly kill them. Maybe O'Brien thinks they can do it, but it sounds like it would result in

We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And, above all, we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.

...happening. Don't piss about with the rats, just kill him. It's like the villain leaving the room after tying Bond to the machine that is definitely going to kill him.

He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Wouldn't happen. Is that bit supposed to happen in O'Brien's head? If it's Winston's actual thoughts, then it seems ripe for a sequel. Nineteen Eighty-Six: Electric Room-102 (a Loo).

[badaids]

I never fully understood the very end.

Is it a real bullet that gets Winston or just the final submission of his brain to the deprogramming?

Someone please tell me what to think?

[touchingcloth]

I never fully understood the very end.

Is it a real bullet that gets Winston or just the final submission of his brain to the deprogramming?

Someone please tell me what to think?

I think it's supposed to be that his brain and spirit are killed, but his body lives on? That the Ministry doesn't need to resort to actual physical murder because they are genuinely able to win over people's minds.

[touchingcloth]

And to be clear, I can see why a state would want to be able to do all of the things and for all of the reasons in the extended passage quoted by Ferris. But it's the implication that they actually managed to do that successfully that has stuck with me.

It's a neat ending, but not particularly haunting because I just don't but it happening. The way the main narrative of The Handmaid's Tale ends, for example, is ambiguous and sickening because of it, in a way I still feel viscerally to this day.   

[Ferris]

It's like the villain leaving the room after tying Bond to the machine that is definitely going to kill him.

Laughed. Yeah that's valid.

Orwell tries to explain why the Ministry works that way (and I buy the explanation like the sap I am) but can totally see why it might not ring true for folks.

Is that bit supposed to happen in O'Brien's head?

It's Winston, isn't it? At the end, pissed up on horrible gin celebrating a (fictitious?) victory in a (fictitious?) war. It's the grimmest possible ending, far grimmer than if he was shot in the back of the head and bulldozed into a grave.

He's so broken that he's trying to believe all the nonsense, but at the end of the novel he finally "wins" the war on his own internal logic and critical faculties to just believe whatever shit is being told to him and not to question it (summarized as "loving Big Brother"). I think?

Re: O'Brien, he's moved on to the next prisoner - the state at large has no interest in Winston any more (they even give him a job that pays more than his old one). Winston can do what he likes, except he has no will to do anything, except whatever he's told. In fact: he doesn't need to be told what to do, because he's absorbed and incorporated The Party's views as his own.

[Ferris]

I never fully understood the very end.

Is it a real bullet that gets Winston or just the final submission of his brain to the deprogramming?

Someone please tell me what to think?

He's thinking back to all the things that had happened to him (real and imagined) to get him to his grim conclusion, and accepting that they're great and fantastic and worth the price.

They're not actually happening, he's just drunk and crying in a horrible bar drinking horrible gin.

[touchingcloth]

It's Winston, isn't it?

It reads that way, yeah. What I mean is, I can't believe Winston would actually win "the victory over himself", so it would make more sense as something that someone like O'Brien was thinking, or if there was a pullback where those final scenes were revealed as being part of something like a pamphlet given to new party members.

[Ferris]

It reads that way, yeah. What I mean is, I can't believe Winston would actually win "the victory over himself", so it would make more sense as something that someone like O'Brien was thinking, or if there was a pullback where those final scenes were revealed as being part of something like a pamphlet given to new party members.

Ahhh gotcha. I read it as a the last vestiges of personality/sanity leaving Winston but open to interpretation I guess.

[Senior Baiano]

then it seems ripe for a sequel. Nineteen Eighty-Six: Electric Room-102 (a Loo).

Nineteen Eighty Eight, Winston gets into E and starts to really really love Big Brother