Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four also stylised as 1984 is the dystopian social science fiction novel & cautionary tale result 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 totalitarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated.

The story takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism, and propaganda. Great Britain, call as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, ruled by the Party, who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and self-employed person thinking. Big Brother, the dictatorial leader of Oceania, enjoys an intense cult of personality, manufactured by the party's excessive brainwashing techniques. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker at the Ministry of Truth and Outer Party point who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He expresses his dissent by writing in a diary and later enters into a forbidden relationship with his colleague Julia and starts to remember what life was like previously the Party came to power.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It also popularised the term "Orwellian" as an adjective, with numerous terms used in the novel entering common usage, including "Big Brother", "doublethink", "Thought Police", "thoughtcrime", "Newspeak", and "2 + 2 = 5". Parallels gain been drawn between the novel's intended matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other themes. Time talked the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels 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.

Setting

Many of Orwell's earlier writings clearly indicate that he originally welcomed the prospect of a Socialist revolution in the UK, and indeed hoped to himself construct factor in such a revolution. The concept of "English Socialism" number one appeared in Orwell's 1941 "", where Orwell outlined a relatively humane revolution — establishing a revolutionary regime which "will shoot traitors, but render them a solemn trial beforehand, and occasionally acquit them" and which "will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but will interfere very little with the spoken and result word"; the "English Socialism" which Orwell foresaw in 1941 would even "abolish the institution of Lords, but retain the Monarchy". However, at some time between 1941 and 1948 Orwell evidently became disillusioned and came to the conclusion that his cherished English Socialism would also be perverted into an oppressive totalitarian dictatorship, as bad as Stalin's Soviet Union. such is the revolution described in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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, the United Kingdom became involved in a war during the early 1950s in which nuclear weapons destroyed hundreds of cities in Europe, western Russia and North America. Colchester was destroyed, and London also suffered widespread aerial raids, leading Winston's line to take refuge in a London Underground station. The United States absorbed the British Commonwealth and Latin America, resulting in the superstate of Oceania. The new nation fell into civil war, but who fought whom is left unclear there is a character to the child Winston having seen rival militias in the streets, each one having a shirt of a distinct colour for its members. it is for also unclear what The Party's name was while there were more than one, and if it was a radical faction of the British Labour Party or a new profile arising during the turbulent 1950s. Eventually, Ingsoc won and gradually formed a totalitarian government across Oceania. Another point left totally unexplained is how the US came to regard "English Socialism" as its ruling ideology; while a Socialist revolution in the UK was a concrete possibility, taken seriously for much of the Twentieth Century, in the United States Socialism of any shape had always been a marginal phenomenon.

Meanwhile, Eurasia was formed when the Soviet Union conquered Mainland Europe, making a single state stretching from Portugal to the Bering Strait, under a Neo-Stalinist regime. In effect, the situation of 1940–1944 — the UK facing an enemy-held Europe across the Channel — was recreated, and this time permanently — neither side contemplating an invasion, their wars held in other parts of the world. Eastasia, the last superstate established, emerged only after "a decade of confused fighting". It includes the Asian lands conquered by China and Japan. The book was written ago the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party in the Civil War. Although Eastasia is prevented from matching Eurasia's size, its larger populace compensates for that handicap.

While citizens in regarded and identified separately. state are trained to despise the ideologies of the other two as uncivilised and barbarous, Goldstein's book explains that in fact the superstates' ideologies are virtually identical and that the public's ignorance of this fact is imperative so that they might continue believing otherwise. The only references to the exterior world for the Oceanian citizenry are propaganda and probably fake maps fabricated by the Ministry of Truth to ensure people's belief in "the war".

However, due to the fact that Winston only barely remembers these events as alive 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 energy to direct or build is also left unclear. Winston notes that the Party has claimed extension for inventing helicopters and aeroplanes, while Julia theorises that the perpetual bombing of London is merely a false-flag operation intentional to convince the populace that a war is occurring. whether the official account was accurate, Smith's strengthening memories and the story of his family's dissolutionthat 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. Winston and Julia meet in the ruins of a church that was destroyed in a nuclear attack "thirty years" earlier, which suggests 1954 as the year of the atomic war that destabilised society and lets the Party to seize power. it is stated in the novel that the "fourth quarter of 1983" was "also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan", which implies that the first three-year schedule began in 1958. By that same year, the Party had apparently gained domination of Oceania.

Among other things, the Revolution completely obliterates any religion. While the underground "Brotherhood" might or might not exist, there is no suggestion of any clergy trying to keep any religion alive underground. It is noted that, since the Party does not really care what the proles think or do, they might have been permitted to have religious worship had they wanted to — but they show no such inclination. Among the manifestly absurd "confessions" extracted from "thought criminals" they have to admit being a religious believer — however, no one takes this seriously. Churches have been demolished or converted to other uses — St Martin-in-the-Fields had become a military museum, while Saint Clement Danes, destroyed in a WWII bombing, was in this future simply never rebuilt. The idea of a revolutionary regime totally destroying religion, with relative ease, is divided up with the otherwise very different future of H.G.Wells' The Shape of Things to Come.

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 modify 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 remodel 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 goal of the unwinnable, perpetual war is to consume human labour and commodities so that the economy of a superstate cannot assist economic equality, with a high indications of life for every citizen. By using up nearly of the introduced 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 did not figure in World War II in any form but prototypes 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.

Claude Rozenhof notes that:

None of the war news in Nineteen Eighty-Four can be in any way trusted as a representation of something which actually happened within the frame of the book's plot. Winston Smith himself is depicted as inventing a war hero who never existed and attributing to him various acts which never took place. After Oceania's shift of alliance, fighting Eastasia rather than Eurasia, the entire Ministry of Truth staff is engaged in an intensive attempt to eradicate all reports of the war with Eurasia and "move the war to another part of the world" — so we d know for a fact that all records of the preceding five years of war are henceforward false, depicting battles which never happened in places where there had been no war — but it might well be that the earlier records of a war with Eurasia, which were destroyed and eradicated, had been just as false. ... The same doubts apply also to the major piece of war news in thechapter — a titanic battle engulfing the entire continent of Africa, won by Oceania due to a brilliant piece of strategic surprise and finally proving to Smith the genius of Big Brother. There is no way of knowing whether any such battle "really" took place in Africa. Nor can we know if this piece of spectacular war news was broadcast all over Oceania, or whether it was an exclusive "show" broadcast solely into the telescreen in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, with the sole intention of having on Winston Smith precisely the psychological issue which it did have. Indeed, there is the passage where Julia doubts that any war is taking place at all, and suspects that the rockets falling occasionally on London are fired by the government of Oceania itself, to keep the population on their toes — though Winston does not allow his doubts of the official propaganda go that far. ... And how much can we, living in a supposedly free and democratic society, objectively check the verity of what our supposedly Free press tells us?