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Related: About this forumGeorge Orwell's Dystopian Novel '1984': Why It Still Matters
(5 mins). The New Yorker, '1984' At Seventy: Why We Still Read Orwell's Book of Prophesy.' George Orwells "1984" published seventy years ago today, has had an amazing run as a work of political prophecy. It has outlasted in public awareness other contenders from its era, such as Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932), Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Anthony Burgesss A Clockwork Orange (1962), not to mention two once well-known books to which it is indebted, Yevgeny Zamyatins We (1921) and Arthur Koestlers Darkness at Noon (1940). Published in 1949, 1984 is obviously a Cold War book, but the Cold War ended thirty years ago. What accounts for its staying power?
Partly its owing to the fact that, unlike Darkness at Noon, Orwells book was not intended as a book about life under Communism. It was intended as a warning about tendencies within liberal democracies, and that is how it has been read. The postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe produced societies right out of Orwells pages, but American readers responded to 1984 as a book about loyalty oaths and McCarthyism. In the nineteen-seventies, it was used to comment on Nixon and Watergate. There was a bounce in readership in 1983-84four million copies were sold that yearbecause, well, it was 1984. And in 2016 it got a bump from Trump...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/1984-at-seventy-why-we-still-read-orwells-book-of-prophecy
George Orwell (1903-1950), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
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(12,712 posts)appalachiablue
(41,171 posts)..This Orwellian view of a possible future draws heavily on modern experience with totalitarian socialism: People in this world are slaves to the state. They live in fear and poverty. Art and media are used to control them. History is rewritten to create an appearance of progress. People are forced to make public confessions of crimes they never committed. Families are destroyed to insure complete loyalty only to the state. And the state is in constant war with neighbors to unify the people through an us against them mentality. Its a distillation of all the horrors of National Socialism, Soviet and Chinese communism, and the various variants thereof.
The story was meant as a warning to the remaining free countries, whose academic eggheads in particular seemed curiously open to socialist ideas.
It opens with a propaganda broadcast in which Goldstein, an enemy of the state, is being denounced. A crowd watches the broadcast and begins shouting feverish anti-Goldstein condemnations. The propaganda has clearly had its effect. However, in that crowd is a man who sees through at least some of it. He meets a young woman who, in her own cynical way, also sees through the propaganda. The two arrange a series of trysts in which they gradually get to know, trust, and love each other. But in this world, love for anything but the state is forbidden, and despite the most minute precautions, one day they are caught. Such are the horrors of torture and mind control that in the end the state succeeds in destroying even their love.
In the background to all this is the full panorama of Orwells projected totalitarian world: the control of the individual through control of the language (newspeak); endless broadcasts of faked production statistics intended to give the impression of material progress despite obvious widespread poverty; purges and denunciations of supposed traitors; televised executions; 24-hour surveillance via in-home monitors; and so on.
- Trailer, '1984' movie with John Hurt (1984).
External Reviews of 1984 (1984) What Orwell feared, when he wrote his novel in 1948, was that Hitlerism, Stalinism, centralism, and conformity would catch hold and turn the world into a totalitarian prison camp. It is hard, looking around the globe, to say that he was altogether wrong. - Roger Ebert...
http://missliberty.com/orwells-1984-in-three-films-1954-1956-1984-movie-review/