The funniest part is how one obvious bait line instantly turns awkward silence into a whole book club.
Was at the library a few weeks ago for the first time and got 1984. Didn’t touch it and had to return it. Now when someone asks I can show them that I borrowed it and claim that I reread it recently 👌
the audio book is free on youtube and very good. thats how o experienced it and i recommend it
It’s a good read
Some recommended reading about George “I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler” Orwell:
- Isaac Asimov’s 1980 review of Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Orwell’s 1940 review of Mein Kampf
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell's_list
- https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/George_Orwell
one could say the widespread misperception of who he actually was and what he stood for is rather… orwellian 🙄
Didn’t he also call Indians “yellow-faced animals?”
“I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity.”
I think the first sentence was taken a bit out of context. In the second he says he would kill him if got the chance to. I think he’s just trying to say that Hitler was charismatic.
The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the
television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and
see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and
are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom.
Hence, the meaning of the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’.
This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under
control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other
person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian
society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great
development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression.Interesting that someone like Asimov has not seen how technology would make this possible, like it’s right now
Interesting that someone like Asimov has not seen how technology would make this possible
He did. A few paragraphs later he says:
Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance.
What no Foucault does to a MF.
The idea that every person will only behave as though they are being watched if they are actually being watched, fails to recognize that if people know that they could be watched at any time, but can’t actually see if the watcher is watching them, they will behave as though they are being watched all the time.
Panopticon goes brrrr
Both Orwell and Asimov assumed that The Party would care about false positives.
ohh hell nah they made a tanky conservapedia 💀
The guy fought Nazi supplied Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. This take is nuts, he almost died for the CNT-FAI. He’s not a Nazi sympathizer.
And went on to literally work for the British intelligence services and provide them lists of communists, you could read the provided sources.
Just a thought experiment: since you apply this logic that fighting the Nazi-supplied nationalists in the Spanish civil war makes one an antifascist, do you agree that the greatest antifascist force in Europe was the USSR as the only country supplying weapons, munitions, tanks and airplanes to the Republican and Anarchist during the civil war?
Being anti communism is the same as being pro Nazi now?
Always has been, but not sure why you’re telling this in response to my comment
The USSR didn’t supply the anarchists.
TheyThe Communists actively refused to give them arms and worked against them. That was the cause of Orwell’s disdain towards them. source: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/noam-chomsky-on-anarchism#fn70Edit: Correcting sentencing after being corrected in a reply.
Circular sourcing, you’re quoting Orwell himself in that citation.
Regardless, “the communists” referred to in this link are not the USSR, they’re the Spanish communists, you’re conflating the two again and therefore pushing the fascist propaganda that the Jewish Bolsheviks were puppeteering everything in Spain. Also, are there any quantitative modern studies of the scale of this “embargo”? Because I’ve provided sources* proving that the extent of the “anarchist repression” by the USSR in Spain was about 20 individuals, and motivated by the revolts in Barcelona that the Fascists and Nazis were pushing for.
*I linked the sources in another comment, here is my research on the topic as a Spaniard myself. If you read through this, you’ll see that Stalin himself commended the anarchists in private meetings with the Republican diplomats and tried to get the Spanish Second Republic to collaborate with them
Edit: adding Stalin’s opinion on collaboration with anarchists:
Aludió ampliamente a los anarquistas y señaló que en las filas confederales había buenos elementos. Preguntó si podría haber una plataforma común entre socialistas y comunistas a propósito de la CNT. La respuesta de Pascua fue afirmativa, aunque con matices.
He extensivelty referred to the Anarchists and pointed out that there were good elements among the confederates [CNT, largest Spanish anarchist organization at the time]. He asked whether there could be a common platform between socialists and communist regarding the CNT. Pascua’s answer was affirmative, though with caveats.
(Translated by myself from one of the sources linked, feel free to browse through the books yourself as I did).
To be honest I don’t care if the communists are Soviet or Spain. The arms that the USSR was sending didn’t reach the anarchists. That was the only claim I was refuting.
Reiterating for the sake of clarity.
That the Communists withheld arms from the Aragon front seems established beyond question, and it can hardly be doubted that the motivation was political. See, for example, D.T. Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War (1955; reprinted New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), p. 110.
The fact that the footnote ends with Orwell’s own quote is just a nice tie back to the discussion.
Regarding the rest of the comment I’m not interested in reenacting “anarchist vs ML: spanish civil war” online theater. I just wanted to push back on the claim that the USSR supplied anarchists.
To be honest I don’t care if the communists are Soviet or Spain.
I just wanted to push back on the claim that the USSR supplied anarchists
Least intellectually dishonest anticommunist.
I’ll go ahead and spend one fucking hour reading through the sources again just to prove you wrong because I’m 100% certain that the at least half of weapons that the anarchists used were of Soviet origin, and I know for certain you won’t provide such sourcing because if you actually did the reading you wouldn’t be saying that the USSR didn’t supply the anarchists too.
Otherwise prove me wrong: give me a modern source estimating the availability of weaponry of anarchists in the Spanish civil war and its origin.
Ok. You wanna dance? Let’s dance.
The USSR did supply (provide any weapons to) anarchists in Spain.
However the Communists¹ didn’t supply (provide as many weapons as they could have to) anarchists in Spain.¹: because as you pointed out the fault wasn’t just the USSR but Spanish as well.
I was hoping that the context made the distinction clear but clearly that is not the case.
The May Days is not some unknown event.
I can walk down the street here see the bullet holes.
What’s your point?
You don’t need Orwell to know that the anarchists and Stalinists fell into opposition.
Everything we know about Orwell disagrees, from his review of Mein Kampf to his comments about Jews and Homosexuals. He opposed fighting the literal German Nazis until war actually broke out. The civil was was a few years and a single book, and hardly representative of his entire life.
Its a bit off topic, but its really amusing in that Isaac Asimov article how he talks about the Spain thing where Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists were at odds. Basically, the left righting amongst themselves.
The more things change…
Just because it’s so true people are sick of it doesn’t change the fact that it is, indeed, 1984.
Also Brave New World, weirdly enough.
Good news - we didn’t have to pick a dystopia. We’re getting them ALL. At the same time.
If it’s Brave New World please send me to Iceland.
Heavy influence from Fahrenheit 451 as well
And The Sheep Look Up.
Idiocracy.
It’s also beginning to feel like Children of Men with all this microplastics in everydude’s balls.
Damn, guess I no other option but to chop my balls off.
It’s literally a cyberpunk dystopia only less cool.
And none of the cyberpunk. Just the shitty corpos controlling everything.
If you know where to look, the cyberpunk is def a thing. I have friends with chip implants, friends that race drones through the city, and friends build robots for fun. Meshtastic is pretty cool. We have open source 3d printers and vr projects. Shits pretty cool if youre a nerd. The mainstream is bleak but the underground is doing some really cool.stuff
That’s cyberpunk as a niche hobby, not a cultural norm. We’re nowhere near Night City, Blade Runner or even Ready Player One.
Yeah, the shit is pretty cool, but it isn’t cyberpunk as an inescapable culture.
Even in ready player one and night city, the corpo tech was enshittified to all hell and back. I definitely dont trust IOI any more than Meta or Neuralink
The people with the resources to change things took those stories as guidebooks… “Ooh sick robots!”
and we don’t even have those sick robots
They really failed on every front
They only succeeded in building the torment nexus
from the popular hit series, Please For The Love of All That is Holy Don’t Build the Torment Nexus
as a reminder. Zaphod Beeblebrox is meant to be understood to be a villain in Hitchiker’s Guide. he’s a dumb, drugged out, psuedointellectual who’s allowed far too much leeway because he’s both rich and famous
Oddly enough, for all the lolz, some deep wisdom from those books stuck with me for life. The lines about how the kind of people who want to and can get themselves elected to such-and-such office, how that capability and desire also makes them de facto the precise kind of person you never want running things. That idea remains honestly one of the most profound things I’ve ever read, you see it reflected in ~every politician who walks the earth.
In many ways it feels like every other problem we have as humans is downstream from that contradiction (but of course, I’m oversimplifying / overgeneralizing hugely).
Silly books for sure, super silly, but not only silly, def agree.
Hey to be fair they’ve been hard at work facilitating cyber-psychosis as well, just without the cool implants (talking about ai if anyone was wondering)
And that one where a bunch of kids get stranded on an island and have to survive.
They become the rulers of the USA apparently.
Lord of the Flies?
Yes, thank you!
You don’t need to read 1984 to understand the basic meaning people get out of it. The significant aspects can be summed up as a few bullet points or a few short paragraphs.
Unfortunately because its message is so broad, it is often used in support of all sorts of opposing arguments, small and large, Jacob Geller discussed this topic in detail.
1984 is the Rick and Morty of books.
The basic meaning is idealist, though, as in non-materialist. 1986 outlines an “authoritarian” society that has essentially no material reason to be authoritarian. The book explains in painstaking detail how the citizens have fake coffee substitutes with no flavor, but doesn’t explain at any given time why this happens. It reduces this idea of “authoritarianism” simply to “state bad”, without any further political analysis. It’s lazy and sloppy.
It does explain that, in Goldstein’s book. Without destruction of production and privation, you cannot maintain a hierarchical society is the argument it plainly makes.
Is he a zionist?
Ok, I’ll take the bait. It’s a good book, and not all that long!
The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern “degeneracy”) that stuck around at least until the 2010s.
It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn’t put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.
I mean saying it isn’t as good as anything by LeGuin is hardly an insult. Nearly everyone isn’t as good as LeGuin.
The romantic sub-plot… That’s a misunderstanding. It’s a love triangle between Winston, Julia and Big Brother. It’s not really a sub-plot at all.
But you’re right. Le Guin runs rings around it.
Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidencesupporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity:[4][5] that a language’s structures influence a speaker’s perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.
It might not be the best book ever written, but I think it’s important to read. It’s one of the most cited books to support whatever people want. Once you read it, you can interpret it for yourself, and you actually know what it’s about.
The thing most people know from it is Big Brother watching you. It’s just surveillance state stuff. That’s a relatively small part of it though. It’s more about shaping culture through information control. Yeah, surveillance is part of it, but even that’s not just cameras; it’s also about having people inform the government about their neighbors, or parents, or whatever else.
Which was of course already incredibly contemporary with what Goebals, Himmler and Stalin had been up to. Everyone sees the novel as the endgame of the opposing ideology, though it’s basically a warning against those who would seek to cement their power by making opposition impossible.
I think the premise is not linguistic relativity, it’s the political bullshit itself. Something like “all countries bullshit against their own citizens, so that those citizens defend things going against their own best interests. Watch out when yours does it.” If what I’m saying is correct, the only role of that relativity would be that Orwell incorrectly believed to be one of the tools used to craft bullshit.
I’m saying this based on two things. One is the book itself; in plenty situations there’s no relativity, the bullshit pops up because people forgot what happened. Check the first two quotes for examples.
The other reason is another text Orwell wrote, Politics and the English Language. IMO the six points are bad advice (and often propagated by muppets, who didn’t understand the text in first place), and Orwell was completely clueless about language, but the premise itself is related to the one in 1984; something like “stop hiding bullshit behind walls of babble”. The last quote shows it
Quotes
[1984] It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
[1984] 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. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.
[Politics and the English Language; emphasis in the original] In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. […]
EDIT - moved quotes to spoiler tags for less clutter.
core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified
i’m interested–further reading on this?
There are two types of linguistic relativity: “strong” and “weak”. Usually, when people simply say “linguistic relativity”, they’re talking about the strong view.
In the “strong” view, language limits your thought, perception, etc. You’d be completely unable to understand certain concepts, unless your language has words for them. Nowadays we know it to be false, but in Orwell’s times it was popular, and Orwell was clueless about how languages work, so he used it in 1984 (that’s where Newspeak comes from).
In the “weak” view, language doesn’t dictate your thought or perception, but influences them a bit. It’s probably true, but it’s a rather trivial conclusion.
So, for example. Let’s say there’s some language out there using the exact same word for two different concepts:
- unrestricted, unchained, unbound
- costless, at no exchange of money
If the strong version was true, a monolingual speaker of said language would be completely unable to tell both concepts apart. But since the weaker version is true, they can do it; it’s just they’ll have a bit of a harder time. (The language from the example is English, by the way. Cue to “free beer” and “free software”.)
I don’t know if I missed it, but I don’t think it’s been disproven. I actually think it’s true still, though maybe not as dramatic as 1984 would say.
For example, IQ tests (in particular old ones, as modern ones try to control for this) are built on a modern western sensibility. However, the way some cultures handles different concepts can be different, and it can measure it poorly.
As an example of this, classic Greek math is built on geometry. Having that basis on math makes solving certain problems significantly easier, but equally it makes some thing calculus significantly more difficult. It’s much harder to do abstract math when you’re mind is trained on concrete shapes.
I dropped it about halfway through. I’m sure at the time it was bold, but today you can find totalitarian regimes reshaping society unrecognizably in an average YA romance novel. I got tired of it explaining how awful the depicted world was when I got it the first time. Basically no plot was happening at all. Just one long, establishing scene setting up the world as Winston did his 9 to 5.
I read some summaries about the later parts enough to write a report on it. So I knew that (Spoilers ahead) eventually he starts attempting to rebel beyond sneaking out to hire a prostitute once. But he doesn’t really accomplish anything significant before getting captured and converted, because the entire point of the book is to show how awful that potential future is supposed to be, meaning of course the characters don’t need real agency.
The lesson it’s trying to explain is pretty obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with history around WWII. Of course we shouldn’t let governments get enough power to establish a police state that can preempt rebellion. They will use propaganda to rewrite even recent events, establish a bogeyman enemy to blame any problems in society on, change what terms and values are acceptable, and otherwise control every aspect of their populations’ lives. Obviously, some people need to hear that, but it was mind-numbing to listen to someone use a boring dystopia to argue for something you already agreed with. It was nearly as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451.
as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451
How do you feel about Bradbury’s claim that it was less about a totalitarian state than a condemnation of the effects of mass media?
If we’re still talking about 1984, then from what I read I would still say it was meant to cover a totalitarian state as a whole. We get to see the Ministry of Truth the most because that’s the department Winston works at, and controlling what information the populace receives is certainly important for the state. But there are other implicit criticisms to the society’s structure that aren’t really related to just media.
And if anything, I think we could only read a criticism of government-controlled media from the book. We can’t infer if Orwell has a problem with private media when it doesn’t feature at all in the story. And personally, I would say a free press serves as a check against the descent into this kind of society by informing the public about their government. Private media has its own agendas, but at least it’s only incentivized to lie when there’s a profit motive.
If you mean Fahrenheit 451, then yeah, I agree he focusses on media. The government is still tyrannical, but other abuses are smaller than in 1984 and are more in the background compared to their focus on eliminating media they didn’t control. It mostly cares about hitting you on the head that burning books is what the bad guys do.
Also spoilers ahead here.
I’ve read it, and i completely agree. The plot is quite sluggish, and after i was finished reading, i wished that i would have dropped it halfway through. The last third, is basically graphic descriptions of torture. And i wouldn’t have needed that to get the point of the book. I don’t need a happy ending. This isn’t what the book is about. But i also don’t want 150 pages of literal torture.
It’s the one with all the animals, right?
I think. Is Star Wars the one with the wizard boy?
In a way, yes
It insists upon itself.
I learned recently that although identifing as a socialist, Orwell was kind of a crappy dude. He sold out a ton of people he saw as too communist to the British intelligence service in a weird dossier with kinda bigoted descriptions of people.
He was apparently on his deathbed and dying of a disease (I think TB?) That some have said makes you not all mentally there, but it seems unlikely to me that the bigotedness was fabricated entirely by the impact of disease on his mind.
It kinda made me reconsider how I interpreted parts of 1984. He seemed to kinda look down on lower socioeconomic groups and indigenous populations as like baser more animal, less human creatures, and you can kinda see a bit of his McCarthyism in 1984. I found it kinda odd what groups he said he thought would form the authoritarian bougiosie class (sorry I dont feel like looking up how to spell that right now, so you get my horrible butchered spelling)
‘Orwells List’ is rightfully controversial. Im not gonna try and fully defend him siding with the British Goverment against anyone
But I do think to judge him fairly you gotta understand a couple things
-
it was written in 1949
-
it called out people who he thought were too closely tied to Stalin’s Russia
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the British Establishment at the time were nominally friendly with the Stalin government
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Orwell was unhappy with Soviet Communists due to their liberal collaboration and repression of anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
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Orwell was always explicitly anti-stalinist
So I don’t think he’s immune from historical judgement, but I do think that modern conclusions of Orwell as a kind of ‘counter-revolutionary’ miss a lot of valuable context
He definitely wasn’t just informing on people whom he thought were ‘too socialist’, even if from a 2026 perspective he had more in common with the communists he was listing
And it’s worth noting that this was years before American McCarthyism and the associated witchhunt
Orwell was unhappy with Soviet Communists due to their liberal collaboration and repression of anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
This is most certainly not true. Modern estimates of Soviet repressions of Anarchists in Republican Spain number a total of 20 individuals, there were literally 10 soviet NKVD agents in Spain at its peak. The whole idea of the “Jewish-Bolsheviks” repressing everything and anything in Spain stems from Francoist propaganda and from widespread application of anecdotal evidence of one or two cases such as the assassination of Andreu Nin.
For a more detailed review of my sources on the topic as a Spaniard myself, I wrote a post on my alt account detailing the reality of the Soviet repressions in Spain.
Also, being anti-Soviet in 1949 is extremely suspicious too. The Soviets had just saved Europe from Nazism, regardless of his thoughts about Catalonia if one is antifascist in 1949 one supports the Soviets, period. It’s not until a few years later as you say that anti-Soviet propaganda starts to be widespread in the west out of fear that the revolution will spread to the rest of the capitalist world.
Interesting, I appreciate you adding additional context. I dont know how or if it changes my perspective on things but having more info to consider is helpful :)
From a google it does seem like the second red scare (I didn’t know there were two of them) was right around the late 1940s through the 1950s according to Wikipedia. I described it him that way cause thats how one of the people listed in the Wikipedia article on his list described it reflecting on him and I felt it was apt, but if I’m missing about what happened when something I’d welcome additional info and correction ☺️ I’m honestly really ignorant about history and have been trying to learn more lately.
If you wanna share anything more you know about the subject please feel free (no obligation or anything of course)
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He grew up in the British Raj, with his father supporting the opium war in China. He also worked as a radio host for the British government to spread propoganda (insisting that him not doing it would mean someone worse would). This makes his assertion that things like 1984 media influence of opinion a little insane, with him saying it wasn’t happening then, but it could happen soon. He was literally a part of it.
A lot of his views seem to come from when he went to Spain to fight in their civil war against the Fascists. He ended up joining the Anarchists (not by choice, but because this was the option available), and the Communist faction treated them poorly, saying they weren’t really leftist enough (as usual). This is why he ended up focusing almost all of his energy on anti-USSR/anti-authoritarian stuff, rather than anti-empire or anti-capitalist. He was a leftist, just one with a massive grudge against “the wrong leftists”.
jorjorwel??!!!
France is bacon
Meesa JorJor, meesa JorJor Well
I’ve read 1984, and yeah that’s basically it
Double plus good
Literally 1984
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