The best-selling book on Amazon is '1984' – which was originally published in 1949
By John Broich
By
The Conversation, Contributor
| Jan. 27, 2017, at 10:46 a.m.
By John Broich
A week after President Donald Trump's inauguration, George Orwell's "1984" is the best-selling book on Amazon.com.
The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.
The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.
Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or
mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear
exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional
war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in
domestic control.
Oceania demands total subservience. It is a police state,
with helicopters monitoring people's activities, even watching through
their windows. But Orwell emphasizes it is the "ThinkPol," the Thought
Police, who really monitor the "Proles," the lowest 85 percent of the
population outside the party elite. The ThinkPol move invisibly among
society seeking out, even encouraging, thoughtcrimes so they can make
the perpetrators disappear for reprogramming
.
.
The other main way the party elite, symbolized in the
mustached figurehead Big Brother, encourage and police correct thought
is through the technology of the Telescreen. These "metal plaques"
transmit things like frightening video of enemy armies and of course the
wisdom of Big Brother. But the Telescreen can see you, too. During
mandatory morning exercise, the Telescreen not only shows a young, wiry
trainer leading cardio, it can see if you are keeping up. Telescreens
are everywhere: They are in every room of people's homes. At the office,
people use them to do their jobs.
The story revolves around Winston Smith and Julia, who
try to resist their government's overwhelming control over facts. Their
act of rebellion? Trying to discover "unofficial" truth about the past,
and recording unauthorized information in a diary. Winston works at the
colossal Ministry of Truth, on which is emblazoned IGNORANCE IS
STRENGTH. His job is to erase politically inconvenient data from the
public record. A party member falls out of favor? She never existed. Big
Brother made a promise he could not fulfill? It never happened.
Because his job calls on him to research old newspapers
and other records for the facts he has to "unfact," Winston is
especially adept at "doublethink." Winston calls it being "conscious of
complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies…
consciously to induce unconsciousness."
Oceania: The Product of Orwell's Experience
Orwell's setting in "1984" is inspired by the way he foresaw the Cold War – a phrase he coined
in 1945 – playing out. He wrote it just a few years after watching
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carve up the world at the Tehran and
Yalta conferences. The book is remarkably prescient about aspects of the
Stalinist Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China.
Orwell was a socialist.
"1984" in part describes his fear that the democratic socialism in
which he believed would be hijacked by authoritarian Stalinism. The
novel grew out of his sharp observations of his world and the fact that
Stalinists tried to kill him.
In 1936, a fascist-supported military coup
threatened the democratically elected socialist majority in Spain.
Orwell and other committed socialists from around the world, including
Ernest Hemingway, volunteered to fight against the rightist rebels.
Meanwhile, Hitler lent the rightists his air power while Stalin tried to
take over the leftist Republican resistance. When Orwell and other
volunteers defied these Stalinists, they moved to crush the opposition.
Hunted, Orwell and his wife had to flee for their lives from Spain in
1937.
Back in London during World War II, Orwell saw for
himself how a liberal democracy and individuals committed to freedom
could find themselves on a path toward Big Brother. He worked for the
BBC writing what can only be described as "propaganda" aimed at an
Indian audience. What he wrote was not exactly doublethink, but it was
news and commentary with a slant to serve a political purpose. Orwell
sought to convince Indians that their sons and resources were serving
the greater good in the war. Having written things he believed were untrue, he quit the job after two years, disgusted with himself.
Imperialism itself disgusted him. As a young man in the
1920s, Orwell had served as a colonial police officer in Burma. In a
distant foreshadowing of Big Brother's world, Orwell reviled the
arbitrary and brutish role he took on in a colonial system. "I hated it
bitterly," he wrote.
"In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.
The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups,
the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts…"
Oceania was a prescient product of a particular biography
and particular moment when the Cold War was beginning. Naturally, then,
today's world of "alternative facts" is quite different in ways that
Orwell could not have imagined.
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