Wednesday, January 20, 2021

When and what is "1984"? (video)

Editors, Wisdom Quarterly, Wiki edit of George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty Four: A Novel; MC
It's force if Huxley is seduction.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, sometimes published as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English novelist George Orwell, who was born in British Burma/India.

It was written in 1948, which is how Orwell came up with the title, but in the book no one actually knows what year it is. No one knows where they are, as there are only three places left, two of which are always at war, but which two changes. Collective memories are erased and rewritten as political expediencies.

The novel was published in the summer of 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime.

Julia is a sexual rebel, and Winston rebels.
Thematically, it centers on mass surveillance, totalitarianism, and repressive government policing. Citizens are regimented and enslaved, and society is severely controlled.

Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia. "Big Brother," the all-seeing central government (as in the famous slogan "Big Brother is watching you"), is sometimes depicted as the tyrant Stalin.


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More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts in a world of lies and cover stories. Its central point is how LANGUAGE is used in politics and elsewhere to manipulate minds and lives. Everything becomes a euphemism, or what Orwell dubs "Newspeak" (deception).

The story (a sexy love story of sorts between Winston Smith and sexually rebellious Julia) takes place in an imagined future, the year he thinks may be 1984, when much of the world is involved in perpetual war, government surveillance, historical disappearances (erasing people from history), and constant propaganda.

Newspeak rules the world.
Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a totalitarian super-state named Oceania ruled by a party that employs the "Thought Police" to persecute individuality and independent thinking.

"Big Brother," the leader of the party, enjoys an intense cult of personality despite the fact that he may not even exist. Winston Smith, a rank-and-file worker and Outer Party member who secretly hates the government, dreams of rebellion.

He enters into a forbidden sexual relationship with a colleague, Julia, and starts to remember what life was like before the current party came to power. More

They made it into a movie, too

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