1984 (Signet Classics) by George Orwell
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.58 You Save: $5.41 (54%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.11 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of 1984 (Signet Classics)
Book Review: Totalitarianism totally today
Summary: 5 Stars
More than half century is gone since George Orwell depicted with 1984" a frightening picture of a totalitarian regime of oppression of all human individuality and freedom and absolute control. Principally he has only transcribed from reality, because the dictatorships of terror existed already: Nazi-Germany, Sowjetunion, Mao-China, GDR, Northern Korea and others. A better description in literary form is not thinkable! That`s all old hat? Not at all!
Orwell is about advising against mechanisms which lead to such slavery of people. And these mechanisms are still going, even with us. He wants that everybody develops a feeling in order to become able to stop such wrong developments. No wonder that this book was on the black list of many dictatorships. Why? A dog that is hit will bark! But we are all hit since in this time of a progressing media age the ideal presuppositions for the complete exertion of influence and control of people are given. In totalitarian regimes of today it is for example often practise to block websites, so that only certain information currents are available. Talking about opinion-forming. That is to say the advantages of linking ways of information in our days can be reversed at any time to a disadvantage. You believe what a majority says is right, because it is comfortable.
When Orwell wrote 1984" he thought of the Sowjetunion, but his observations of human psyche have universal validity. What he describes is the ideal type of a totalitarian dictatorship that comes automatically from the misleading human will of self-realization, being often enough wishful thinking that the paradise could be ordered on Earth, thanks to the human capability. This has nothing to do with prophecy when Orwell writes this. It is nothing than self-observation and self-realization of any reasonable human.
In 1984", similar to the Sowjetunion or the GDR or Cuba, there is a striking economy of scarcity which is being denied with the help of propaganda. Hence the ministry of economics is for Orwell the "ministry of abundance". This is a mark of totalitarian systems, that they misuse the language, twist everything, blackmail opponents and let them disappear when they get them. All for the alleged welfare of the community. Everybody understands the proper insanity but all surrender to the pressure and take part in the game. Reality sense is no longer needed, it dwindles ever more and the reversion to reason and to sustainable values is getting more and more difficult. "Why do you accuse me of not having unlocked the door?" is the question of the concentration-camp guard who stands in front of the court because the prisoners perished in the locked building. "I have not had an order to open it!"
At first one agrees with the lie until on is able to live under it by constant use. Who does not remember the propaganda of the Nazis about worthless lives and alike to praise man on one side as superior masters and at the same time devalue man by racism. That is always the same, self-elevation leads to fall. So much for ideologies where after man himself determines what is good and bad. In so far Orwell draws not the last necessary conclusions, that man cannot find truth in himself. Hardly he seems to have found it, at once it is turning destructively against him as is apparent in his "Animal farm".
Orwell says clearly in "1984" what is unjust. But, whence the individual freedom and self-determination of man should come when they cannot be given naturally, he is not able to say.
It is lost somewhere in the fog of humanistic wisdom which are always under suspicion of being misused as helpers for something else. Already the Bible warned: "woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who make out of darkness light and out of light darkness". Well, but how to avoid the evil?
It would be wrong to point at totalitarian systems and think that this could not happen to a democracy. Orwell knew about the fragility and sensibility of all man made power structures which have those above and those below. He knew that the so called free West could quickly slide into Totalitarianism. In Germany that happened very quickly. It is a deception tp assume that it would be different somewhere else. It was visible that a high culture could not withstand. And today? Sceptics discover also in our society the beginning of limitations of freedoms and of the misuse of information, even when this happens subtly. For example somebody who behaves like a Christian is in our days quickly branded as a fundamentalist or even thrown into the same pot with Islamists. Because of the relativism of today which regards as only truth that there is no binding truth it is ignored that exactly the Christians combine the notion of truth tightly to the notion of individual freedom, whereas this is not the case in Islam, because Islam has a political claim of power exertion.
It is true that Orwell makes clear that the reversal of the values goes together with the reversal of the words. "War and peace" is exchangeable with "just war". Sand this process is starting in the small, with verbal persecution and it is ending in the worst case with Holocaust. At first you are eliminated in words and then with all consequences. Marxism-Leninism possessed the impunity to call itself scientific knowledge. We laugh about it. But what about today? We have an extended faith in science. Today even the former marxists know that they were wrong. We have seen it a hundred of times what happens when man takes himself as last measure. His self-redemption programs are sentenced to failure. One day it will also be put an end to the personal freedom. Orwells book should be a warning. "1984" is one of the few books which everybody should have read. And it holds its actuality.
Book Review: A book of tremendous power
Summary: 5 Stars
In the past I've been reluctant to read 1984 because I thought it was "good for me," like medicine. And the novel seems to have become very dear to one side of the political spectrum lately, the left, which enhanced my suspicion that 1984 was going to be a dreary exposition of an oppressed society not worth living in. I'd also seen the British movie released in the year 1984, which was good, but dreary, as I remembered it. But I sensed that there was something wrong with Michael Moore's quote of Orwell in Fahrenheit 911, which might mean that there was something wrong with our current embrace of Orwell, and that gave me the final push to read the book. To my everlasting gratitude, I found that 1984 is one of the most human novels I have ever read. It has a moving love story (which I had not remembered at all from the movie), and it has more than enough challenges to all forms of politics, left and right. The book is especially challenging if you do not read it merely as a political commentary but also as an examination of the human soul, particularly your own. It is the kind of book that delves so unflinchingly with cruelty and evil that it's hard to put down but also difficult to endure. It will leave you shattered; a truly great work.
The context of the novel was helpful to me when I did examine its politics. I won't give away the plot, but I will talk about the society Orwell lays out in the beginning of the book.
Orwell wrote at a time when it seemed that communism was on the march everywhere. Eastern Europe, North Korea and China, the world's most populous nation, had all recently fallen. The year after the publication of 1984, communist nations invaded both Tibet and South Korea, though the latter was not conquered; communism would not spread by full-scale invasion again until South Vietnam fell in 1975, but in the meantime, socialist and Marxist revolution would continue to threaten everywhere. Orwell saw the incipient Cold War of his time, with good reason, as the kind of perpetual warfare that is described in 1984. He felt that the democracies of the recently finished World War had not left behind their wartime command economies, and this was true in many ways; he probably believed that they would remain that way if they seriously meant to embark on an arms race or war with the communist world. The U.S. had moved toward socialism with the New Deal, and after the war with Hitler it had become a kind of New Deal big brother to a ravaged world; and Orwell wrote 1984 while living under a Labour government; so if we try to judge his thoughts from his novel, he probably felt that an ongoing state of war would lead the countries of the West into the kind of dictatorship seen in Russia, one that was socialist in name, but that really betrayed the ideals of socialism. (Orwell considered himself a socialist but was critical of communism). In that way, he saw England, the U.S. and Australia forming a society, Oceania, little different from Russia's or China's. The novel reports that atomic warfare occurred in the 1950s, and such a thing in real life might very well have produced suffering, privation, revolution and dictatorship throughout the world.
So when the novel opens in the year 1984, the West has essentially gone down the road of warfare, which has destroyed all the free elements of its societies, such as private life and free markets. Orwell was essentially criticizing the left for going down the road of communism and not genuine socialism, as he saw it.
Yet it's easy to find places where the novel challenges the right of today. For instance, Orwell's description of doublethink seems to explain how Saddam Hussein's government, openly built upon Stalin's model, knew that the American army was approaching Baghdad in March 2003, while describing the situation, in press conferences, as the exact opposite; yet George Bush has had a similar tendency to speak about the situation in Iraq as if things are going just fine, when clearly they are not.
Orwell says that in the world of tomorrow, the war is meant to be perpetual, and this does seem to indict both the Cold War and the war on terror. Michael Moore quotes 1984 on the concept of perpetual war, but the quote comes from the movie of 1984, not the novel. The novel itself says that "the object of the [perpetual] war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory." Fahrenheit 911, and the movie of 1984, both avoid this phrase, since American interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq do look like conquests of territory.
Orwell writes in 1984 that the societies of the future do not ever try to conquer distant lands, and restrict themselves to lands on their borders, because contact with the enemy by millions of their own soldiers would run the risk of genuine, human contact with people described in wartime propaganda as brutes and animals -- and all this would reveal the lies of the Party. Orwell was right about totalitarian societies; all have invaded nations on their own borders. They have killed tens of millions at home or close to home. The U.S. and Britain, by contrast, have exported both armies and peaceful civilians, and their press, to far-flung societies, often literally on the other side of the world.
There is much here that the left could embrace, but much that challenges the left as well. 1984 does not seem either to challenge or support the right of today in the same degree; it seems to me largely a book about the left, by a man of the left.
As a critique of Western democracies, 1984 is very powerful, but I have read that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is even better.
Book Review: Trust me, Its good
Summary: 5 Stars
Nineteen Eighty-four is a classic and timeless book; It has as much effect today that it possessed in 1949. I would strongly argue that this book is a classic novel and deserves every bit of praise that it has and will receive. It doesn't feel like there is any type of language barrier between Orwell, his message, and today's reader. He often uses long sentences with very descriptive words to allow the reader to be able to see/feel/smell every place and problem that the main character, Winston Smith, encounters and deals with.
I expected this novel to be painful to read and understand, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Orwell had done an exceptionally good job of writing the novel, and thus made reading the book utterly painless. One of my favorite descriptive paragraphs in is when Winston enters the canteen where everyone eats lunch. Here is an excerpt form it:
"In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip."
Slowly I began to see the chapters fly by, amazed by the originality that the setting included. This was meant to be a bit of a pseudo-Sci Fi novel, in that it is set in the future. But unlike many other Sci Fi novels, however 1984 does not focus on how the technology works. Rather Orwell focuses on why it works and why the government made it, or replaced something else with this new approved technology.
I was fascinated by how believable the setting was and how myself, as the reader, didn't come across any of those usual Sci Fi moments where something is just to out there for the reader to grasp, or relate to at all. This is a book about humans and the human condition, not about sparkily flying cars or teleporters. In fact, many things about the futuristic setting of 1984 make you glad that you are in the present time and not in this hellish future of thoughtcrime and Ingsoc(which means English socialism in newspeak, a new form of shorter English). From horrible tasting "victory" coffee, gin, and cigarettes, to the constant fear of being prosecuted with thoughtcrime. The reader is constantly drawn into Smith's nightmare. Even just having unusual facial patterns in public or in front of one of the countless telescreens could lead to not only your own death but you being erased from history. Indeed, the world of 1984 is Orwell's own interpretation of a world with socialism as its only form of government, and how he thought socialism would naturally evolve.
The sense of paranoia and the disturbing way one could look at this new age as a possible future for the human race is immense, where everyone is as politically correct as can be. Children turn in their parents to be killed by the government for thoughtcrime, and people watch extremely gory movies and laugh their heads off when the children and their mother get pumped full of lead from a helicopter. Wars that may or may not really be going on, constant missiles going off around the towns, blowing up hundreds of people everyday, leaving the others left alive without a sense of fear because they know that Big Brother, the father figure of the party, will save them from their enemies, all these features add to the unusual background of the story. Winston himself works at the Ministry of truth, and basically writes some of Big Brothers speeches, creates imaginary hero's of war to raise the morale of the people, rectifying history books and novels to better fit the parties beliefs, and the creation of propaganda. I found it interesting and ironic that Orwell would make the main character, who despises the party inwardly, work for the very ministry that keeps the lie a reality.
I could safely recommend this book to anyone who likes English literature, or likes to think and ponder of an idea or thought. Because I found the whole premise of the book incredibly enjoyable and thought-provoking. It all seems so believable, like Orwell saw all the gaps in the theory of his novel and his invented culture, and made sure to cover them all. It takes you to another world politically, but isn't fanciful about it; in fact, when I think of this new London and Oceania, I think of a very gritty, dirty and rusty nation.
I really loved part I of the book as it is more about introducing you to Oceania and the Party's rules/beliefs rather then the progression of Winston as a character and his situation. "War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength" is the slogan for the party, and it is repeated many times throughout the novel. I think that it was a great yet practical way for Orwell to sum up the attitude of the party and the setting of the novel in just nine words. 1984 truly is a classic of English literature. It will, and has, stood the test of time. It feels like this book has hardly aged a day, because of the detailed yet simple writing method that Orwell uses. As long as the English language remains the same, one could read this book and understand what Orwell is portraying in 1984. Because it relates to basic human fears of always being watched and the fear of speaking out and being your own person, someone who thinks for himself. The novel has a universal character to it. Anyone could relate to it; not necessarily paranoia, but just that feeling like you cant quite speak your mind fully for one reason or another.
Book Review: The classic work on totalitariansim
Summary: 5 Stars
With the exception of "Animal Farm," it would be hard to think of a work of satire in the English language that is as powerful as "1984" (actually "Nineteen Eighty Four"). Whereas the Whig-Tory squabbles that make up the background of "Gulliver's Travels," are mostly forgotten now, the totalitarian essence of Airstrip One still haunts the imagination of the First World. No other major novel this century has produced so many memorable terms. Not simply fantasies of universal surveillance, but also "Newspeak," "Doublethink," "the Ministry of Truth," "Sex Crime" "Thoughtcrime," "Two Minute Hate," "Memory Hole," "Room 101," "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever." Indeed, not since Dickens has there been such a novelist so much on the popular consciousness.Since there are already several hundred reviews in praise of this book, I will devote the rest of this review to providing some reservations. It is often said that Orwell is a master analyst of totalitarianism. Dead wrong, in my view. On the Nazi side of the Molotov-Ribbentrop symbiosis, Orwell has rather little to say. There is no systematic analysis of Nazism, no evaluation of Nazi terror, and, in retrospect most damning of all, no real appreciation of the singular importance of the Holocaust. A look at "Revenge is Sour", which opens up the fourth volume of Orwell's collected journalism, reveals his limitations dramatically. However just and liberal his opposition to revenge is, Orwell's account fails because he has never had any experience which could make him understand those feelings. It is like reading a denunciation of pornography from a cardinal who has been blind from birth.
What is most powerful in Orwell's account is his satire on Communist dishonesty. (About Nazi irrationalism and fanaticism he has little to say.) Why Oceania commits the barbarisms it does is more open to question. Rather oddly, given his frequent skepticism about Progressive pieties, Orwell appears to believe that a growing economy would be in itself sufficient to provide the goods and services a just society needs. Since the three world states wish to prevent that, they encourage endless war which wastes any surplus, and which supports their own regimes by permanent war psychosis. The result is an endless stagnation, and a horrifying stability which could last forever.
Now an economic slowdown was clearly a problem with the Soviet Union in the last decades of its life, but equally clearly it was not intended to be that way. More importantly, the worst Communist atrocities, Collectivization and the Great Leap Forward were attempts to radically change society. Soviet Stalinism was a society that went through every sort of radical change imaginable. It was not a society whose crimes were rooted in stasis.
Other objections. England no longer exists, there is only "Airstrip One." Orwell set his nightmare world in England to challenge his countrymen's complacency. But arguably he reinforced it by showing that it could only occur in an England which was already dead. It was perhaps this aspect that appealed to Czeslaw Milosz and other Polish exiles who viewed their own country as an innocent swamped and threatened by Russian aggression imposing a thoroughly UnPolish society. While this view had a great deal of truth to it, the fact that the former Communists have won two free presidential elections in a whole, suggests that it is not the whole truth. Viewing totalitarianism as a deracinated purging of authentic local traditions has obvious limits. Clearly the Axis countries were militantly nationalist, and it is clear that Communist regimes could not have survived in China, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea without successfully appealing to some aspects of nationalism and national culture. All Communist countries appealed to local traditions (has there ever been any kind of regime that did not?), and Orwell should have taken this into account. Likewise romantic love is viewed as Winston's salvation, yet Claudia Koonz, Geoff Eley have pointed out how Nazism gained strength from its appeal to conventional ideas of family. And Richard Stites has pointed out that Stalin's policy cannot simply be viewed as anti-family.
Another weakness of the book is its view of Stalinism as one based on intellectuals. While it could be said of Lenin's dictatorship that the government was dominated by intellectuals, one could not really apply that term to Beria, Zhadanov, or Molotov. Too much concentration on the sins of a Heidegger distracts one from the far greater crimes of the Wehrmacht and I.G. Farben. But the greatest weakness of the book is O'Brien. O'Brien's lust for power is so deranged as to be pyschotic. That he lives only for others to suffer tells us nothing about how torturers work. (It does not help the book that Orwell cannot tell the metaphysical difference between a statement such as "Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939." and "2+2=4". The first is a historical fact, the second is a tautology. It would be evil to try to torture people to deny the first, madness the second.) In his portrait Orwell reveals his inability to understand such a personality. Indeed, such a person could not really be human at all. Surely in the name of all that is humane and tolerated, he must be extirpated, like a demon. Arendt's concept of the banality of evil or Sartre's view of the anti-Semite have their limitations, but they tell us more than Orwell does, as does, from the inside as it were, Celine's own later novels.
Book Review: The most unnerving novel ever written, but it must be read
Summary: 5 Stars
I do not much enjoy reading the works of George Orwell; they are far too grim and pessimistic for me. Despite their unpleasantness, however, Orwell's books are amongst the finest ever written, particularly "Animal Farm" and his masterwork, "1984". Having recently experienced "1984", my being is still in a state of disarray, as will be that of anyone who encounters the novel. "1984" challenges everything humankind stands for, examines what it means to be human, and then spits on the face of humanity. It does more than that, though - it also tears out all our insecurities and flaws, exposes them in bright sunlight, and then strips us of all confidence and hope, leaving us feeling like little more than dust in the wind. And yet still "1984" is as much a celebration of humanity as it is a ghastly warning of the dystopia awaiting us should we allow the human spirit to be corrupted.
Orwell's novel was written in 1949, shortly after the end of World War II and the detonation of the atomic bomb, and the paranoia and fear that arose from those conflicts as well as from the threat of communism (which even at this time Orwell was well aware of) clearly spawned "1984". The book is set in 1984, probably (because in the future no one can really keep track of the years). The world has been grouped into three opposing forces: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Winston Smith is a citizen of Oceania (which grew from America and England, among others), living in London. In this society, you are monitored at all time, primarily through "telescreens" placed in every room (a telescreen being a device which transmits and receives information simultaneously). When you are alone, you are never really alone. Individualism is not only discouraged against - it is forbidden. Everyone must work toward a better Oceania. Sex is frowned upon, and is to be used strictly for reproductive purposes. The only music and films are those put forth by the government, and there is no such thing really as "entertainment". One's time should be divided between work and community activies, such as joining the Anti-Sex League or, for children, joining the Spies, a group which encourages youth to turn in their parents should they commit "thought crime". Thought crime is when, even for a moment, one should think a negative thought about the government. Crime is monitored by the Thought Police, an elite and secretive government organization which "vaporizes" criminals - that is, takes offenders in their sleep and erases all records of their existence. In essence, this future society is a far more perturbing version of communism.
Winston is 39 years old and works at the Ministry of Truth, a division of government dedicated to revising old news articles so that any record of something being slightly different from the way it is at the present does not exist. (Time is shaped and controlled, even, by the government.) Winston is a dreamer, however, and he suspects that things were not always this bad. Not that that could be proven; any real documents detailing life before the last few years say only that it was very bad. One day he buys a journal and begins writing in it - an act punishable by death, should ever it be discovered by the Thought Police. He fantasizes about a future when the "proles", the majority of society, the peasants, will rise up against Big Brother (the mascot and ruler of Oceania) and overthrow the government, returning things to the way Winston believes they once were. Winston doesn't think of any way to begin this revolution on his own, however, until he receives a note from a co-worker whom he suspects to be a member of the Thought Police. Then Winston discovers the ultimate way to rebel: he falls in love.
How grievous an existence George Orwell must have led. "1984" is the work of a man not only perturbed, but horrified of the future he saw looming ahead. Fortunately, 1984 has come and gone and present society is not anywhere near as terrible as Orwell's dystopia, but under the control of George W. Bush and our current government it is growing nearer. Thus the message of "1984" comes across strong as ever, and the "inevitable" future it predicts remains the most horrific thing imaginable. Indeed, "1984" is very probably the most unnerving novel ever written.
Nevertheless, it MUST be read. It is the strongest message one could send about staying true to the ideals of those who founded the United States of America, but more than that, it is the strongest warning one could make about violating human rights. Human rights must be protected, whether the human in question is black, white, American, Japanese, man, woman, criminal, innocent. Otherwise, society will turn into the nightmare predicted in "1984", and that is the most tragic thing I can conceive.
It's endlessly terrifying, entirely bleak, and ultimately hopeless, but "1984" is a brilliant novel and unquestionably one of the greatest ever written. George Orwell set out to concoct the most powerful and timeless warning he could, and "1984" was his grandiose success. The human spirit must not be oppressed, lest all that should remain are humankind. And what is humankind without humanity?