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27 December 2005
Tue, 27 Dec 2005 17:41:00 GMT1984
George Orwell
First book I’ve ever ‘read’ as an audiobook. I don’t know if I liked it. Digressing for a moment from the actual book, it seemed that listening on my iPod (with audiobooks set to faster) took a phenomenally long time, the book clocked in at just under 10 hours. I usually read quick, and the audio can’t go as fast as my eyes without being incomprehensible.
I also usually like to make notes in the margin of pages, fold the corners of pages down to mark off stuff that merits a second look after I get all done with the book, which doesn’t work well with a recording.
But back to the book itself, I’d never read 1984. Animal farm, by Orwell, was covered in two of my classes at some point along in school, and both times I read it I made note to find a copy of 1984, but just never got around to it.
The whole NSA spying thing and all the Orwellian accusations being thrown around the political arena lately finally convinced me, and I’m glad society has yet to come to Orwell’s visions.
The scariest part for me wasn’t the civilian surveillance, but the government control of history. Control of the present is the equivalent to control of the past, also equivalent to power.
Somewhere in part three, where O’Brien digresses from torturing Winston long enough to explain what the aims of the Party were – power over everything.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
Their ability to always be right, and be able to dupe the population of Oceania into believing their correctness, gives the government an air of beneficent fairness. They’re doing society such a favor, always winning the war, always improving production.
Their ability to detain and torture whomever they wish at the aptly named Ministry of Love cements that illusion of societal unity – anyone not with the party is dead, but not until their subjugation and capitulation to the party ideals (2+2 always will equal 5).
In the excerpts Winston managed to read from Goldstein’s the book, clearly the entire populated world of 1984 is a complete sham, three societies constructed to do nothing but alternately fight each other, with all individual thought stifled entirely, just to serve the upper members of the inner parties desire for power.
The whole domination of information by the party is disturbing because it’s happening now. The evolution of neocon justification for war with Iraq could have come straight from an office in the Ministry of Truth. Although it is still archived in its original form and retrievable, neither the media nor political leaders are doing anything about the lies, only echoing party lines.
The rats are funny in that they really epitomize the whole society that Winston is so sublimely against. Peoples lives are led for them through the telescreen. They’re awakened, exercised, and indoctrinated – not to mention monitored.
Big Brother has created complete control over all of them, to the point they’re leading their lives through a dilapidated and grungy London without being the slightest bit human.
Newspeak is a fun idea – the language that completely eliminates the human capacity of thought. By compressing usable vocabulary to it’s most basic and then building upon it with simple modifiers humans lose the ability to reason beyond what the state sponsored dictionary will allow them.
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Also somewhat recently
