He loved Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell)

Member Name: robbroome

Product:	Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
Date:	23/03/09 (44 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great story . As relevant today as ever .

Disadvantages: None .

George Orwell, like many social idealists of the mid-20th century, was horrified by the political excesses of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. 1984 was Orwell's often macabre fictional interpretation of the 'perfect society' turned into a living nightmare.
Seventeen years after the novel's famed date and eight years after the fall of the Soviet Union, 1984 remains as socially relevant today as it was then.

The novel represents what has been termed a 'dystopia', where the physical needs of the masses are met at the supreme price of the human spirit. Freedom of thought is a crime, punishable by a bullet to the back of the head. Propaganda is the primary means of communication and for mobilizing the masses into action in a perpetual ideological war with Eurasia (or Eastasia? No, Oceania has never been at war with Eastasia.). Big Brother is the all-powerful, omnipresent figure who watches over Oceania as a symbol of strength, total conformity, and sheer intimidation.
And, as it was in the former Soviet Union, the government of Oceania is a monolithic bureaucracy. There is the 'Ministry of Love', whose job it is to stifle all expression of romantic feeling and instead concentrate on hate; the 'Ministry of Peace', permenantly engaged in the art of war; the 'Ministry of Truth', a shameless propaganda machine that is attempting to shrink the range of human thought by eliminating words from the English language. The new minimalist dialect is called 'Newspeak'. This is being done so that 'thought-crime' will become impossible as there would be no words left to express someone's subversive intentions, in effect silencing them.

Emmanuel Goldstein is the government sanctioned scapegoat whose function is to arouse burning hatred in the masses on cue, uniting them in that emotion against a political 'traitor'.
Orwell creates in his sympathetic character, Winston Smith, a dubious 'aparatchik,' loyal to Big Brother, but full of doubts and personal longings. His unquenchable need for truth and genuine human feeling delivers him straight into the arms of fellow functionary Julia. But their forbidden relationship is soon discovered by the sinister character O'Brien. At first, Winston believes that he is a fellow subversive, someone who understands and feels the same sense of a better life being possible without Big Brother and the party, but later on it is revealed that he is in fact a subordinate to Big Brother, but wielding considerable power and intelligence knowledge.

The couple are tortured and turned against each other. They are then released back into society as reformed citizens. But Big Brother never forgives, and he never forgets. The bullet to the back of the head will come when they least expect it.
Orwell's '1984' is a classic piece of literature that is as inspiring now as when it was first released. It takes a cue from Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' but brings the horror of a modern dystopia onto another level.It is a lasting testament to the human spirit and to a social experiment, sublime in rhetoric and lofty in principle, that went horribly wrong. Everyone should read this book at least once and learn it's lesson. Freedom is a luxury that should not be underwhelmed.

Summary: He loved Big Brother