Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell

The author• Born Eric Blair 1903, died George Orwell 1949.• Classical education at Eton - won scholarship• Worked as a Colonial Officer in Burma –

resigned 1927– he hated authority– he hated injustice

‘I knew I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’ The Hanging.

Nineteen Eighty Four is a satire on trends in international politics at the end of WW2.

Orwell’s intention is to draw attention to the oppression and cruelty as he saw in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and even the behaviour of some Western countries.

George Orwell

- considered himself a truth writer

- was a social reformer

- was involved in the Spanish civil war and found it far more complicated than he first imagined.

- said, “History is written by the winners.”

Slogans of “The Party”

Context of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• based on Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

• Most detail from Nazi Germany.

• Once a goal is reached in a totalitarian society it is replaced immediately by another.

Soviet Russia

• The theories of Karl Marx were more than fifty years old when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917.

• The response of people around the world was one of hope, that this was the beginning of an International workers’ movement that would bring Communism into

existence.

Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system that strives to regulate nearly every aspect of public and private life. Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of state terrorism.

As its name suggests, Totalitarianism is a political system that strives to regulate nearly every aspect of public and private life. Orwell’s Totalitarian society (Ingsoc) was aimless – “we are interested solely in power...if you want a picture of the future...imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.” (O’Brien pg 280)

Joseph Stalin

(born Iosef Besarionis dze Jughashvili )

18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953)

Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's

Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. In the years following Lenin's death

in 1924, he rose to become the leader of the Soviet Union

.

• Stalin launched a command economy, replacing the New Economic Policy of the 1920s with Five-Year Plans and launching a period of rapid industrialization and economic collectivization. The upheaval in the agricultural sector disrupted food production, resulting in widespread famine, such as the Soviet famine of 1932-1933, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor.

During the late 1930s, Stalin launched the Great Purge (also known as the "Great Terror"), a campaign to purge the Communist Party of people accused of corruption or treachery; he extended it to the military and other sectors of Soviet society. Targets were often executed, imprisoned in Gulag labour camps or exiled. In the years following, millions of ethnic minorities were also deported.

Big Brother is Watching YOU

The face of a man...with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features Pg 3, 1984

Background to Nineteen Eighty-Four

• The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is based upon two totalitarian dictatorships, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

• The world of Ingsoc (English socialism) bears strong resemblances to the Soviet Union, but much of the detail of the life comes from Germany.

EVER since I have been scrutinizing political events, I have taken a tremendous interest in propagandist activity. I saw that the Socialist-Marxist organizations mastered and applied this instrument with astounding skill. And I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties.

Nazi Germany

Mein Kampf by Adolf HitlerVolume One - A Reckoning

The Nuremberg Rallies

After 1933, the rallies were held in the first half of September under the label of ("National Day of the (Nazi)Party of the German People"), which was meant to symbolize the [apparent] solidarity between the German people and the Nazi Party.

• Like Stalin, Adolph Hitler denied his subjects access to the truth. His Third Reich “can be read as a war against memory – an Orwellian falsification of reality...” (Primo Levi) Oceania conducts an unceasing war on memory-evidence that conflicts with the latest official line is systematically destroyed & a false trail is laid in its place.

•We do not intend to use the radio only for our partisan purposes. We want room for entertainment, popular arts, games, jokes and music. But everything should have a relationship to our day. Everything should include the theme of our great reconstructive work, or at least not stand in its way. Above all it is necessary to clearly centralize all radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones, to introduce the leadership principle, to provide a clear worldview, and to present this worldview in flexible ways.

- Goebbels

Children of the revolution

In the Soviet Union,young people were encouraged to join the political group. They were called Young Pioneers (aged between 7-13) and later called Komsomols.

If you were a Komsomol member you got into university automatically, so there was great pressure to join.

Hitler Youth

• "My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be knocked out of them. In my Ordensburgen a youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back. A violently active dominating, intrepid, brutal youth - that is what I am after". Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey. "I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men.

Hitler youth flourished…

What does this remind you of?

“How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal, - tall muscular youths and deep bosomed maidens, blond haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree –existed and even predominated”

Nineteen Eighty-Four p63.

“In the schools it is not the teacher, but the pupils, who exercise authority. Party functionaries train their children to be spies and agent provocateurs. The youth organizations, particularly the Hitler Youth, have been accorded powers of control which enable every boy and girl to exercise authority backed up by threats. Children have been deliberately taken away from parents who refused to acknowledge their belief in National Socialism. The refusal of parents to ‘allow their children to join the youth organization” is regarded as an adequate reason for taking the children away.

•  (School teacher letter to a friend 1938)

Compare…[

[But] men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments must be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. (Sigmund Freud.)

With....

Always …..there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of

trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

(O’Brien Nineteen Eighty-Four p.280)

Sigmund Freud – father of psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud

Adolf Hitler's 1933 rise to power by democratic majority in Germany made Freud a personal historical witness to the phenomenon that he had previously attempted to account for in psychoanalytic terms in his writings.

Hitler, Freud and Nineteen Eighty-four

"I am beginning to comprehend," he wrote, "some of the reasons for Hitler's astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman [Catholic] church, he is restoring pageantry and color and mysticism to the drab lives of 20th Century Germans. This morning's opening meeting...was more than a gorgeous show, it also had something of the mysticism and religious fervor of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral. The hall was a sea of brightly colored flags. Even Hitler's arrival was made dramatic. The band stopped playing. There was a hush over the thirty thousand people packed in the hall. Then the band struck up the Badenweiler March...Hitler appeared in the back of the auditorium and followed by his aides, Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Himmler and the others, he slowly strode down the long center aisle while thirty thousand hands were raised in salute."

Nineteen Eighty-Four

• A novel that is also an essay

• Winston’s experience is typical of what happens to people in Ingsoc.

• Winston’s journey to the Ministry of Love (Torture Chambers) is inevitable from the time he picks up the diary.

Why keep a diary?

Anne Frank keeps a diary to explore what she feels and reflect on what she knows.

She also keeps it as a way of comforting herself.

This activity is difficult for Winston because the activity of diary writing becomes impossible.

No privacy exists.

‘Big Brother is watching you.’

• Surveillance and control

The people of this society are constantly being watched by telescreens (monitors that have an ability to project images and take in images)

They are also watching each other. Any small facial gesture or sigh can give you away.

It doesn’t matter if you are innocent

Cameras everywhere!

Big Brother is Watching

YOU No joke or popular TV show – he really was watching!!!

Part I chapter 5 – key…Syme ‘venemously orthodox.’

Ability of Syme’s brain to disengage from reality, to think without feeling.

Parsons - pathetic, ignorant, manipulated.

The nightmare of his children.

People’s capacity to ignore present suffering.

Duckspeaker in the midst of noise.

Bad food, crowded lifts

Some themes…The deprivation of privacy

The prohibition of sex.

The destruction of history.

The essential nature of memory.

An appreciation of the past.

The ultimate fallibility of the human mind.

The human need for freedom

• In the society Orwell imagines, people could not:– Love who they want– Work where they want– Walk where they want– Eat what they want– Write anything down– Weren't allowed to have memories

What is someone willing to risk for freedom?

From Nineteen Eight-Four

• Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If this is granted, all else follows.

• Thoughtcrime does not entail death, thoughtcrime IS death.

Things you need to take note of when reading the text:

• The “new” language. Any term that is unfamiliar to you should be noted down and defined. At the start of the novel most words are defined or explained.

• Words/terms like: newspeak, minitrue, thoughtcrime, proles, Ministry of Love, Hate Week. Doubleplusgood, duckspeak, Oceania

Newspeak

The official language of Oceania. Newspeak is "politically correct" speech taken to its maximum extent

Oceania –

One of the 3 Superstates. (Political System: Ingsoc) Winston Smith's home. Comprised of North and South America, Britain, Australia, and southern portions of Africa. Newspeak is the official language of Oceania, but standard English is still spoken by many.

The Three Superstates

• In the world of 1984, language is reduced, so that thoughts are also reduced

Education

• Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we will make thoughtcrime virtually impossible, because there will be no words to express it.

• “In fact there will be no thought. Orthodoxy means not thinking. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness”

• People believe what they are told because doubting a fact means death. People just switch off

The importance of history

• One of Winston’s jobs is to change the past so that it “fits into” the present beliefs of those in power.

• No one values history, even personal history is worthless.

Memory and creativity

Remembers his mother.

His mother’s suffering.

His adult awareness of his mother’s suffering.

His mother’s loyalties.

The impossibility of feeling sorrow.

Julia and he make love because it is a political act

Human connections

• Sex is seen as a nasty thing you do to have babies.

• “When you make love…you feel happy and don’t give a damn about anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that….If you are happy inside yourself why would you give a damn about Big Brother”

Loyalty to the party transcends even family ties.

All marriages are arranged to produce children to serve the state. From the time that these offspring are very young, they are trained as spies. Many children, turn their parents in to the Thought Police. Neither the parents nor the children are supposed to have any love for one another. There is no love in the world of Big Brother.

Buys diary to communicate with future.

Regimented life.

‘You had to live, did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.’

Outraged by demands party makes on people’s intellects.

Outraged by party’s attempt to destroy sexual instinct.

Relationship with Julia allows him to feel human.

Capable of recalling and thinking.

‘These fragments have I shorn against my ruin,’

Winston.

JuliaNot intellectual as is Winston

Resourceful, spontaneous, guiltless.

Natural, but has not thought to the degree Winston has.

Falls asleep as Winston reads Goldstein.

Does not care if the party invented aeroplanes or not

O’Brien

Contrast between O’Brien’s burly physique and elegant manners.

His manner draws Winston to him.

An indication of Winston’s despair.

When torturing, he adopts different personas.

Perfect at doublethink - the power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accept both of them.

The Proles

• - Proletarians or lower, working classes. Approximately 85% of Oceania's population are in this class. Members of the party viewed them as animals. They are not as rigidly observed as members of the party, and very few (if any) have telescreens in their home. They are permitted to indulge in pornography, prostitution, and other acts considered thoughtcrime, simply because it would be impossible to observe all of them as rigidly as the party observes its own members. Plus, allowing them to indulge in these "little joys" helps to keep the masses content.

Is Nineteen Eight-Four a novel of despair?

NO – George Orwell offers a political choice between the protection of truth and a slide into expedient falsehood for the benefit of rulers and the exploitation of the ruled.

It is a subversive novel, a protest against immoral rulers, the authoritarian in every personality and unquestioning conformism

Nineteen Eight-Four can be seen as an account of the

forces that endanger liberty and the need to resist them

  A scene from one of Winston's drug-induced hallucinations while in the Ministry of Love: he and O'Brien look out upon the rolling hills of the Golden Country.

  John Hurt as Winston Smith in the Chestnut Tree Café, in the final scene from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984).

http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/