1984

This is a wonderful book that describes a dramatically dark world ruled by Big Brother. Orwell uses vivid imagery to show you an exaggerated world where government has been given too much power. Orwell warns the reader of what government could become without the balance of power. A brilliantly written piece of literature that everyone should read at least once.

The classic original. The reason we use the term: "Orwellian". This is the book which predicted "The Lives of Others" [[ASIN:B000OVLBGC The Lives of Others]]. Much of Orwell's work is now part of our lexicon: "Big Brother". This should be mandatory reading in High Schools.

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.

You may think this is about Stalin and his Purges... it may be... but it's much more. The date is irrelavant, except that it's in the future of the author (Orwell). Our hero, Winston Smith (no accident that Winston Churchill and the most comon name, Smith, were used by Orwell), has all the right qualities: a questioning mind, a distrust of authority, and an oddball fascination with the truth...to get himself "cleansed" by the Thought Police, who torture and kill, out of "love" for Big Brother's lot of Outer Party Members. Smith has the temerity to question the nature of this power exuded by the Inner Party - for it's own sake, which seems fragile. Built on embracing "DoubleThink," where any two diametrically opposed statements are both valid, and where citizens are told which version is the truth - for that moment. Smith asks, "Does Big Brother exist?" while Inner Party member O'Brien tortures what's left of him into believing 2 +! 2 = 4 or 5, depending what the very same Big Brother decides is Truth, for today, now. Why is "1984" important? Keeping an alert eye on any government that exudes power by control and manipulating information, where the individual is sacrificed to the needs of the many, where the press is owned by the church, and where the state is unapproachable and abstract, is not only the province of the American CIA, but of any individual professing adherence to democracy. The enemy may just be our own complacency. Orwell's anti-utopia novel is a warning: we must engage in our democracy or be prepared to believe 2 + 2 = 5...and all else will follow...!

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. I am unable to adequately describe to you here how utterly amazing (also horrifying, nightmarish, grim, cold, and bleak) this book is. If you feel that you're capable of transcending to a new level of intellectual awareness and intelligence, then you're ready for this book. People who read this book that aren't ready for this transition will find the experience unfulfilling.