Hello my Beautiful Watchers.
I think I might have bitten off a bit more than I can chew this time.
You know that feeling you get when the more you learn about something the more you realise
you don’t know shit about it?
I know I usually make a habit of projecting confidence here because it helps with the
job but I just thought you ought to know I’m feeling a little out of my depth on this one.
That’s not going to stop me from sharing my opinion; I’m just trying to make it less
of a disappointment for you if this review is shallow garbage.
1984 is the work of a Mr. Eric Arthur Blair aka George Orwell, an English novelist…
Huh... there’s been quite a few englishmen on the show recently, that’s not intentional
I swear.
In the very unlikely event you’re not familiar with his work already, he’s kind of THE
guy for writing about dystopias, past present and future.
He is in fact SO famous for it, much like HP Lovecraft, his name has become a descriptive
term for them.
If a society is Orwellian, shit has gone DOWN.
Though far from being his only big hits the most instantly recognisable of his books are
probably Animal Farm and 1984.
Of course there's a good chance you already know most of this because these books are
often chosen for mandatory study in schools, both in Britain and the United States.
Maybe elsewhere as well, I’m not sure, those are my countries.
I myself had to write a hideously long essay on Animal Farm when I was a young teen.
Almost flunked that class actually.
Well look at me NOW Mr. Keans!
Now who’s not applying himself huh?
I don’t think he watches Youtube.
Animal Farm is an episode for another day.
Maybe.
Hopefully not.
It's pretty much common knowledge that it's basically a retelling of the rise of the Soviet
Union in Russia but with talking animals.
1984, published in 1949, was at the time a story about the not so distant future and
Orwell's warning to the world to get its shit together or everyone could very well expect
to end up up to their eyeballs in the crapstorms he describes in his books.
Ok let’s real quick address the elephant it the room.
I find myself in a rather difficult position here because I don’t want to spend this
entire book review pointing out the disturbingly accurate comparisons between the events of
this book and modern day real life, that would instantly date this video horribly, probably
ruin the pacing, be off subject and quite frankly be no fun for me or I suspect you.
However I am not so cowardly that I intend to pretend I don’t SEE said comparisons,
so perhaps the compromise is to get an acknowledgment out of the way now, then throw my all into
the review.
The recent bout of violation after violation of our personal privacy and information online
being brought to light and the disturbing revelation that that information is being
used to manipulate us, either for profit or political gain combined with the current governments
of both America and Britain constantly proving they think they can make us believe whatever
reality contradicting “alternative” facts they want as long as they make a good sound
bite with shocking levels of success in some cases is not exactly what happens in 1984
but it would be terrifyingly fitting in amongst its pages.
The world is a fucking scary place at the moment and there might come a point soon when
we all need to make a stand on a platform that isn’t online.
Anyways let's get fictional and talk about this book already shall we?
Fair warning: I might be about to share an unpopular take on this though I’m not SURE.
People may praise me for saying it, proclaim it a “well no shit Sherlock” moment or
just lose all respect for me as a critic.
Regardless....
I find myself inescapably of the opinion that the plot of 1984 isn’t particularly important.
Or to be more precise, it's only important because it serves as a way to explore the
world it's set in.
I can’t say why for now because of spoiler reasons but the lead’s journey in this doesn't
ultimately amount to much and I think that's because this cautionary tale was never supposed
to be “don’t do what this guy did”, it’s overwhelmingly “please don’t the
let world became like it is in this book”.
Because of this possibly foolish belief of mine, a disproportionate amount of this review
is going to be given over to describing the world of 1984 as opposed to a detailed plot
synopsis.
Apologies if you find that frustrating.
The upside is most of this review will be reasonably spoiler safe.
I’ll give you a heads up if that is about to change.
The actual recent history of the world in 1984 is almost impossible to confirm as what
is considered “history” is changed pretty much constantly to suit the needs of the government
and the only supposedly independent source of information the lead comes across is highly
unlikely to be genuine.
However some of it still seems to actually check out with the way the world works so
there might be a gain of truth to it.
The best lies apparently work that way so let's go over it based on that assumption.
Sometime in the 1950s World War 3 took the form of atomic bombs being thrown every which
way.
Entire cities went bye bye all over the planet.
In the resulting aftermath the world became divided up into 3 super states.
Russia took over most of Europe and became known as Eurasia.
North and South America joined up, presumably under the leadership of the United States
and absorb what was left of the British Empire, forming the nation known as Oceania.
Some years later China, Japan, and most of east Asia formed their own super state called..
Eastasia.
Well I say it's called that.
I actually rather suspect each nation has its own name for itself and the two others.
Oceania probably keeps the names of its rivals so similar so it will be easier to edit the
history books everytime they change who they’re at war with.
The remaining part of the world is constantly fought over by the three super states, its
unlucky population being used as slave labour by whoever is in control at the time and forced
to strip mine their own land for its natural resources.
Apparently even though the three nations are perpetually at war they never make any real
effort to attack each other outside of the contested areas, aside from sending the occasional
small missile towards each others cities to kill maybe a few dozen people.
This is supposedly because each is so powerful, even if the other two teamed up they would
have no realistic chance of conquering them, so they all exist in a sort of never ending….
Well not a cold war because they do fight….
I guess a lukewarm war is the best way to describe it.
Moving onto specifics about the nation the story is set in.
Britain, now just a small part of Oceania is rather insultingly known as Airstrip One,
though London is still London.
Just before Oceana became a thing Britain had a rather nasty civil war that resulted
in a completely new socialist government taking over.
Much like the real life history of Soviet Russia and its allegory Animal Farm, the original
ideals of the new government were quickly ripped to pieces while still being touted
as the reason for its greatness.
Indeed, the socialist part of the English Socialist Party or Ingsoc quickly became in
name only, as a fascist movement quickly took over from within.
Framing the original revolutionary leaders for treason and publicly executing them.
They then instituted a very strict class system on the country, almost to the point of being
a caste system with them unsurprisingly in the role of the nobility.
Unless I’m misunderstanding something, and feel free to correct me if that is indeed
the case, oddly enough, despite Britain being only one small part of Oceania, one that appears
to have been annexed by the United States as basically a vassal kingdom, the English
Socialist Party somehow became the ruling party of the entire Super State.
Decades later, in the year 1984, the inescapable status quo within Oceania is as follows:
The “inner party” are the ruling class, the 1% and the government.
Living in luxury while the rest of the country slowly starves to death as the cost of constant
war slowly strips everyone of their basic living needs.
The “outer party” represent the middle class and work the menial or physical government
jobs, having mostly miserable lives but at least not being in immediate danger of starvation.
They are the most closely watched of the population by the party as they routinely have access
to sensitive and possibly incriminating government information and might have just enough education
to realise how royally fucked up the world is.
The remaining 85% of the population are known as the proles, the lower class…
Basically modern age peasants.
They die by the hundreds, maybe even thousands each day through starvation, poor working
and living conditions, conscription into the everlasting wars and civilian casualties of
the occasional but never ending bombs.
One of the most prevalent features of Airstrip One and the book itself is government surveillance.
The entire population is watched CONSTANTLY.
If you are a member of the outer party, having a TV screen in every room of your house with
a built in camera is legally mandatory.
This allows the government to shower you with propaganda while also keeping track of your
every activity.
While many of the proles live in houses that are too old and delaptated to support such
technology, all public areas are closely monitored 24/7.
Supposedly the members of the inner party are watched as well with only small respites
of privacy but that can’t be confirmed.
Under such close scrutiny, any kind of organized rebellion against the party is effectively
impossible.
Even the suspicion that you might harbour ill intent towards the government would be
enough to get you quietly arrested, executed and expunged from any records that prove you
ever existed.
One of the most iconic parts of the book, “Big Brother”, the name borrowed for countless
seasons of mind numbingly boring reality TV was the poster boy for the government.
And I mean that literally.
You ONLY ever see this character on posters.
He’s a nameless man with a big mustache plastered on every wall of the city with the
slogan “Big Brother is watching you”.
A phrase that's supposed to be part threat but also part reassurance that your big brother
will watch over you and keep you safe.
The other slogan or motto of the party is “War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance
is Strength”.
The highly contradictory nature of all of those statement is another huge staple of
the book.
The Party has stayed in power for so long because they have successfully forced the
population to partake in what they call doublethink.
Simplified, doublethink is the ability to genuinely believe two completely contradictory
things are perfectly and equally true.
The party has, through decades of propaganda and extreme punishment managed to train almost
everyone to believe everything they tell them, even if they have just said the exact opposite
thing mere seconds before.
There's examples of this all the way through the book, some of the most blatant ones include
when they quietly let slip that they’re going to have to reduce the chocolate rations
to 20 ounces one week then announce how happy everyone is that they had increased it to
20 ounces the next.
More impressively, mid pro war rally they change who they’re claiming their mortal
enemy is.
Like…
Mid speech….
Mid sentence they claim they’re now, and have ALWAYS BEEN fighting someone else entirely
and the crowd just accepts it, throwing down their banners that say “down with those
particular guys” and wondering how they got them in the first place.
Now I know this might SOUND like some ridiculous sci-fi shit but believe it or not there's
a shit ton of real science behind cognitive dissonance and how it’s used to break people’s
will.
Star Trek fans will get this reference, there are FOUR LIGHTS!
FOUR LIGHTS!
The idea that it could work on a massive scale is not insane, it has happened.
Possibly not quite to the level described in this book but give a propaganda machine
enough time.
A thing called newspeak features heavily in the book as well.
The english language is known for constantly changing and adopting new words for things
but apparently the government of Oceania isn’t too keen on that so they’re constantly editing
down the dictionary and banning any words they feel are superfluous or problematic for
their agenda.
They’ve been at it for quite a while and apparently believe they’ll have perfected
it by the year 2050 where the human language will be boiled down the the absolute bare
minimum words needed to impart information.
Unlike Animal Farm which is based on very specific real world events, it looks like
Orwell took inspiration from multiple totalitarian regimes for the villains of this book.
The most prevalent being Nazi Germany, surprising no one I would imagine.
The part about blatantly lying about being a socialist party is an obvious example.
Also all of the children of Oceania are forced to be a part of a clear parody of the Hitler
youth, known as “The Spies” where they’re indoctrinated into fanatical loyalty to the
party and taught the importance of monitoring one's friends and family for any signs of
dissonance so it can be reported.
Like every would be dictatorship that has ever existed, exist and probably ever will,
there is of course a villainized boogeyman for the public's anger to be directed towards
to help keep them in line.
It's usually whoever Oceania is at war with at the time but it's also a gentleman by the
name of Emmanuel Goldstein.
Yes, I’m sure it's no coincidence that Orwell gave the representative of a scapegoated minority
a Jewish name.
He wasn’t always particularly subtle.
Goldstein was allegedly Big Brother’s partner in the even better, more life controlly revolution
that took over the original revolution but there was a big parting of the ways and Goldstein
apparently ran off into the country’s underworld to start a resistance movement against the
government.
Clearly doctored video clips of Goldstein saying easily disprovable nasty things about
the government are played for a few minutes each day during a time referred to as “the
hate”, a ceremony designed to work everyone up into a murderous fervor against anyone
who would dare question their glorious leaders.
Orwell seems to have shied away from discussing the specifics of technology too often in this
book so there's no major gaffs in his predictions as far as I can see.
In fact he was bang on the money about several military developments, predicting that long
range surface to surface missiles and aircraft carriers were going to become super important
in the future, though he did call them “rocket bombs” and “floating fortresses”.
Still bloody impressive.
Very impressively he also basically predicted webcams with the combining of monitors and
cameras, that was in reality a tad later than the 80s but still.
The only thing I’m surprised he didn’t pick up on was the widespread introduction
of night vision technology.
When the lights were off the government couldn’t spy on you any more.
I mean, I’m pretty sure infrared has been around since like the second World War hasn’t
it?
So as would be expected in a society that’s super intense about regulating all information,
ownership of unauthorised books is punishable with death and basic literacy is unheard of
in almost all of the population.
The outer party is allowed to read but preferably only newspeak approved words, and writing
is discouraged in favour of using text to speak technology.
Another very impressive future prediction of Orwell’s.
Much like Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451, Orwell and 1984 shows us that authors will
always consider an attack on reading and writing to be the pinnacle example of a dystopian
society.
As a avid book lover myself I’m not disagreeing with them and there is plenty of historical
evidence to back that up, but I can’t help but think it’s a little funny that they
consider what they do for a living to be the thing we have to protect the most in all the
world.
Chastity and sexuality are recurring themes in this book as well.
The Party try to repress people’s sex drives as much as possible, telling them that sex
should be a horribly unenjoyable act done only to produce children.
This supposedly worked much more effectively on women than men, giving rise to the all
female anti sex league.
Very… unfortunately from what I can tell in the book these women are blamed for the
lack of sex in the world much more than the government that pushed it onto them.
Ok so I should probably describe the plot at least a little.
Spoilers starting from now I guess.
Winston Smith is a 39 year old low level outer party member working a job making minor amendments
to records as and when instructed by his superiors.
He is absolutely miserable with his life and secretly hates the government he works for.
He finds relief by doing things like keeping a secret diary where he talks about his dissonant
thoughts and goes to the seedier parts of London looking for relics from before the
war in shops and talking to old men in bars who remember what life was like back then.
Very unexpectedly, a young attractive coworker named Julia, who he originally took a disliking
to because he assumed she might be an informer, passes him a love note and they start a secret
sexual relationship in any place they believe they’re not being monitored.
However it all goes wrong very very fast for both of them as Winston takes a chance on
trusting an inner party member he believes is also anti-government and asks him to induct
him into the secret resistance movement that he believes exists.
Alas his friend turns out to have been part of a government sting operation designed to
root out people just like him.
He is arrested and subjected to months of physical and psychological torture, intended
to force him to accept and adopt doublethink as his new way of life.
During this, his tormentor informs him that both Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein are
fictitious characters created to give the public a focus for their love, a focus for
their hate and the party control over both.
Winston resists as best he can but is eventually broken and indoctrinated, forsaking his free
will and even his feelings towards Julia.
She is subjected to the same treatment and result.
Now a good little drone, Winston is released back into the public to enjoy his love for
Big Brother while the government finalizes his inevitable execution and shoot him in
his now thoroughly warped head.
So yeah… bit of a downer ending really but I suppose it wouldn’t be much of a cautionary
tale if Winston suddenly became a super commando, brought down the government and restored freedom
to all.
Ok let's end this review on some plot specific stuff and quick fire minor observations I
made while reading:
Ironically because of the title of the book Winston is not actually sure it even is 1984
when the story starts because the government changes facts so much even calendars are wholly
unreliable.
It seems like everyone wears spectacles in this story.
Just like…everyone.
You can tell right from the first page that there's something….
different about this book.
I mean, for starters it's really interesting how unheroic the hero is.
He’s middle aged, he’s overweight, he has rather unappealing body issues.
He’s also not particularly likable, he has SO many issues with women like seriously…
Yikes.
And even worse he basically proves that any resistance movement he would want to be a
part of has the potential to not really be that much better than the government considering
he agrees he’d be happy to help them murder or disfigure innocent children to achieve
their ends.
Good philosophy there Winston, I’m sure an ends justifies the means mentality is a
great way to go about this.
There’s no chance of that backfiring down the line with a perpetual cycle of the oppressed
becoming the new oppressors or anything.
My point is although you can’t help but feel for him and his plight in this hell world
he is not you standard protagonist, he’s far too…. human.
And an asshole.
In conclusion, I would say that by design this book is bit of a hard read.
Like I said before if it wasn’t all doom and gloom it would defeat the purpose for
which it was written.
It's not a pleasant experience, but it is an educational one, just like Orwell presumably
hoped.
If everyone read this I it would legit raise the general awareness of how potential tyrannical
governments operate and help them be more mindful of them trying to establish themselves.
I can't really think of a better endorsement for a book.
Thank you for joining me my Beautiful Watchers, as usual if you would be willing to show some
attention to that like button or artificially inflate my channel’s statistics by leaving
a comment about say... your favorite type of cheese I would be most grateful for the
support and I will see you soon.
Hello again my Beautiful Watchers.
I just wanted to take this opportunity to give you a quick reminder that there’s a
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That’s actually a very important part of the process as I use it to gauge how much
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However, if right now you are thinking, “My goodness The Dom, I can’t do that, the Llama
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