YOU. ARE. THE. DEAD. Oh my God. I got the chills so many times toward the end of this book. It completely blew my mind. It managed to surpass my high expectations AND be nothing at all like I expected. Or in Newspeak "Double Plus Good."

Let me preface this with an apology. If I sound stunningly inarticulate at times in this review, I can't help it. My mind is completely fried.

This book is like the dystopian Lord of the Rings, with its richly developed culture and economics, not to mention a fully developed language called Newspeak, or rather more of the anti-language, whose purpose is to limit speech and understanding instead of to enhance and expand it. The world-building is so fully fleshed out and spine-tinglingly terrifying that it's almost as if George travelled to such a place, escaped from it, and then just wrote it all down.

I read Fahrenheit 451 over ten years ago in my early teens. At the time, I remember really wanting to read 1984, although I never managed to get my hands on it. I'm almost glad I didn't. Though I would not have admitted it at the time, it would have gone over my head. Or at the very least, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it fully.

From the start, the author manages to articulate so many of the things I have thought about but have never been able to find a way to put into words. Even in the first few chapters I found myself having to stop just to quietly consider the words of Mr Orwell.

For instance, he talks about how the act of writing itself is a type of time travel. It is communicating with the future. I write these words now, but others may not discover them for hours, weeks, or even years. For me, it is one time. For you the reader, it is an entirely different one.

Just the thought that reading and writing could one day be outlawed just shivers my timbers. I related to Winston so much in that way. I would have found a way to read or write.

The politics and psychology of this novel run deep. The society in the book has no written laws, but many acts are punishable by death. The slogan of the Party (War is Peace...) is entirely convoluted. Individuality is frowned upon and could lead to being labeled a traitor to the Party.

I also remember always wondering why the title was 1984. I was familiar with the concept of Big Brother and wondered why that wasn't the name of the book. In the story, they don't actually know what year it is because so much of the past has been erased by the Ministry of Truth. It could very easily have been 1981. I think that makes the title more powerful. Something as simple as the year or date is unknown to these people. They have to believe it is whatever day that they are told it is. They don't have the right to keep track. Knowledge is powerful. Knowledge is necessary. But according to Big Brother. Ignorance is strength.

1984 is written in past tense and has long paragraphs of exposition, recounting events, and explaining the society. These are usually things that distance me from a book and from the characters, but Orwell managed to keep me fully enthralled. He frequently talks in circles and ideas are often repeated but it is still intriguing, none the less. I must admit that I zoned out a bit while Winston was reading from The Book, but I was very fascinated by the culture.

Sometimes it seems as though the only way to really experience a characters emotions is through first person. This is not the case with this book, as it is written in third person; yet, I never failed to be encompassed in Winston's feelings. George manages to ensure that the reader never feels disconnected from the events that are unfolding around them, with the exception of the beginning when Winston is just starting to become awakened. I developed a strong attachment to Winston and thrived on living inside his mind. I became a member of the Thought Police, hearing everything, feeling everything and last but not least, (what the Thought Police are not allowed to do) questioning everything.

I wasn't expecting a love story in this book, but the relationship between Julia and Winston was truly profound. I enjoyed it even more than I would have expected and thought the moments between them were beautiful. I wasn't sure whether he was going to eventually betray Julia to the Party or not, but I certainly teared up often when it came to their relationship.

George has an uncanny ability to get to the base of the human psyche, at times suggesting that we need to be at war for many different reasons, whether it's at war with ourselves or with others. That is one thing I have never understood: why humans feel the need to destroy and control each other.

It seems that the main and recurring message in this book is about censorship and brainwashing. One, censorship, is limited and little exposure to ideas of the world; the other, brainwashing, is forced and too much exposure to a certain ideas. Both can be extremely dangerous.

Inside the ministry of Truth, he demonstrates the dangers of censorship by showing how the Party has completely rewritten the past by forging and abolishing documents and physical evidence. We also spend quite a bit of time with Winston in the Ministry of Love, where the brainwashing takes place. Those who commit thoughtcrime are tortured until they grow to love and obey Big Brother and serve only the interests of the Party.

A common theme occurred to me throughout the book, although it wasn't necessarily referenced consistently. The good of the many is more important than the good of the one. There are so many variables when it comes to this statement and for the most part it seems natural to say, "Of course, the many is more important than the one", but when inside Winston's head, all that I began to care about was his well-being and not if he was able to help disband or conquer the Party and Big Brother. I just wanted him to be at peace.

Whether or not the good of all is more important than that of the one, I can't answer. I think most people feel their own happiness is more important than the rest of the world's, and maybe that's part of the problem but it's also human nature. I only wish we could all accept one other regardless of belief and culture and not try to force ways of life onto other people. Maybe I'm naive for thinking that way, but so be it.

I almost don't know what to think about this book. I'm not even sure my brain still works, or if it ever worked right at all. This book has a way of making you think you know exactly what you believe about everything and then turning you completely upside down and making you question whether or not you believe anything at all about anything. It's the strangest thing. Hmmm. Doublethink? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Everything about this book is captivating. It's groundbreaking yet at the same time, purely classic. Ahead of its time, yet timeless. From Big Brother to the Thought Police, I was hooked and wanted to know more about it all.

Basically, I think everyone should read 1984 at some point. You really have to be in the mood to work at reading it, though. But it's all worth it in the end. It's absolutely incredible and I loved it. I don't re-read many books but this will definitely be one of them. It is a hard read, but more importantly, it is a MUST read.

2020 view: Winston Smith lives in Airstrip One (formerly G.B.) in Oceania, and spends his days being monitored and watched as he completes his task of changing the past on command, by re-editing public data and media! On his way home, he is also watched and monitored, and the surveillance continues in his home, everywhere in his home? When Winston joins in the mandatory Two Minutes of Hate he catches himself hating their omnipotent leader, Big Brother, and is scared that the Thought Police may catch-on... yeah I said it, the Thought Police.

In this wide ranging and detailed dystopian read Orwell goes to town on what a world would be like with total government over-reach, deep state mass surveillance, and the extreme regimented repression of all the privileged people's (non-Proles) minds, bodies and souls! Like Animal Farm this is another ode to the betrayal of Socialism and Revolution caused by the ascension of Stalin in the Soviet Union. On top of the multiple themes, there's is also a readable and compelling story. And as I write this I am looking at the Donald Trump led Government's response and behaviour in regards to the protest against police brutality to Blacks, and this story still resonates. 9 out of 12.

2005 view: Alongside Animal Farm there's nowhere to go with these must-read books. They are not brilliant, but they are part of modern culture, especially for readers. For me titling the book with a year, makes it that much harder for a modern reader to appreciate this 1949 published book, as one can't help but start comparing Orwell's 'predictions' to the reality. Still, he did deal with some key issues, and very importantly he tried to deal with how this world would impact on the individual. One of the most important and essential dystopia books ever written? 7 out of 12.

Praise the lord and pass the amunition, I am finished with this beast of a book. My brain feels like sludge, I just want to crawl into a hole and forget all that was engrained into my poor head. Why, oh why did I have the noble idea to read such a monster? How am I supposed to rate such s#@$?????
I believe, like some of you that this might have been better had I read it in a class or with a group. Alone it was fingernails to chalkboard miserable.

After reading this, it just makes you feel hopeless.

Hallelujah, it's over. Never again, Orwell.... Never again!

Sidenote: I did a little experiment on facebook about this book... I wrote in my status that I was reading '1984', anybody have any opinions? Almost everyone of the commenters wrote how much they enjoyed this book and how it was one of their favorite books ever. While I am sure that maybe 1 of them was being truthful, I have to doubt atleast half of them..... Now I ask, Why do people lie about certain books? Do they think it makes them look smarter? Cooler? Well-rounded? I just don't get it, if you don't like something you don't like it. It's not neccessary to like it for classic book sake. This might not be making sense to some of you.... maybe you would have to know the people who were commenting, I don't know. But, I am sure all of you have been in a bookstore or talking with a co-worker, etc., and they spout out some well known "hip" book that they just 'adore'. You know this person and it's hard to see them reading period, much less what they are talking about.

I guess my point is, don't be a fake book talker. Like it, Yay. Don't like it, Yay. I'm not going to think less of you for not liking something you "SHOULD" like by literary standards.

Rant over.

misogyny at its finest but this was written 76 years back so okay.

Well, shit. That was depressing.



On the upside, the government doesn't actually need Big Brother to keep an eye on us, as we freely head to the internet to type out every excruciating detail of our lives - all while taking pictures of ourselves and then tagging our location.
Bravo, humans!

Ok, but in all honesty, I wasn't all that crazy about this book. There were a lot of things I thought were just bananas. I mean, I get that it's a cautionary tale, but there was just nothing that represented any sort of faith in humanity. While I do see a lot of parallels in this story to the worst and most ignorant parts of us, there's still a lot of good out there.
Every day people commit selfless acts of kindness.
Every. Day.
No, it's not always newsworthy stuff when it happens, but it does happen.
I don't know if Orwell really thought this sort of thing was possible or if it was just his hyper-fantasy version of the worst-case dystopian landscape, but there's just no way you could pull off a lot of this stuff.



Kids turning on their parents? Okay, yes some of the kids would have but some kids are just born to be little shits. But all of the kids? No. Sorry, children with abusive parents love them despite the fact that they were horrible to them. It's hard for children to break away from even the worst family. Most of us tend to seek our parents' approval well into adulthood - usually chasing it until the day we die. The idea that you could completely break down every family like that is unlikely.
No friendships? I don't think so. It's a very human thing to bond with other people and I think it would be hard to irradicate it all. Just like the natural bonds between parents and children, the bonds of friendship and loyalty would be difficult to erase completely across the board.
Loveless marriages? Ok, that would be a bit easier, I'll admit. Still, even with everything arranged to be ridiculously bland and state-sanctioned, you'll have love creep in.
Also, it appeared to me that Orwell thought women (on the whole) could simply be taught to hate sex. Like we don't have urges and have to be coaxed into getting horizontal by men? Religious organizations have been trying to do that for centuries, and yet, here we are.




Now, the idea that we can be misinformed and misdirected as to what is really going on in the world? Yes. But that shit has been going on since the dawn of time. If you think fake news is new, you're an idiot.
Also, the concept of getting people riled up and angry over said misinformation/misdirection. Oh, yeah. And if you're nodding along thinking that it's only those other guys that are stupid enough to get sucked into the paranoid bullshit from their chosen media outlet - think again. We're all being duped and played. Just like the people in the story, we're being fed nonsense to keep us all fighting amongst ourselves.
AND WE ARE GOBBLING IT UP.
Even the words and catchphrases I see used to describe different groups are intentionally picked to sound abrasive, incite anger on all sides, and keep people arguing.



Anyway. In the end, I thought half of this was hysterical nonsense that assumed you could control love and kindness through dwindling language skills and propaganda, and half of it was an incredibly realistic version of the way the Powers That Be have been controlling us for thousands of years.
I didn't enjoy any part of this book but it's definitely worth a read.



The narrator of the audiobook I listened to was Simon Prebble and he did an excellent job.

My third time reading this has confirmed something to me.

The world is worse than I originally thought, prayed, or hoped it could be.

It's also easy to scratch the barest surface of Orwell's grand dystopia to see the truth of the world of 1948 or 1984 or 2019 or probably even 2091.

We're all doublethinking all the time. Maybe we believe we're not. Hell, I'd bet that none of us consciously maintain two contradictions in our heads as we juggle the party line... but then, maybe we do. You never know. It is probably about something personal, not political. Maybe it's about saying you love a job you hate, or a spouse, or your own body.

Just applying this to the grand sphere, that people in power got power for the sake of power, and then manipulated us all into believing that we put them there by our own free will, is just a single step further than all the other little lies we keep working so hard to convince ourselves about.

Do you like the way that we deny environmental concerns? Or the future of our energy? Or the very real idea that crop failures stemming from a cascade effect could starve us into near extinction in a single generation? How about the thought that even the most optimistic and drastic of measures in any of these realms is still going to be too little, too late?

We don't even need to look at Orwell's hate-driven society that systematically abuses its populace and then releases them once they're compliant. Just look around us, right now.

Who among us has the single overarching desire to JUST BE LEFT ALONE. Not hassled, not abused, not tormented? This is a far cry from reaching for self-fulfillment, love, and esteem.

I think we're already here. At least we're self-aware enough to know we've always been at war with Eurasia.

It's written 1948? Clearly History has its twisted ways to repeat itself..
A Note that MUST be written in the cover of every edition..

لم اتوقع أن هذا التحذير "إن هذه الرواية تحذير وليست بدليل" بهذه الواقعية، مازالت الحكومات العربية تراقب الجميع لحماية أمن الحكام..بينما مازال أمن الأفراد هزيلا..منعدما

هي الرواية التي كتبت في 1948 بعبقرية، أرسي بها جورج أورويل قواعد روايات الديستوبيا بحق
وإن كانت مستوحاه من واقع محيط به ولكن التاريخ دائما يجد وسيلة ليتكرر ويزيد وينتشر ويتوغل
هي رواية مازالت صداها في روايات شبابية تصدر حتي الأن متأثرة بها..بل وقد تكون اكثر امتاعا منها

*تحذير هام قبل البدء*
كاتب الريفيو متأثرا ويعاني أعراض "ازدواجية التفكير" بشكل خطير
فأذا لم تقرأ الرواية بعد فستستشعر ان كاتب الريفيو "مجنونا"، أما اذا قد قرأتها فستتيقن انه حتما يعاني من الجنون

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عشقت هذه الروايه لدرجه الكراهيه
احببت جمال قبح العامه، وكرهت الحريه بشده..اقتنعت باننا يجب ان نخطئ وارتعبت جدا من الصواب

وقد كرهت بشده الاجزاء السياسيه و ضجرت من تلك المقاله السياسيه الطويله "في الجزء الثاني" والتي عزمت علي ان اقرأها قراءه سريعه ..ولكن قرأت مايقرب من 40 صفحه في ساعه ونصف!! لأني شعرت انها فعلا يجب ان تقرأ بتمعن, فهي من اهم المقالات السياسية الواقعية

كرهت تلك المشاهد الجنسيه البسيطه ولعلي استشطت غضبا اذا لم تحدث
وكم كرهت تلك النهايه التي شعرت انها قُدمت كنهاية سعيده..واكرهها اكثر كلما اشعر انها فعلا ليست سعيده
لقد عشقت تلك الروايه لاني شعرت بالملل المثير طوال احداثها
لم اشعر انها كلاسيكيه,رايتها معاصره واحداثها واقعية وتدور في الوقت الحالي , ومع ذلك شعرت بملل الكلاسيكيات بها
روايه ينعدم فيها العواطف ولكني تأثرت لدرجه الدمع في احد مشاهدها
روايه عشقت فيها اشمئزازي الرهيب منها, واحداثها وشخصياتها
روايه كنت اسابق الزمن كي انهي عذابي معها..وافكر في نفس الوقت متي سأقرأها مره ثانيه..قريبا

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الاحداث
------
اذا كنت من هواة قراءة الروايات الحديثة -مثلي- واعجبتك تلك الروايات المصنفه كديستوبيا - حيث يعم المدينه او الدوله او العالم ككل الظلم و القهر والفساد والاستبداد, الدمار والتجارب اللاانسانيه - تلك الروايات مثل
The Hunger Games و The Maze Runner و Divergent
او تجربه الرائع احمد خالد توفيق المصريه يوتوبيا
  
فعليك بالبدء في تلك الروايه الكلاسيكيه للروائي العبقري "جورج اورويل" 1984
-فهي مدخل رائع لمثل ذلك النوع من الروايات, ولن تشعر أبدا انها كلاسيكية او قديمة, حتي وان كانت ترجع ل1948...قبل عنوان الرواية بأربعون عاما

يجب التنويه انه اذا كنت قراءتها واعجبتك بالفعل فعليك بقراءه تلك الروايات الحديثه ايضا- ..بالأخص العاب المجاعات

عقب الحرب العالميه الثانيه وفي وقت صراعات النازيه والشيوعيه ,فتره الاربعينات من القرن الماضي ينقلك المؤلف الي لندن في الديستوبيا التي يتنبأ بها بعد اقل من 40 عاما
ففي عام 1984 ستجد ان العالم بعد صراعاته الدمويه النوويه صار مقسما الي 3 قوي رئيسيه تتحكم في العالم بكل ما تحمله كلمه "تحكم" من معني
فتتحكم في مسكنك ومأكلك ومشربك,تتحكم في اسلوب حياتك,تتحكم في أراءك,توجهاتك
تتحكم في افكارك,مشاعرك,عواطفك..فتذكر ان الاخ الكبير يراقبك..دائما وابدا

هل العالم كله هكذا؟ كيف لك ان تعرف ماذا يحدث في باقي العالم..اصمت واستمع للاخ الكبير فحسب..لا يوجد لك سبيل تواصل مع العالم الخارجي..فكلهم عدو لبلدك
انت منعزل تماما عن العالم..لايصلك من اخباره الا ما يقوله لك الأخ الكبير - هل يبدو ذلك مألوفا لك؟؟

ستقابل مفاجأت واحداث مثيره, ثوره داخليه بعقلك,عقل وينستون البطل الذي تتعايش معه..كراهيه التمرد والشغف الشديد به
نبذ الحريه التي هي العبوديه..نبذ السلام الذي هو الحرب

بالنسبه لي ما يعيب الاحداث شيئا ما هو الجزء المطول من "كتاب حكم الاقليه" والذي ذكرني كثيرا بجو كتب الفلسفه السياسيه كتلك التي يقدمها "يوسف زيدان" وغيره من مدعي الحنكة السياسية...ولكن يقدمها جورج اورويل هنا بطريقه محايده, مفهومة ومتميزة وبالرغم من الملل الذي اعتراني في الجزء الثاني ربما اغلبه بسبب هذا الجزء والذي بالرغم من انك قد قرأت ملخصه في الجزء الاول من الاحداث الا انك ستجد انه من الصعب ان تتركه دون قراءه

ويحسب بحق للمؤلف "تعمقه الشديد"في احداث روايته ورسمها فعلا كانها عن عالم حقيقي.. "ذكرني بعبقريه اخري معاصره هي جي كي رولينج عندما تسهب في عرض مقالات من جرائد عالمها الساحر او عرض صفحات عده لاحد كتب ذلك العالم الخيالي الذي ابتكرته" وهذا ان دل علي شئ فانما يدل عن انك امام روايه ثريه لم يبخل المؤلف بها بشئ ليجعل من الخيال واقعيه فهو ايضا مزج تاريخ اوقيانيا بتاريخ تلك الاحداث العالميه الحقيقيه والمعاصره -وقت صدور الروايه - من نازيه و شيوعيه

راعني ايضا ملاحظه وجدتها علي الويكابيديا هو ان "تبخير الانسان" واعتباره لم يكن
Unperson
كان امرا حقيقيا واتبعه بتعديل الصور وذلك في الاتحاد السوفييتي في الثلاثينات في صوره لستالين مع نيكولاي يزوف رئيس الشرطه السريه والتي تم تعديلها بعد اعدام الاخير لينسب الفضل لستالين وحده في حمله التطهير الشيوعيه وليكون وحده صاحب الفضل في بناء الاتحاد السوفييتي..اي ان الامر له اصول حقيقيه

وأه من مظهر ستالين نفسه :)


وكما قلت في بدايه الريفيو ان ازدواجيه التفكير قادتني الي الجنون في هذا الريفيو
فاني من اعجابي الشديد بالروايه كنت اتمني ان لا تنتشر, ولا يتم طبعها ولا قراءتها علي نطاق واسع...فكم من اخ كبير ظهر بعدها ونفذ قليلا او كثيرا من سياسته...سواء كان علي حق وصواب في جزء من سياسته او علي خطأ
كم منا وصل الامر معه لعشق الاخ الكبير وحبه وتوقف عقله وذهنه وكأن هذا الاخ الكبير الذي نصبه لنفسه لا يخطئ؟


وايضا من اعجابي الشديد بالروايه اتمني ان تنتشر ويتم طبعها كثيرا و تقرأ علي نطاق واسع
فكم منا يجب ان يفيق ويدرك ان عليه ان يعمل بعقله ويفكر كثيرا في حريه فكره وعقله...يفكر لصالحه ولصالح المجتمع ويتخلص من سلطه الاخ الكبير عندما يراه خاطئا كاذبا او منافقا
الصور مجرد صور..لاتعبر عن راي شخصي فمابين تلك الصور ناس احترم سياستهم ولكني لا اراهم دائما علي حق ..فهم بشر اولا واخيرا بعضهم اصابوا ويصيبون قليلا و اخطئوا و يخطئون كثيرا و بعضهم العكس

تناقض؟ هذا هو مايسمي بازدواجيه الفكر التي ستجدها في تلك الروايه الرائعه بحق
اقرأها لتتعرف كيف تحكم عقلك في مايعرض عليك من تاريخ..لتحاول التفرقه بين الزيف وبين الحق
لعلنا نستطيع القضاء علي من يسيطر علينا باسم الاخ الكبير..او من يدعي انه جولدشتاين عصره..اقرأها فانها بحق
روايه مرهقه للعقل

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الشخصيات
-------
وينستون سميث
هو من ستتوحد معه خلال احداث الروايه
وهو الاختيار المناسب ,فهو الطبقه المتوسطه-ماتحت النخبة-..فهو يتوافر له الطعام والشراب والمسكن...ليس ادميا او يتناسب مع كونه احد اعضاء الحزب الخارجي وانما علي الاقل ادميا بما فيه الكفايه مقارنه بعامه الشعب ,اللاشئ , هؤلاء الذين يمثلون 85% من السكان,وهو في وضع أأمن منهم بعيدا عن اماكنهم المعرضه للقصف باستمرار

ولكنه ليس افضل حالا منهم
فقيود حريته اعظم بكثير فهو -عكس عامه الشعب-مراقب 24/7حتي في احلامه واغوار عقله الباطن فيجب ان يكون منضبطا كالمسطره..تاركا افكارك ومشاعرك وعواطفك وتوجهاتك في يد "الاخ الكبير"..في يد حزبك الداخلي والذي يمثل 2% من السكان..اسيادك

ذلك الحزب الداخلي الذي لا تعرف كيف يعيش..هل هو مثلك في تلك المعيشه..معيشه الكفاف او ما دونه؟ بالتاكيد لا, هم ليسوا كعامه الشعب الذين صاروا تحت مستوي الفقر..بل تحت مستوي الحياه نفسها, فلا يلقوا الكفاف..وحياتهم مهدده من وقت لاخر جراء عمليات القصف الحربيه التي لا احد يعرف كنهها بالتحديد


برع المؤلف في رسم شخصيته بطريقه ممتازه,تحولاته ودوافعه وافكاره بل ورسم ذكرياته باتقان وربط بينها وبين الاحداث بطريقه..عبقريه جورج اورويل فعلا ايقنتها برسمه لشخصيته
ادمعت بحق كما قلت في بدايه الريفيو في تلك الذكري التي تذكرها قبل لحظات النهايه عندما كان يلعب السلم والثعبان مع امه
تبا ها انا ارفض الكتابه عن تلك اللحظه لاني شعرت بالقشعريره الان مره اخري

بالطبع وغضبت جدا لتلك النهايه السعيده..انها ليست تلك التي تمناها وينستون وانا معاه..ومع ذلك فاني متقبل تماما ان يلقي مصيره..سعيدا

الم اقل لك؟ انها ازدواجيه التفكير تبا لها تلك اللعينه


جوليا
جوليا جوليا جوليا..اه من جوليا..لازدواجيه الفكر ظللت اعشقها واعشق فكرها واعشق ايضا فكره تحطيم راسها في اغلب الوقت
هي زميله وينستون في وزاره الحقيقه في الحزب الخارجي..زميلته الغامضه المريبه المتزمته لدرجة انك ستشعر انها روح الحزب نفسه..ولكنك ستكتشف عنها اشياء لم تخطر علي بال


اوبراين
عضو الحزب الداخلي الموقر..واحد من الساده ..ال2% من الشعب والذي من خلاله ستعرف مميزات هذه النخبه
رجل وقور..مهيب..محترم..ستشعر كم يتفهمك بمجرد نظرته
وكم من المفاجأت التي يطويها في طياتها

فستفاجأ انه مثلك ومعك في الفكر..ولعلك ستفاجأ بحق عندما تجد انه بالفعل روح متمردة تغلغلت الي هذا الحد بالحزب

روايه لن تشعر معها بالوقت..روايه ستقلب تفكيرك

وكما يقول المترجم "الرائع بحق" انور الشامي لهذه النسخه العربيه

إنها رواية تقرأ، ثم تقرأ من جديد

n
وبالفعل..الي قراءه اخري ربما للنسخه الانجليزيه المره القادمه ان شاء الله

محمد العربي
من 27 مايو 2013
الي 30 مايو 2013

Q: We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.(c)
This was meant to be a warning not a guide. Yet, somehow, it has managed to turn into a manual. Which probably was not what the author had in mind. NB! Do not ever attempt warning the public about any dastardly Party plans. They might take to it and go straight to the implementation phase.

When I read this in school, I visualized some country with harshly blatant communist/socialist/whatever regime and the rest of the naivete incorporated. And I was mistaken, see below WHY. Today, I see that this is happening in about any country. Any at all, no matter how declaratively liberal, democratic, freedom-oriented they believe themselves.

When I reread this, I couldn't help wondering why the author kept going so hard at giving this bunch of messsages, even to the point of sacrificing the literary worth of this novel.

Was he some kind of government-tenure writer, paid to promote certain ideas?
Did this freak of a novel simply go really wrong?
Or was he a visionary of quite some access to the bleak future that our society keeps moving to?
Or maybe he was simply a fruity nutter who thought himself a prophet?

Not sure. Anyway, how does one go about thinking up world populated by a Ministry of Truth (the version THEY tell you!), a Ministry of Peace (concerned with war!) and a Ministry of Love (the scary one!), complete with Junior Anti-Sex League, Thought Police hunting for 'face-' and 'thoughtcrimes', novel-writing machines, 'versificators', Two Minutes Hate, 'child heroes', 'unpersons', 'sacred principles of INGSOC', 'Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past', 'reality control', Physical Jerks (yes, and not in the way one would naturally think about such a thing), Pornosec (unmarried girls only! 'cause, they are the ones pure enough to prepare porn, you know), 'memory holes' (sorry, no porn meaning intended for this one!), 'definitive texts', 'duckspeak', 'ownlife' ('meaning individualism and eccentricity')? "Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces."

Q:
The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. (c Powerful stuff, sheer gunpowder!
Q:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. ...Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.(c)
Q:
Only the Thought Police mattered.(c)
Q:
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.(c)This definitely borrowed from Zamyatin. And it actually predates the psychological research on the effects of cold on a person. Fascinating, actually.
Q:
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.(c) Remember the scandals on the camera-snooping?
Q:
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 scrutinized.(c)
Q:
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position....
It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do....
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.(с)
Q:
A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.(c)Ok, this is clulmsily thought-up. I mean, how does one establish if they are 'fairly sure they are 39'? How exactly? By remembering all their birthdays or something?
Q:
How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.(c)Another piece where the literary merits are sacrificed to the IDEA. I'm not persuaded that the opressed dystopian people would be that bent on the grandeur of the future and the intricacies of communicating with it. A good phylosophy point but a weakness to the novel
Q:
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.(c)
Q:
He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.(c)
(WHY)Q:
The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even - so it was occasionally rumoured - in some hiding-place in Oceania itself....
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less....
the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author...(c) Can't help thinking of all the half-assed media shit storm (Facebook, hackers, etc, etc, blah-blah... all the shit that gets written about Trump, Assad, Russia, China... Any parallels with Mr Goldstein treatment and the Two Minutes Hate?
Q:
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army -row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. ...
Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia (c) I never paid attention to this before. Basically, this shows the Oceania as a Big Brother society with HQ in London warring for their Party ideas with Eurasia (Russia?+China). WTF? Orwell time-travelled or was a seer or something? This definitely wasn't about communist doctrine, the 'neckerchiefs' made me misread it all the 1st time around.
Q:
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary.(c)
Q:
He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.(c)
Q:
To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.(c)
Q:
... it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals.(c)
Q:
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!' chanted the little girl, still capering round.
... what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's greyish face. ...
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. ...
It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. (c)
Q:
... it was still impossible to be sure whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship.(c)
Q:
The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.(c)
Q:
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.(c)
Q:
He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. ...
Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. ...
Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.(c)
Q:
'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' ... Proles and animals are free.(c)
Q:
His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.(c)
Q:
Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. ... But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. ... All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. ... Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.(c)
Q:
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared.(c)
Q:
To-day he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence. ...
At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter. At six -- a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules -- he had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen he had designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he had perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches and all -- an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible to contemplate without feelings of envy. Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity and single-mindedness of Comrade Ogilvy's life. He was a total abstainer and a non-smoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty. He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally.
Winston debated with himself whether to award Comrade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit: in the end he decided against it because of the unnecessary cross-referencing that it would entail.(c)
Q:
You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? ...
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. ...
Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. ...
Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.(c)
Q:
The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.(с)
Q:
The past not only changed, but changed continuously.(c)
Q:
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.(c)
Q:
The heresy of heresies was common sense. ... Truisms are true, hold on to that! ... Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.(c)
Q:
In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed.(c)Now, that a really sad perspective
Q:
It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.(c)
Q:
At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.(c)
Q:
To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair. (c)
Q:
What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship....There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy....The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.(c)
Q:
There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out. (c)
Q:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree. (c)
Q:
'I betrayed you,' she said baldly.
'I betrayed you,' he said. (c)

1984 is not a particularly good novel, but it is a very good essay. On the novel front, the characters are bland and you only care about them because of the awful things they live through. As a novel all the political exposition is heavyhanded, and the message completely overrides any sense of storytelling. As an essay, the points it makes can be earthshaking. It seems everyone who has so much as gotten a parking ticket thinks he lives in a 1984-dystopia. Every administration that reaches for power, injures civil liberties or collaborates too much with media is accused of playing Big Brother. These are the successes of 1984's paranoia, far outliving its original intent as a battery against where Communism was going (Orwell was a severely disappointed Marxist), and while people who compare their leaders to Big Brother are usually overreaching themselves and speak far away from Orwell's intent and vision, it is a useful catchcloth for dissent. Like so many immortalized books with a social vision, 1984's actual substance is so thin that its ideologies and fear-mongering aspects can be stretched and skewed to suit the readers. If you'd like a better sense of the real world and Orwell's intents, rather than third-hand interpretations of his fiction, then his Homage to Catalonia is highly recommended.

2+2=5
وعليك اعتباراها حقيقة مُسلم بها
كيف؟
والمنطق والفكر والمعادلات والدلائل والتاريخ ...إلخ، ليس لها قيمة إذن
فالجهل هو القوة
وأين حريتك في التفكير والرأي!
الحرية هي العبودية
أسوء أنواع القمع، هي تلك التي تُمارس على العق�� والتفكير
أنت لا تملك سوى تلك السنتيميترات المربعة في جمجمتك
لكن حتى تلك، تنوء بِحملها
وملكيتها تُشكل لك خوف ورهبة من أن يظهر ما تُفكر فيه في انفعالاتك
أو على صفحة وجهك أو لغة جسدك
أو حتى أن ينطبع لديك في اللاوعي
فيُصبح أخشى ما تخشاه أن تهلوس به أثناء نومك
قمع فكري، وعملية غسيل للمخ وإعادة صياغته
للدرجة التي توصلك للتشكك في قواك العقلية
أأنت المجنون أم ما يحدث من حولك هو هذيان لا أكثر؟

أكثر الأعمال التي تُبهرني، هي تلك التي تعبث بعقلك
وتغير تفكيرك
تلك التي من المستحيل أن تقرأها ويبقى تفكيرك كما كان قبل قراءتها
تلك التي تصوّر فظاعة الواقع، تجرده وتعريه
وتكشف الحقيقة التي نتغاضى عنها، ونتجنبها
الرواية على الرغم من بعض الملل الذي يتخللها
إلا أن فكرتها تُجبرك على استكمالها
الجزء الأخير منها كارثي وصادم!

أعُجبت بفكرة كتاب غولدشتاين
تلك الحيلة التي أستخدمها أورويل
ليُوضح مقصده وفكرته بتفصيل أكبر
لنُصدم بالحقيقة أكثر

من يملك الماضي يملك المستقبل، من يملك الحاضر يملك الماضي
ووطن بماضي مُزيف، هو وطن لا مستقبل له
اسأل الله ألا يُفقدنا ماضينا، ذاك الشيء الوحيد الذي بقى لنا للتباهي به

هي كما قيل
رواية تُقرأ ثم تُقرأ من جديد

تمّت

i'm not making any point in particular...just that if you have any intention of reading a book about totalitarianism and apocalyptic government, written by a man who believed in democratic socialism as the solution...well, now might be a good time.

----
full review

I had been meaning to read this book for a long time, but I finally did it based on a friend’s (hi Dario) insistence. It took me way longer than expected to finish it, and once I managed, said friend requested (in all caps) a text-message review. Here is that unaltered review for your perusal.

Message 1: I THOUGHT IT WAS MOSTLY A VESSEL FOR A CERTAIN LINE OF THINKING

Message 2: WHICH WAS CARRIED ACROSS IN GOLDSTEIN’S BOOK AND O’BRIEN’S DIALOGUE AT THE END

Message 3: AND WHILE THOSE PASSAGES WERE SMART AND WORTHY OF PUBLICATION, THEY ULTIMATELY WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE EFFECTIVE AS AN ESSAY

Message 4: BUT NOWHERE CLOSE TO AS MANY PEOPLE WOULD HAVE READ IT AS AN ESSAY

Message 5: anyway in the end i thought much of it was unnecessary but overall it’s a deeply impressive work

Message 6: i was lowkey astonished at how long the goldstein “passages” were

Message 7: but some of the ideas there were remarkable

Message 8: i found myself skimming at some points, and then i was mad at myself for skimming bc it’s like the whole point of the book, and then i was mad at the author for conveying the most important ideas in such a lazy way

Fin.

In conclusion, yes, I am the type of nightmare-person who responds to texts by breaking up sentiments into dozens of messages.

Sorry.

Bottom line: This was good but I wish it had been one or two political opinion papers instead! Sorry again!

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

This changed the way that I looked at ideologies and changed the way I looked at leadership. Cynical, scathing, and not without its flaws, this is still a stark, haunting glimpse at what could be.

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”

Chilling.

** 2018 addendum - it is a testament to great literature that a reader recalls the work years later and this is a book about which I frequently think. The scene that I most often think is when Winston and Julia are captured.

** 2019 reread - Lost in my memory was to what extent Orwell describes and explains his nightmare.
Winston Smith cautiously and surreptitiously learns about the Brotherhood led by Goldstein and then learns all too well about doublethink.

More than just a cautionary political tale, Orwell has described an ideological abyss into which we must not gaze; a glimpse at authoritarianism power plays to which the Nazis and Soviets never descended. While we can appreciate the reminder to avoid authoritarianism and his prophetic vision, the idea that truth can be arranged through media is perhaps the most relevant for us today.

*** 2020 reread

This time around I focused on the human side of this iconic novel – especially the relationship between Winston and Julia. In the past I have somewhat overlooked Julia as a character and thought that Orwell had neglected to form a strong female character, however I now think that she is every bit as strong as Winston and plays a central role in Orwell’s message.

Whereas Winston hates the party and wants to overturn it, Julia is much more practical and realistic in her rebellion. Winston thinks about the nature of the totalitarianism in abstract ways, Julia uses the terms of doublethink against the party and makes her frank sexuality a systematic rejection of party principle.

While Orwell was forming a cautionary tale based upon his own experience in writing against authoritarian regimes like Stalin’s, Hitler’s (both actually named in the text) and by extension Moa, Mussolini and Franco, it occurs to me that the irony of Winston’s dystopia is at least to some degree focused on the party members themselves. Winston embodies the use of media as propaganda and to disseminate inaccurate statements that prop up the party. In today’s world we are already seeing this kind of abrogation of truth in favor of party purity.

Every bit as timeless and relevant as it has ever been.

*** 2023 reread -

I think we all have had a situation similar to this: we search on the internet for something and then we start seeing advertisements related to our earlier search. That seems reasonable enough, understandable at least.

What about this situation though: we have a VERBAL discussion with our spouse, alone in our kitchen, and then we start seeing advertisements about the subject of our speech.

Wait a minute. OK, I’ve got an Amazon echo, they must have heard us talking.

Wait a minute: heard us talking? In the “privacy” of our home? And who is they?

The fear of surveillance has risen to an alarming level in the past few years and we can look back to 1948 and Orwell’s tale as one source of this anxiety.

I’m in my early 50s as I write this and my generation was raised to be somewhat suspect of governmental intrusions and overreach, taught to be vigilant against totalitarianism. We lived in the time of the Soviet Union and we were taught to be mindful of surveillance and propaganda.

But what if the surveillance does not come from government?
What if what we were taught was itself not wholly correct or accurate?

A young person recently told me that they had read 1984 in high school in the past 3-4 years so this gave me some hope about the next generation.

As a press officer in the military, I had a hand, as did Winston Smith, in shaping the news and thus history. If in my little corner of history, I cropped photos, erasing some people’s involvement in an event, destroying the full accurate record of what happened, then extrapolate this ability at official omission and you can begin to see how easily can the truth be tweaked to match a desired narrative.

This book is as provocative as ever, maybe more so in our strange political climate. More than anything else, this is a thought provoking novel, we are required to think critically about what Orwell states and he invites us, page after page, to think and rethink what we know and how we have been led to know it.

If we “know” something is true, why do we know that? HOW do we know that truth? Like Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! We are asked to consider our source and to be at least a little skeptical, of everything.

In this reread, I also made notice of the casual violence that creeps up into Winston’s thoughts. Was Orwell suggesting that the subrogation of Winston’s natural feelings caused an aggressive response in him? Does injustice and tyranny lead to subconscious of animosity?

Orwell describes how Proles represent 85% of Oceania, we see the propaganda and party policy from the perspective of the party, of a party member who actually initiates the remaking of news and thus history. The Party makes up 15% and the inner party is only about 2%. It occurred to me that I’m a Prole, most of us are on the outside looking in. Like George Carlin said, “it’s a club, and we’re not in it.” Did the Proles care anymore? Did they pay attention to the “news” or were they more like Julia, and only played the part for the surveillance state?

I’m going to buy copies of this book for the young people in my life.