n  “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” n

Orwell caught me off guard. After a slow start, the novel picked up the pace. It was depressing, dark and hopeless. For some reason, every time Winston's name is mentioned, I think of Winston Churchill. This is not a story about revolution or making world a better place, but the story about a corrupted power and what you get if you connect two incompatible ideologies - fascism and Marxism. It's brilliant.

By the year 1984, the world has been divided up into three major nations - Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania. Oceania is where our protagonist lives. The one Party rules and Big Brother reigns, watches and controls everything. There's only one language and it's the Newspeak, or rather some kind of an anti-language, whose purpose is to limit speech and understanding and leads to the loss of literature. Individuality is frowned upon and leads to being labelled as a traitor of the Party. The nation is always at war, words are disappearing from the vocabulary, everyone are monitored through telecasters, even bad thoughts are a crime. As much as we know, only one man knows something is wrong and not even he is ready to fight for the change.

The world-building is so fully described, detailed and terrifying that it looks like Orwell visited such place and wrote it all down. The society in the book has no written laws, but many acts, mostly bad thoughts, are punishable by death. The main message is that censorship and brainwashing are a key to a greater power.

Orwell explores the idea of how we are controlled in life and how we control others in return. At times, he suggests war brings peace and unity, whether it's the war with ourselves or with others. I don't think that anyone has done a better job in showing realistic nightmare of a society without basic civil rights and a government with complete and unchallenged control. I believe every single person who had read this book recognized some similarities between the plot and the societies nowadays.

It's a cold and cruel vision of the world in which people can be forgiven for hating and violence. This novel brings up a few questions. Does controlling the truth and history enable us to control how other people think? Who is the real enemy? Is it a few sociopaths who control everything or the rest of us when we act like sheep? It bring up the everlasting dilemma - was Hitler really the one to blame or 90% of Germans who voted for him? Those methods of controlling life will eventually kill what makes life worth living. Freedom of mind is something we all should take for granted. We all want to believe we’re untouched by governments' propaganda, but are we? Why humans feel the need to destroy and control each other? This book is bleak, lifeless, frightening, disturbing and extraordinary. A book from 60 years ago, set 30 years in the past, is still horribly relevant today.

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

And let's not forget the most famous and disturbing 2+2=5. When you think about it, ever since tribes were formed, maybe even before that, there always was some kind of a war. Even today we can speak of informal Third War that is happening right know in Africa and Asia. It's almost like humans feel more comfortable in war than in peace.

"Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing."

This quote speaks for itself.

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

This sentence is crucial for the last third of the book. For those who haven't read it yet, there is only one way to find out what Orwell meant with this quote. READ THE BOOK NOW. I must admit, the ending wasn't what I have expected, though there was no other way it could've ended. I won't say it's was a tragic ending, but it was necessary.

Winston is smarter than many other citizens, but he is also discontent, paranoid, weak-willed and passive-aggressive. He's not special in any way nor young, attractive or strong. He doesn't find strength within himself, he doesn't "save the world". Maybe the fact that he's unsuccessful is what is important about 1984. He tries, he fails, and he could be any one of us.

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”

Well, at least he had a goal.

Winston's relationship with Julia was tender and a necessary escape from the reality. Unfortunately, their bond is established purely on physical attraction. He treats her like she's a sex toy. He thought of her as someone with limited intelligence and had to be patiently told each detail that others could immediately comprehend. In a way, Julia is our true hero of the novel because she was the only one who made even small attempts at being genuinely happy.

“You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.”

One of the rare humorous moments in the book.

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Çok etkileyici bir korku ütopyasi ,herkeze Gönül rahatlığıyla tavsiye edebileceğim kült bir roman.1984 distopya alanında yazılmış en iyi romanlardan biri, sisteme sıkı bir eleştiri niteliğinde. Ve ayrica Orwell'ın hayal gücüne hayran kalmamak imkansız.

İllede okuyun diyebilmek ne güzel.

This classic dystopian nightmare remains as relevant in the 21st C as it was when Orwell published it in 1948. The story of Outer Party member Winston Smith having his brief glimpse of truth and even love with Julia before being literally eaten alive by his erstwhile revolutionary but solidly IngSoc party operative O'Brien is heartbreaking. On one hand, the fact that Winston does get a brief instant of revelation and pleasure is a sort of victory, but it is so short-lived and so brutally repressed that it is disheartening.

The other protagonist is, of course, the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Big Brother who glares out of every wall, who watches everyone's every move through the telescreens and who enforces strict adherence to the principles of doublethink and harsh repression of thoughtcrime via his ominous Thought Police. These figures have all become, since, figures of the popular imagination. Of course, in the 70plus years since the book was published, the Stalinist system and the East German system came very close to the totalitarian society that Orwell described. I think it can be argued that, although the division of the world into three competing but equal sides never happened, we are in a state of perpetual war (the one in Afghanistan run by the US has been running for nearly 18 years with no goal and no end in sight) and perhaps with webcams and the spyware that Edward Snowden warned us about, we have pretty much telescreens as well. My understanding is that in China, the screens in many places have been connected to AI systems with facial recognition and thus we are only a baby step away from Thought Police-style enforcement of the conformance of ideas.

One of Orwell's central questions in 1984 is how and why it is perpetuated by fellow human beings with such awful results (massive pollution, rampant hate, the total lack of love or positive passion, etc). O'Brien explains this during Winston's imprisonment: it is all about power which becomes both an ends and a means and, according to O'Brien, thus perfects all the previous systems of totalitarianism in its purity and simplicity.

As an American who detests Trump and Trumpism, the sections that struck me the hardest as relevant to today were:
1/ when Julia and Winston are in the hidden apartment and the differences between their philosophies (hers being a generation after that of Winston) where Julia says 'Who cares? It's all one bloody war after another, and one know the news is all lies anyway." (p. 161). This brings home to me how Fox&Friends works and how insidious it is with Trump attacking the veracity of the media. Unfortunately, this has worked completely and irrefutably for the 38%.
2/ In this same discussion, Talking to her, he realised how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did they no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. (p. 163) The piece I italicized is important because it is a manifestation of how keeping people stupid, you can manipulate them to accept things like children in cages, 4-month old babies standing trial, and the non-stop lies coming out of the White House and the Senate.
3/ In the famous forbidden book which Winston reads before his struggle abruptly ends, the sinister layout of the system is described: Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with War, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contraditions that no power can be retained indefinitely...If human equality is to be for ever averted - if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently - then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity. (p. 225) I found this particularly terrifying, but it makes some sense out of how morally high-minded evangelists could continue to point to morally decrepit Trump (forced to pay a $2M fine for frauding people with his own charity).
4/ The image that O'Brien gives Winston of society before obliterating his free will is iconic and graphic: 'Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.' (p. 280) This is precisely what I see behind the crispy rictus-like smiles and narrowed, angry eyes on photos from Trump rallies, that desire for an orgy of violence.

Winston, of course, is released from the Ministry of Love as a changed, subservient man. He is given a deadend job (that as described on page 307 resembles many many of today's corporate jobs) and loves Big Brother. Will the next generation of Americans (and Brazilians and Hungarians and Poles and Italians...) break this pattern which their far-right wing leaders are trying to impose on history? Or will they coalesce into faceless masses screaming hate into the eternal night?