- Nineteen Eighty-Four
- “Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with.”
- “The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep the people frightened'.”
- “The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.”
- “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.”
Winston, a member of the Outer Party , lives in the ruins of London , the chief city of Airstrip One — a front-line province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania . He grew up in post-Second World War Britain , during the revolution and civil war . When his parents died during the civil war, he was picked up by the growing Ingsoc (newspeak for "English Socialism") movement and given a job in the Outer Party . Like the rest of the population, Winston lives a squalid and materially deprived existence. He lives in a filthy one-room apartment in "Victory Mansions", and is forced to live on a diet of hard bread, synthetic meals served at his workplace, and vast amounts of industrial-grade "Victory Gin ." He is deeply unhappy in his life and keeps a secret diary of his illegal thoughts about the Party . Winston is employed by the Ministry of Truth , which exercises complete control over all media in Oceania: his job in the Ministry's Records Department involves doctoring historical records in order to comply with the Party's version of the past. Since the perception of the past is constantly shaped by the events of the present, the task is a never-ending one.
While Winston likes his work, especially the intellectual challenge involved in fabricating a complete historical anecdote from scratch, he is also fascinated by the real past, and eagerly tries to find out more about the forbidden truth. At the Ministry of Truth, he encounters Julia , a mechanic on the novel-writing machines, and the two begin an illegal relationship, regularly meeting up in the countryside (away from surveillance) or in a room above an antique shop in the Proles ' area of the city. As the relationship progresses, Winston's views begin to change, and he finds himself relentlessly questioning Ingsoc . Unknown to him, he and Julia are under surveillance by the Thought Police , and when he is approached by Inner Party member O'Brien , he believes that he has made contact with the Resistance. O'Brien gives Winston a copy of "the book", a searing criticism of Ingsoc that Smith believes was written by the dissident Emmanuel Goldstein .
Winston and Julia are apprehended by the Thought Police and interrogated separately in the Ministry of Love, where opponents of the regime are tortured and executed. O'Brien reveals to Winston that he has been brought to "be cured" of his hatred for the Party, and subjects Winston to numerous torture sessions. During one of these sessions, he explains to Winston the nature of the endless world war, and that the purpose of the torture is not to extract a fake confession, but to actually change the way Winston thinks. This is achieved through a combination of torture and electroshock therapy , until O'Brien decides that Winston is "cured". However, Winston unconsciously utters Julia's name in his sleep, proving that he has not been completely brainwashed. Room 101 is the most feared room in the Ministry of Love, where a person's greatest fear is forced upon them as the final step in the re-education. Winston is dreadfully afraid of rats, and a cage of hungry rats is placed over his eyes, so that when the door is opened, they will eat their way through his skull. In his absolute terror, he tries to think of the one thing he can say to stop the punishment, and he realizes what it is. He says, "Do it to Julia!" At the end of the novel, Winston and Julia meet, but their feelings for each other have been destroyed. Winston has become an alcoholic and we know that eventually he will be killed. The one thing Winston had held on to when facing his inevitable end was that when he was killed, he would still hate Big Brother. This would be his victory, showing that the party's power was not absolute. However, the novel's conclusion reveals that the torture and 'reprogramming' have been successful; Winston realized one truth above all, 'He loved Big Brother'.
At the end of the novel there is an appendix on Newspeak (the artificial language invented and, by degrees, imposed by the Party to limit the capacity to express or even think "unorthodox" thoughts) , in the style of an academic essay.
History according to 1984
| The War of Nineteen Eighty-Four | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of World War II and the Cold War | |||||||||||
From top clockwise: The Russian invasion of Finland , the Soviet-Japan War , Clement Attlee 's socialist victory , the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty . Several historical forerunners of Orwell's world. |
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| Combatants | |||||||||||
| Americas
British Isles Australia |
Soviet Union
Europe East Asia |
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The novel does not give a full history of how the world of 1984 came into being. Winston's recollections, and what he reads from "The Book" (i.e., Goldstein 's book) reveal that at some point after the Second World War , the United Kingdom descended into civil war, eventually becoming part of the new world power of Oceania; at roughly the same time, the Soviet Union expanded into mainland Europe to form Eurasia ; and the third world power, Eastasia — an amalgamation of east Asian countries including China and Japan — emerged some time later.
There was a period of nuclear warfare during which some hundreds of atomic bombs were dropped, mainly on Europe , western Russia , and North America . (The only city that is explicitly stated to have suffered a nuclear attack is Colchester .) It is not clear what came first — the civil war which ended with the Party taking over, the absorption of Britain by the US, or the external war in which Colchester was bombed. To reconstruct it one needs to try combining the hints scattered in "1984" itself with the analysis and predictions contained in Orwell's non-fiction writings.
In articles written during the Second World War , Orwell repeatedly expressed the idea that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war, the only question being whether its end would come through a Fascist takeover from above or by a Socialist revolution from below. (The second possibility, it should be noted, was greatly supported and hoped for by Orwell, to the extent that he joined and loyally participated in "the Home Guard" throughout the war, in the futile expectation that that body would become the nucleus of a revolutionary militia ). After the war ended Orwell openly expressed his surprise that events had proven him wrong.
The most complete expression of Orwell's predictions in that direction are contained in "The Lion and the Unicorn " which he wrote in 1940 . There, he stated that "the war and the revolution are inseparable (...) the fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a textbook word into a realizable policy". The reason for that, according to Orwell, was that the outmoded British class system constituted a major hindrance to the war effort, and only a Socialist society would be able to defeat Hitler . Since the middle classes were in process of realizing this, too, they would support the revolution, and only the most outright Reactionary elements in British society would oppose it — which would limit the amount of force the revolutionaries would need in order to gain power and keep it.
Thus, an "English Socialism" would come about which "...will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word".
Such a revolutionary regime, which Orwell found highly desirable and was actively trying to bring about in 1940 , is of course a far cry from the monstrous edifice presided over by Big Brother, which was his nightmare a few years later. Still, one can see how the one may degenerate into the other (and The Party does provide "traitors" with "a solemn trial" before shooting them...)
The term "English Socialism", repeated numerous times in "The Lion and the Unicorn", is rather parochial — had events developed as Orwell predicted, the Scots and Welsh would have undoubtedly had a major share in such a revolution. Its importance for understanding "1984" is that the official Party ideology is "Ingsoc", an abbreviation of "English Socialism". This shows that Orwell perceived of the monstrous regime which he described in "1984", not only as a betrayal and perversion of Socialist ideals in general, but also as a perversion of Orwell's own specifically and dearly cherished vision and hope of Socialism .
In 1940 Orwell was quite optimistic about the chances of Socialism — his brand of Socialism. In 1947 , when he wrote "Toward European Unity" he was far more pessimistic (which may have had to do, not only with objective conditions in the world, but also with his fast deteriorating health). He no longer had hopes in the possibility of a Socialist revolution in Britain alone. The only real chance (and he considered it a slim chance) was through a Socialist Federation of Western Europe , "The only region where for a large number of people the word Socialism is bound up with liberty , equality and internationalism ". Such a federation, embracing some 250 million people, would provide a large-scale working model of "a community where people are relatively free and happy and where the main motive in life is not the pursuit of money or power".
A lot of preconditions had to be fulfilled for that vision to materialise. The Western European countries had to remain independent both of the Soviet military might and of looking to the Soviet Union for their model of Socialism. Britain had to divest itself of its empire, since exploiting the labour of colonial masses was incompatible with building a true Socialist society. It also had to cut itself completely out of the American orbit, and ally with the West European countries in a common revolution. Orwell was not sanguine about the chances of all these conditions materialising, but stated in conclusion: "One thing in our favour is that a major war is not likely to happen immediately" — which would at least give some breathing space to the forces seeking Democratic Socialism .
"Ninteen Eighty-Four" was written at almost precisely the same time as "Toward European Unity", and the fictional history unfolding in the past of the novel could be considered as the exact mirror image of that article. A major war does break out almost "immediately" from the time of writing in 1948, the opposite happens of all the indispensable conditions for Democratic Socialism, and things go from bad to worse.
From the memories of Winston, scattered through the book, one can try to piece out the following:
- At the outbreak of war, when Colchester was A-bombed, the child Winston experienced an air-raid alarm and was taken by his parents to a tube station, where he heard an old man saying "We didn't ought to 'ave trusted them". This implies a sense of betrayal, felt in the British public in the aftermath of a surprise attack. The context would suggest a Soviet attack, possibly after a period of relative rapprochement or a failed peace effort.
- The outbreak of war might have followed the withdrawal of US forces from Europe — a quite plausible future development when the book was written, before the creation of NATO and when the main available precedent was the American withdrawal from Europe in the aftermath of WWII. That would account both for the feeling of betrayal and for the Soviet success in sweeping, while Britain was heavily bombed but protected by the Channel from a ground invasion, westwards to the Atlantic and southwards into the Middle East . (A newsreel from the Middle East which Smith watches shows a boat full of Jewish refugees being sunk by an Oceanian helicopter; evidently, in this history the state of Israel , founded in 1948, had had only an ephemeral existence.).
- The major invasion was followed by the Soviet Union being transformed into "Eurasia" and adopting the ideology of "Neo-Bolshevism" (possibly under the impact of absorbing the Communists of France , Italy etc. into its ruling party).
- The isolated Britain kept its empire and was perforce drawn into a closer alliance and eventual political amalgamation with the United States — that might have been the time when the Dollar became the common currency.
- At that time, Winston's father was still around and his sister was not yet born. The time must be the early 1950s, since he was born in 1944 or 1945 and these are for him dim childhood memories; in other words, for Orwell writing in 1948 this was the very immediate future. Winston is about the same age as Richard Horatio Blair, Orwell's adopted son, who was born in May 1944 .
- After that, the war in Europe seems to have stabilized into exchanges of aerial bombardments (by tacit agreement avoiding the use of nuclear arms) and to naval blockades and submarine warfare, with ground battles confined to extra-European theatres. In effect, Orwell conceived the future war as taking virtually the same course that WWII took in 1940 after the Fall of France . This is the period from which come Winston's later childhood memories, a time when the father was gone and the mother was left alone with Winston and the baby sister.
- That was a time of very great economic privations — much worse even than the systematised and controlled privations which daily life in 1984 Oceania entails. There was presumably the destruction left by nuclear bombardment, which destroyed a part of Britain's industrial capacity, and also left agricultural areas contaminated ("1984" mentions Winston and Julia meeting in countryside areas still devastated and deserted after 30 years), the need to fight a full-scale war again without being fully recovered from the effects of WWII (in our history Britain only fully recovered in the 1950s, and in 1948 when Orwell wrote, there were predictions of a much longer time needed for recovery). To these would be added Soviet/Eurasian attacks on the supply lines, for which (unlike with Nazi Germany in WWII) the coasts of Spain , Portugal and North Africa , as well as those of France , would be fully available for Soviet/Eurasian submarine bases and airfields. (The development of the "virtually unsinkable" Floating Fortresses might have come later, as a means of securing the Atlantic sea-lanes and ensuring at least a trickle of vital supplies to Britain /Airstrip One — which would explain the popularity of the sailors serving in these fortresses, used in the Party's propaganda. The Floating Fortresses might have been inspired by WWII Project Habakkuk 's virtually unsinkable reinforced ice aircraft carriers, if Orwell had heard of them.)
Winston's memories of this time are full of political chaos and violence, as seen through an uncomprehending child's eyes. There is a specific mention of rival militias roaming the streets, each one composed of boys all wearing shirts of the same colour (a vision which Orwell might have taken from the last years of Weimar Germany , where Nazi , Communist and other militias constantly fought in the streets).
That corresponds, presumably, to the time when The Party (which at the time must still have had a name, being only one of several contending parties) was led by Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, and Big Brother had not yet risen to prominence. (The three are clearly modelled on Bukharin , Zinoviev and Kamenev , the prominent Bolshevik leaders whom Stalin supplanted and executed).
Apparently, Orwell conceives of the three as sincere revolutionaries moved by outrage at the injustice of capitalism . There is the specific mention of Rutherford's "brutal cartoons", depicting slum tenements, starving children, street battles and capitalists in top hats , which "helped inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution". The revolutionaries eventually win — or so it seems. What Orwell hoped for in vain during WWII does take place during the WWIII of the 1950s , Orwell's immediate future — a revolution in Britain. But now he sees it as the beginning of a nightmare, not of hope.
The difference can be partly explained by the fact that the revolution takes place in far more brutal conditions than those of WWII Britain where Orwell hoped for a relatively mild revolution — and more similar to the conditions of 1917 in Russia from which the incipient Soviet regime had its introduction to brutality. While Rutherford's cartoons were obviously exaggerated, in order to be so effective in rousing public fury they must have to some degree reflected the reality of deep privations and social polarization in the immediate pre-revolutionary time. Under such conditions, the revolutionaries' victory could have easily been accompanied by widespread retaliations against "war profiteers" and "fat cats" (there was widespread resentment against such people in WWII Britain). Such retaliations, condoned as "unavoidable excesses", would have set the new regime on a road of arbitrary brutality from its very inception.
Also, Orwell's essential conditions for the revolution to develop towards Democratic Socialism , set out in "Toward European Unity", were all not fulfilled — Western Europe is occupied and in no condition to join in the revolution, and Britain is inextricably tied to both the U.S. and to its oppressive overseas empire. Indeed, the brutal all-out exploitation of colonial peoples as semi-slave labour could have been started by the old regime in the immediate aftermath of the occupation of Europe , as a desperate measure of survival, and deepened rather than abolished by the newly-arrived revolutionaries. Altogether, the revolutionary regime was inexorably perverted into the merciless tyranny of Big Brother.
At some time soon after, the revolution which started in Britain spread to America and won there as well. This is simply mentioned, with no detail and no information of the situation in the American part of Oceania beyond a passing mention of a Party congress in New York and a reference in "The Book" to "Jews, Negroes and South Americans of pure Indian blood" being "found in the highest ranks of the Party". America is not part of this story any more than the detailed history of China , it is just a faraway place of which we know nothing.
The later history of Oceania seems modelled, in a rather one-to-one basis, on Soviet history. Oceania's 1950s are based on the Soviet 1920s , a time of civil war and revolutionary turmoil. Similarly, the 1960s are the 1930s , the time when Stalin/Big Brother, consolidated his power and smothered all opposition. (Stalin's Moscow Show Trials took place in 1936, Big Brother's equivalent in 1965 ). By the end of the 1960s , Big Brother has completed the process of turning the revolution into a pretext for creating a terror state.
By the year 1984, the citizens of Oceania had been separated into three distinct, isolated classes — the Inner Party , the Outer Party , and the proles . However, in the view of Emmanuel Goldstein (which seems to be Orwell's) these are but new names for classes which have essentially existed throughout human history — though under the new dispensation they are more rigid and unchangeable than ever before.
On the global level, as "The Book" (supposedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein though in fact its descriptive part turns out to be endorsed by the Party) explains, the three powers eventually realized that continuous stalemate war was preferable to conquest, as war allowed them to spend their surplus labour manufacturing products that would be wasted during fighting, rather than improving people's standards of living (an impoverished population being easier to control than a rich one).
By the time the novel is set, the three powers have taken over most of the world, but a large area is still disputed between them. This area, containing the northern half of Africa , the Middle East , southern India , Indonesia , and northern Australia , provides slaves , or low-paid workers who are effectively slaves, for all three powers.
The powers rarely if ever fight on their own territory — Airstrip One (the official name of Great Britain ) has become the target of Eurasian rocket bombs, but it is hinted that the Oceanian government itself may launch these weapons in order to convince the population that it is under constant attack.