OK That’s fine by me but no rats.
Any rats and you can give 'em to Julia.
BTW Bumstead has still got that piece of stale bread…sir
Well, take Iraq for example. We were at war with Saddam. In the past, however, we supported Saddam against Iran. Most people don’t really care.
You can’t blame people’s ignorance on the news. Any news I’ve seen firmly puts the blame on Osamma Bin Ladin and the Taliban. I think people made the “we are at war with Iraq” / 9/11 leap of logic on their own.
Now if the news all told us that France was responsible for 9/11 how would anyone know different?
Well… assuming that there are kooks in 1984, one would think that hoarding behaviors take place.
People use to wrap fish in newspapers… did the Thought Police rewrap the fish or did they just remove the old newspaper and leave the fish unwrapped? 
Possibly.
However, they did set up a system where old copies were to be replaced with the modified copies. IIRC, it was Smith’s discovery of a newspaper that wasn’t replaced that set the main events in motion. The reaction of Smith was that of a man who found something that isn’t commonly found in his society… an actual “original” newspaper.
Anyway, it’s been two decades since I read the book so my memories might be a bit fuzzy.
I somehow get the impression that certain posters believe that society today is not dissimilar to Orwells 1984.
Forgive me, but you couldn’t be more wrong.
Sure politicians lie to us but by and large they mostly tell us the truth.
I hope.
JohnT I think it was a photo that came to Smith through the tube. It was inside an old newspaper which he had to “update”
I love 1984 and a lot of other dystopian stories (Farhenheit 451, V For Vendetta, A Clockwork Orange, etc), but this is clearly where the stories break from reality. People wouldn’t just roll over and take what the Party gives them. Especially today with the rise of the Internet. Everybody is connected everywhere and you just can’t shut down society like that.
My brain has to just push out that piece of unreality if I want to enjoy the story.
My view : It worked better in the book than it would in real life because like many people Orwell overestimated how socially malleable people are, and underestimated genetics. Just as some of the leaders of the USSR thought they were creating a “New Soviet Man”, Orwell thought that constant propaganda, an artificial language and so on could create people who were complete malleable to the Party’s will, who would believe what they were told and instantly change their beliefs when the propaganda changed. As I’m sure he’d be glad to know, he was wrong. People can be manipulated, to a point, and they can be terrorised into pretending to believe that “we have always been at war with Eurasia”, but the fact that human nature is partly genetically hardwired means there’s only so far a tyranny can shape people, lacking advanced genetic engineering.
I came to this opinion after reading The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker; an excellent book.
Spot on.
And what’s your basis for that view?
1984 was written 60 years ago and all of the stories you mention predate the popularity of the Internet, so maybe you should cut the authors a little slack. But what you’re talking about is the reason Brave New World is the best and most accurate dystopian novel, in my opinion. There’s no need for an active, repressive government to tell people what do to when people can choose to be distracted and stimulated away from any kind of responsibility. And that works better, because it doesn’t require a conspiracy or much of an ideology.
You can’t blame the news beyond the fact that they failed to do their job, but you can’t blame it all on news outlets. I think people were willing to make the leap you mention- hey, Iraq, al Qaeda, they’re all Muslims, what do most people care? - but they were encouraged to make it by the government. Directly and indirectly, they did suggest a connection.
If you want something fun, check out the period of US history from the 1750’s until 1815. We’re at war with France, then we’re at war with England with France as our ally, then we’re at war with France again with England as our ally, then we’re at war with England again. France couldn’t help us out that time because they were le blockaded (“Well, then break out to sea. THEN FIRE ZE CANNONS!”). I’m not sure if most folks you’d stop on the street would know that we had fought a war with France in the 1790’s.
Also, 1984 is a sort of parody of life in Britain in 1948. It’s meant to be absurd, surreal, more or less comic, exaggeration of things that were then going on; not so much a serious speculation about a possible future.
I don’t think that Orwell believed that the world would be like the book 1984 in the year 1984. Like Animal Farm, the book 1984 was a moral fable: a warning about how bad things could get if certain trends continued. However, if people read and understood the moral fable, then things would hopefully turn out differently.
If Orwell were alive today, he would certainly find things in today’s world that mirrored his vision in 1984 – the most egregious being the totalitarian society in North Korea. He would doubtless be pleased that the Soviet empire collapsed so completely just 7 years after the year 1984, but he would also be unhappy that so many people in Western countries like the US believe not only government propaganda, but also the propaganda put out by big business (e.g., “New improved” versions of products which are neither new nor improved).
And he would certainly see the change from Saddam Hussein being a close friend of the US to being one of its worst enemies, without much real change in SH’s behaviour, as being a good example of “We have always been at war with Eastasia”.
This is a pretty significant point in the novel, where the proles are described as being capable for years at a time of forgetting that a war is even happening, occasionally whipped into a propaganda frenzy or having their lives interrupted by rocket bombs. The war existed as an excuse for state-planned deprivation.
The concept couldn’t be slapped down over modern western society, but Neal Stephenson projected something rather creepily like 1984 in his futuristic The Diamond Age.
Exactly. A society could never be molded that would turn a blind eye to such horrific abuses of human rights. That explains all of those rebellions against Stalin… and why human nature prevented the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was prevented…?
The Holocaust happened in no small part because of human nature; you seem to be confusing “nature” with “good”; genocide is a natural human tendancy. Society wasn’t “molded” to turn a blind eye to the Holocaust; that happened because that’s how humans are.
And there was no rebellion against Stalin because his control was so strong, not because he had turned the Soviets into brainwashed drones. He controlled them; that’s not the same as turning them into “New Soviet Man”.
Where tyranny runs into problems with human nature is primarily self interest; we are not made to be someone else’s disposable tools. We are not hive creatures, designed to sacrifice ourselves for the group without limit.
Oh? How is the Internet in China? How would it be if there weren’t sites outside of China with some facts not allowed there.
I’d think that an Internet based society would be easier to control. Force people to keep things on centrally located servers, under the guise of efficiency through thin clients. Write web crawlers looking for forbidden words and images, or for images of unpeople. Swap the old image/text for new. Monitor access, and punish anyone writing forbidden posts. This is much closer to current technology than being able to monitor everyone through their TVs, and much easier then updating newspapers.
As for rolling over, if rolling over got you food, and not rolling over made you have to look over your shoulder at all times, most people would roll over.
Information is power. You control what they have access to, you control what the majority of them think. Kill off the ones stubborn enough to remember or speak their minds, there you go! No one disbelieves what they hear because they only hear one thing.
Exactly. If death is everywhere, and talking about it does no good, and it’s so safe and warm where you are…why fight? You know where the wires are, but fresh carrots every day. I agree most people would cave. Hell, they’d turn you in themselves.