It's 1984 in Airstrip One, Oceania (formerly London, England). Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, altering old newspapers to reflect current versions of events--"All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as necessary". This work is vital to the Party, whose legitimacy depends on the "mutability of the past."

Oceania is governed by Big Brother and the Party and the doctrines of Ingsoc (English Socialism):

    WAR IS PEACE

    FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

    IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

However, Winston does not believe these things and he has a message for us, which he confides to the journal that he has secretly begun keeping, even though he knows it will destroy him:

    To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one
    another and do not live alone-to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From
    the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of
    doublethink-greetings!

What is doublethink?:

    To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully
    constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled 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 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.

But against the tenets of doublethink, Winston posits the following: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

Winston becomes convinced that a young woman at work, a sash wearing member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, is a member of the Thought Police out to destroy him, but one day she stumbles & when he helps her up, she hands him a note that says "I love you". The two soon become lovers, "but you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory.  It was a blow against the Party. It was a political act."  As Julia understands: "Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria; because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship."

Winston and Julia know their love is doomed and they are doomed because of it, but they make each other a promise:

    Winston: When once they get ahold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that either of us
    can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess they'll shoot you just
    the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as
    much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be
    utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one
    another, although that can't make the slightest difference

    Julia: if you mean confessing, we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You
    can't help it. They torture you.

    Winston: I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter;
    only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

    Julia: They can't do that. It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say
    anything-anything-but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.

    Winston: No, no; that's quite true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is
    worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
 

Now that he is committed to independence of thought and loving Julia, Winston musters the courage to approach O'Brien, who he is convinced opposes Big Brother and tell him: "We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it.  We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers.  I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready."

And so, O'Brien initiates them into the Brotherhood. He gives them a text by Goldstein, a founding member, but subsequent enemy, of the Party and frequent subject of The Two Minutes Hate. Within the book, Goldstein explains that whereas human history had seen a series of rebellions by the Middle against the High in the name of equality, the current revolution lead by the Party is
different: "With the development of machine production, ... the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were
on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted." And he describes the makeup of the Party: "The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts,
sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government."

Here then lies the genius of Orwell and the reason that the Left so despises him. It would have been easy to write a polemic against fascism in 1948 and by then you could even criticize Communism without courting total revulsion from the Left.  Moreover, the politically expedient way in which to criticize these isms was to speak of the noble goals betrayed by tiny bands of oligarchs. But Orwell went beyond these easier targets and attacked Socialism and centralized government in general. When Winston is being tortured, he is told: "If you want a picture of the future imagine a boot stomping on a human face-forever." 1984 stands as an indictment of all the bureaucratic boot wearers everywhere, regardless of their intentions or their ideology. It is a paean to freedom & freedom of thought.

1984 is clearly the greatest novel of the 20th Century and should be #1 on the Modern Library list.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (A+)

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