Bokrecension: 1984 av George Orwell

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Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

When reading the reasoning some of Orwell’s characters use to justify or simply explain the system they’re supporting one can’t help feeling scared. The main characters aren’t allowed to know much about the true history, so it’s all very foggy for the reader to, but from what you can figure out perhaps we should pay more thanks to Orwell and his non-self-fulfilling prophesy -or maybe just our lucky star- that we don’t live in such a world. Or do we?
Nineteen Eighty-Four (“1984“) is a fictional political novel, written by the journalist and author Orwell in 1948. The story takes place in the year of 1984 -hence the name- in a London that’s one of the smaller parts of a great totalitarian nation known as Oceania. The rest of the world is split up between two other totalitarian states, plus small areas that they fight over. This is a true dystopia, the society that is so intimately depicted by Orwell is one of a nightmarish regime, set on controlling both soul and body of their subjects.

The main character, Winston Smith lives in London, which is the chief city of Airstrip One. London is a poor, bombed-out city, much like one of our modern day war zones. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he counterfeits newspaper archives and old documents, so they correspond to the ever changing standpoints of the Party. He is monitored twenty-four hours a day by the telescreen, which the Party also uses to dish out it’s propaganda at a constant rate. Smith and most of his colleagues and countrymen live a life, constantly controlled by the Party. They are being brainwashed through massive propaganda into loving the Party, and it’s personification: Big Brother. They are also kept lashed in a constant fury and hatred towards whichever of the other super states Oceania is at war with at current, a war which neither makes any progress, nor will come to a conclusion.
Smith secretly hates the Party, and everything that reminds him about the Party, and he would do almost anything to see it’s system crashed. The problem is that he constantly have to perform intimate self-control, and fit in with all the others so that the Party never will recognize his defection and “vaporise” him. The faith which awaits all whom deviates from the Party doctrines is trial and then inevitable public execution, but that just happens to a lucky few. Everybody that thinks the wrong thoughts, or who brakes the unwritten laws -which are just as real as normal laws- will be vaporised, which means torture, death and being completely erased from history. One of the unwritten laws is never to mention anyone who has been vaporised, “they’ve never existed, and if you believe that you are crazy”.
While Smith lives his life in terror of the Party, fleeing into the alcohol haze of cheap gin, he tries to relieve the pressure on his suppressed mind through expressing his suicidal thought in different medias. One of them is a diary, which he is able to keep in secret, the other is a relationship he has with a woman, Julia, who hates the Party almost as much as Smith does, but for different reasons.

Big Brother and the Party base all their power on controlling all their citizens both physically and psychic, and they use many different tricks and systems to sustain the system. Modern technology makes so many things possible, this totalitarian state where one is totally un-free would be one of them. Smith represents the free thought, and will of a free person in a society where you are supposed to “stay in line”, and not only pretend that you like it, but also believe that you like it. Julia represents a woman wanting full control of her own body, wanting to do whatever she wants with it, because it hers, and no remote government should tell her what to do with it!
The fictional world of 1984 is very extreme, it could be viewed as an allegory for the Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany, or rather how they would develop in a couple of years, perhaps, but that is only half the truth! In the book, the Party convinces Smith that he is crazy to believe that the Party ever changed history, or to believe vaporised persons have ever existed, and he must be cured from his lunacy. Julia on the other hand is crazy to believe she could do anything she wants whit her body, because it isn’t hers, it’s the Party’s, and she must be cured from her will to offend the Party in such a way. By the standards of their society, both Winston and Julia are obviously insane, and must be cured.
This is all about freedom of body and soul. This is all about being indoctrinated. There are people in the society of Oceania who blend in just fine, so why can’t they? We would say that Winston and Julia are the only normal and sane persons, but that is just because we live in our society. Every society on earth oppresses those who refuse to fit in, who cannot do it because of how they feel, and think. Not every society tortures them to death, but we sure make life hard for them!
We put people in mental institutions daily, because they are insane. But are they really insane, just as Winston and Julia? Would another society believe our Swedish democracy to be the totalitarian oppressor state, while the people we try to forget about, hide away or don’t bother to interact with are the only sane and normal ones in their eyes, while we’re the ones trying to convince them they are madmen?

There are a number of new words presented in the novel, from the new language which the Party is creating to broaden their mind control, one of them is “doublethink”. This is the ability to see something which you know to be right and true and then convince yourself that it is something different, and then forget you ever had to convince yourself, and then knowing it has never been anything else than the thing you actually believe it to be right now. It could also mean accepting one thing in fact could be something completely different at the same time and know them both to be true. An example are the three party slogans: “Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace”.
Perhaps this is a little extreme, but it bares some resemblance to certain mind tricks one has to impose on oneself in order to stay sane in our fast spinning world. For example; At first religion apposed science, but know, it is often said that they don’t have to contradict each other. Is it possible to be learned in the laws of nature and still have great faith for the powers working behind? Should we trust and believe in our government and authorities even when we receive constant streams of information telling us no one is almighty?
In truth, you would have to fall back on some Orwellian “doublethink” to keep sane, just as he tells us in 1984! That fiction world is more alike our modern society than I would like it to be, but while knowing this, I still have faith in that my government won’t let me suffer the same fate as Winston Smith - DOUBLETHINK!

What Orwell is telling me is that I should never ever oppress any different thought or opinion, no matter how crazy it woul...