George Orwell 1984 Book Review
George Orwell’s book full of prophecies in which he describes possible technological developments in the future through “Big Brother”
The following sentence actually shows that he predicts that they will be able to listen to us with some devices (cell phones, etc.) in the future.
“Unless he spoke in a whisper, every sound Winston made was picked up by the telescreen; moreover, as long as he remained in the field of view of the metal plate, Winston could not only be heard, he could be seen. Of course, it was impossible to know when you were being watched. It was very difficult to know who was connected to the Thought Police and when, and with what system. They could have been watching everyone at any time. But it was clear that they could connect whenever they wanted. You had to live with the assumption that every sound you made was heard, that your every move was monitored unless you were in the dark.” Or did Orwell predict the age of artificial intelligence and robots?
“The lyrics of these songs are written without human intervention by a device called a songwriter”
This quote shows that he had a strong prediction about the future of technology. We haven’t researched, maybe there were people who made these predictions before him.
The year he named his work is 1984, the year of my birth. His literary descriptions of London and the world at that time are marvelous. Example: He strained his memory to recall the London of his childhood.
War is Peace, Freedom is a Slavery, Ignorance is Power
Big Brother’s eyes were watching you even on the money. On coins, stamps, book covers, flags, flags, posters, cigarette packs… Everywhere, those eyes always watching you and that voice that surrounds you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, inside or outside, in the bathroom or in bed… there was no escape.
This irony of the eye is common to most English writers. Remember Tolkien’s description of Saouron. The party could commandeer the past and say that this or that event never happened. What was the party slogan:
He who controls the past controls the future. Never show your fear! Never show your anger!
He talked about British floating fortresses. This is an indication of the British dominance in the seas. By floating castles he means British navy ships.
But that doesn’t mean the British are happy. They don’t care about anyone’s happiness. For example, boats are produced. Nobody knows how many boats are produced and nobody cares one bit. All they know is that they produce a lot of boots on paper. The only reality of the people of Oceania (England, Wales, Scotland) was that perhaps more than half of them went barefoot. For the British interest, everything was permissible.
They had such an archive room, a vast complex structure with a sub-section consisting of only one cell. Here, printers and typesetters altered and distorted photographs, engineers and producers in the tele-programming department, and especially masters of sound imitation were on special duty. There were books that had to be discarded and books that had to be erased, and there were obscure minds deciding which part of the past was to be preserved and which part was to be completely erased.
George Orwell 1984 Book Reviews
The Lottery, with its incredible jackpots every week, was the only social event that the proletarians took very seriously. In fact, the Archives Department was only a department of the real ministry, whose main job was not to reorganize the past, but to provide the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programs, plays, novels, news, information and entertainment of every conceivable kind, from sculpture to slogans, from poetry to biological research, from the alphabet for children and the Newspeak dictionary.
The archives department had many subdivisions. They too had various tasks. Another task was for the proletariat. It had many departments that dealt with literature, music, theater and entertainment in order to ensure the lowest possible level of life for the proletarians. Trashy newspapers with nothing but astrology, sports, news of murders, titillating cheap novels, movies full of sex scenes, sentimental songs composed in a purely mechanical way. Moreover, a subdivision which produced the most vulgar pornographic publications, which were distributed in sealed boxes and which no party member was allowed to look at except those who had prepared them.
1984 – George Orwell Book Summary
The useless sport that Orwell describes here is very much present in our football sector. Before, during and after the matches, there are programs that are of no use to people and steal their hours. Not to mention the astrology news that occupies the agenda for nothing and takes up people’s time. The arabesque music that ruined a period in our country and still ruins the youth. Isn’t the fact that all these things were included in the book by the British writer Orwell years ago an indication that everything was consciously planned? Or are we someone else’s proletariat?
He who holds the past holds the future
It was not only lives that were changed on schedule. The past was being updated by the party day by day, almost minute by minute. As Orwell put it: “There was no Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines in a newspaper and a forged photograph could make him exist.” Or someone who existed could suddenly disappear. That person could no longer exist. This may have happened in the history of England. Someone who never existed could live on in the past as a hero, a traitor or a well-known celebrity.
In fact, very little was known about the proletarians. There was no need to know too much, as long as they continued to work and reproduce, it didn’t matter what else they did. They didn’t have time to work in hard conditions, to fight over mouths, to quarrel with neighbors, to have their minds occupied by cinema, football, beer and, above all, gambling.
Orwell said: “Everything in this world belonged to the Capitalists. Everyone was their slave. They owned all the land and all the money.” Just like the nobles in medieval Europe.
Or were Capitalism and Socialism children of the same mentality?
Throughout human history there have been 3 types of people. High, Middle and Low. In the name of freedom and justice, the Middle has sometimes overthrown the High, taking the Low with them. However, as soon as it achieves its goal, it sends the Lower back to its former position of slavery and replaces the Higher. Soon a new Middle section emerges, breaking away from both. Of these three sections, it is only the Lower section that has not achieved its goal. For them, no historical change has ever meant anything other than a change in the name of their master. All new political theories, whatever their name, eventually led back to hierarchy and classification.
George Orwell 1984 Book Notes
In the new order, the aristocracy was largely composed of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, union leaders, teachers, journalists, politicians.
Orwell says in his book that the aim of the new discourse (ingsos) was to dominate people’s minds, to play word games, to first disorganize and confuse people’s minds and then to fill them with fear, anger and triumph and to raise the type of people they wanted. Especially after the invention of television, we see that this stage has passed.
In the new order, people have been made ready for this with industry 4.0 artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, social media and internet technologies. Families have been divided into rooms. Individualization is complete. They are preparing for the final blow. The last blow will be to people’s languages and minds. Perhaps languages will be eliminated. There will be one language.
Orwell said: Because people think, speak and comprehend with words, language is everything. If language is corrupted, meaning is corrupted, society is corrupted.
Although Orwell warned about his new book, “Utopia in the form of a novel” – yes, “the danger of a society in which everything is completely controlled by the state, in which all opposition is destroyed, deprived of memory” – even in the age in which he wrote it, governments were no longer in the hands of states or governments, but of corporations and those who run them.
Although Orwell knew this, he wrote a counter-utopia with 1984, along with Jack London’s Iron Ökçe, Yevgeni Zemyatin’s Biz, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Yevgeni Zemyatin’s Brave New World, against the ideal utopias they dreamed of in Plato’s State, Thomas More’s Utopia, Tommaso Campanella’s Land of the Sun and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. As Celal Üster says, utopias are dreams offered to humanity and counter utopias are nightmares.
Orwell describes contemporary parties and politics as follows: “To know and not to know, to be aware of the whole truth while telling ingenious lies, to defend two contradictory views at the same time, knowing that they contradict each other and believing both of them, to use logic against logic, to ignore morality while claiming to uphold it, to forget what should be forgotten and to remember it as soon as it becomes necessary.”
1984 Conclusion and Evaluation
The story of each book, its protagonists and the societies they live in are different. In this respect, each book is special and unique. Although it may be compared to different books, it is a unique one.
In 1984, Orwell did not merely criticize socialism or satirize only the power and government that deprives freedoms. What he really wanted to tell was to warn the human being who was wanted to be squeezed in the grip of social media, artificial intelligence, cell phones, robots and the internet and whose soul was wanted to be taken away. When you think about the book with the underlined parts, the following come to mind;
1984 has become a classic because it confronts humanity with a society in which history, language, past, memory, love, individual, etc. are destroyed. First, people’s language is changed through a revolution, so that their relationship with history is severed, their thinking, spoken language and literature are destroyed. Then, when they forget their memory and past life, their moral life changes. Civilization loses its consciousness. Then love is forgotten. The definition of love changes. It is replaced by things like flirting and eroticism. The concept of child and family is shaken. Parents and children are separated from each other. Everyone starts living in their own world. They are now ready to become the slaves of “Big Brother”.
