Even more confusing, “1984’s” message has often been appropriated by the very types of organizations that Orwell despised, thus becoming, as Lynskey writes, “a book that almost any political faction could claim.” It has been held up as a warning about the perils of imperialism, capitalism, socialism and fascism it has been lauded by both the John Birch Society - who used the numbers 1-9-8-4 as the last four digits of its phone number - and the Black Panthers, who taught Orwell in their Oakland Community School. For example, he wasn’t - as students are often mis-taught - concerned simply with the oppressive forces of Stalin or “socialism,” but rather with almost every “ism” that manipulated truth through the misuse of language and political propaganda. In many ways, Orwell’s genius was best exemplified by his essays and journalism - and the success of his most famous novels (it may be impossible to avoid either “1984” or “Animal Farm” in most high school curricula) has often obscured the impact of the things he said. (Check out his great personal essays about that period, “A Hanging” or “Shooting an Elephant” - for Orwell, the horror of totalitarianism was not that someone would impose it on you, but rather that you might be all-too-prepared to submit.) Eventually, he went to London, where he wrote productively for the left-wing press - while never missing an opportunity to criticize its failures – and after a brief adventure fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War, secured a full-time job working for the BBC, a monolithically imposing cultural force that Orwell later satirized as “The Ministry of Truth.” After skidding along unillustriously as a “scholarship” boy at Eton College, he joined the Imperial Police in Burma, where he quickly learned what it felt like to wear a uniform - and how it could make you think and feel things you might consider repugnant when you weren’t wearing it. Orwell went on to become a consistently radical critic of his world who always appreciated the conventional pleasures of middle-class and working-class life his novels and essays are thick with appreciations for everything from drinking tea and smoking cigarettes to the novels of Dickens and Kipling - and the “naughty” seaside postcards of Donald McGill.
#1984 JOHN HURT PROFESSIONAL#
In other words, in Orwell’s eyes, “1984” was well already well-established four decades before it got here.įor Orwell, the horror of totalitarianism was not that someone would impose it on you, but rather that you might be all-too-prepared to submit.īorn Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 - he only adopted the now iconic professional pseudonym of Orwell in 1933 - the writer was the son of politically mixed parents: His half-French mother “mixed with suffragettes and Fabians,” and his father was a relatively bland mid-level civil servant.
That is why one of the unproven rumors about “1984” - as explored in Dorian Lynskey’s “The Ministry of Truth,” a respectful and intelligent “biography” of a novel - is that the title was merely a transposition of its publication date, 1948. The most important thing to know about “future-thinking” “utopian” and/or “dystopian” novels is that they are never really about the future at all instead these novels are about the world that surrounded the author. While times have changed, the things that worried George Orwell haven’t changed at all. He got a lot of bad press over the decades - but that was before we found out he was already one of us. Big Brother is no longer simply a set of shadowy, avuncular, half-smiling eyes on living-room posters and street-side billboards he now reserves a virtual space at all our family gatherings, and tells us what to do and buy long before we had the inclination to do or buy anything.
#1984 JOHN HURT CODE#
He’s introducing us to our next partner or spouse on dating and “hook-up” apps, bombarding us with spurious and inaccurate information through jargon and euphemism (“border control” as a code for family separation, or “climate change” as a substitute for “climate collapse”), and instructing us - even from as far away as other continents – about who we should vote for and, more important, who we shouldn’t. Of course Big Brother isn’t just watching us anymore - he’s listening to our cell phone and FaceTime conversations, friending us on Facebook, following us on Instagram (just as we are often following Him).
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