1984: An Anatomy of Totalitarianism

A review of ‘1984’, by George Orwell; Secker & Warburg, 1949.

1984 is a book written by a man who was dying about one trying to survive.

Its hero is Winston Smith, who lives in a world in which everything is tightly controlled. The Party, governed by the principles of IngSoc, rules the island-state of Airstrip One, a province of Oceania, one of the three great super-states that have carved up the world. The Party’s leader is the mysterious Big Brother, whose face looks down at the population he rules from posters and signs. He has an intense cult of personality that helps to keep the populace in check. The Party purges anyone who does not fully conform to their rules using the Thought Police, two-way televisions called ‘telescreens’, cameras, and hidden microphones. Those who fall out with the regime become ‘unpersons’: they disappear and all proof of their existence is destroyed.

By controlling language, the Party controls thought. War is constant, fought between changing enemies whose names and alliances are erased and rewritten as needed. Conflict is carried on to create a siege mentality and give the people an ‘other’ against whom they can rally together. Their minds are dulled by years of doublethink and ceaseless propaganda. They accept the contradictions that stare them in the face.

By controlling language, the Party controls thought.

Winston, who works at the Ministry of Truth in London, is worn out by the daily grind of rewriting historical records that conform to the state’s ever-changing version of history. His job entails revising past editions of The Times, dropping the original documents into ducts called memory holes which lead to a huge furnace. ‘Who controls the past controls the future,’ he says. ‘Who controls the present controls the past.’ He is secretly opposed to the Party’s rule, making him a ‘thought-criminal’, and soon he starts rebelling in the smallest ways: He begins to rebel in the smallest ways: keeping a diary bought from an antiques shop, then falling in love. He knows he is doomed from the moment he has his first rebellious thought.

Like Zamyatin’s We, which inspired it, 1984 is not mere dystopian fantasy. It is a highly political book, a warning drawn from the totalitarian horrors of the time. Orwell alone among the intellectuals of his era was right on the three big questions of the day. He condemned colonialism, Nazism and Stalinism with equal force, falling out with the British left intelligentsia in because of the last. He was unusually perspicacious, noting the way that even more benign politicians used language to shape thought, and how, for men like Stalin and Hitler, the ‘object of power [was] power’, as O’Brien puts it in 1984. The Party has its ideology; but it does not rule to bring about a utopia. It rules to keep ruling. Its aim is to stay in power and wield that power.

Newspeak is the official tongue of the Party. Its purpose is not to communicate but control. Language is pruned, stripped, hollowed out. Words vanish, and with them, the thoughts they once made possible. Rebellion ceases to exist not just as an act but a concept. The mind is left with no means to grasp the idea of resistance. ‘War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength’ — the state’s mantra—is not a set of contradictions, but a list of commands. Truth is set aside in favour of power. Reality is not what is seen, but what is declared from on high. In Oceania, nothing is true but the power of the Party. It does not argue, it dictates. It does not persuade, it erases. To obey is not to submit but to believe, to love the thing that destroys you. Thought is not crushed with force but dissolved into air, until only the Party remains. This is totalitarianism.

Truth is set aside in favour of power.

As for Winston, for all his rebellion, he is a small, tired man. He is drawn as an everyman, a smoker and drinker with an estranged wife and a varicose ulcer on the back of his leg. His dreams of freedom are vague, unformed. He fights not because he can win, but because something in him refuses to surrender. His curious and intellectual nature compels him to resist the Party. That he desires to understand the truth, and desires it to the point that he will not obey the Party—this is what makes him heroic.

All of this is rendered in that beautifully bold and vivid prose style that makes Orwell so immensely readable (whatever Will Self or others might say). The world that Winston occupies is drawn as harsh, bleak, relentless, oppressive. It is a machine, and one whose mechanics Orwell lays bare. 1984 is the portrait of tyranny, the anatomy of state control. And it is so exact, so plainly, coldly depicted, that it has captured the imagination of generation after generation and entered our language: ‘Big Brother,’ ‘Thought Police’, ‘Room 101’, ‘Newspeak’, ‘doublethink’, ‘thoughtcrime’. Totalitarianism, Orwell shows us, is mundane, systematic, inevitable. Its aim is to squeeze the humanity out of its subjects and to make them mere cogs in the machine.