Name: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Author: MindlyBiz

Nineteen Eighty-Four Explained!

The experience of fighting Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War, deeply shaped George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian views. Although he was rejected for regular military service at the outbreak of WWII, Orwell remained actively involved in the wartime effort as a journalist and political commentator, later becoming the literary editor of the left-wing socialist magazine Tribune.

In many ways, the atrocities and atmosphere of fear depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four are reminiscent of those committed by the totalitarian regimes of Orwell’s time and it is not difficult to imagine that he likely wrote that novel as a fictionalised socio-political critical essay.

Here, I’ll highlight the similarities to one of the most repressive and autocratic regimes in Orwell’s era: Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The Almighty Big Brother

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the face of Big Brother is shown everywhere: on TV, posters and even coins. He is depicted as a man “black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm” and “hypnotic eyes”. Beneath every portrait the caption reads BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. It is clear Orwell did not try to hide the obvious similarity to Stalin’s portrait that was displayed everywhere throughout the Soviet Union.

However, it is far less clear whether Big Brother is an actual person or merely a symbolic figure whose sole purpose is to instill fear and obedience. Even though he is supposedly the supreme leader of Oceania, he is never seen by any of the characters in the novel. This raises the question of whether he is a real individual at all. If Goldstein’s book is to be trusted, then Big Brother is an invention of the Party:

“At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization.”

It is difficult to deny that this is a clever and efficacious strategy devised by the Party. Lacking a physical presence, Big Brother becomes a deity of sorts, always untouchable and forever mystical. But, importantly, by anthropomorphising Big Brother people can still relate to it. The masses can more easily direct their feelings of love, fear and loyalty towards a human figure than towards some abstract symbol.

But notice also how the Party chose to depict Big Brother: “full of power”, “mysterious calm” and possessing “hypnotic eyes”. These characteristics are not only designed to inspire awe, but also to instil fear and intimidation. Make no mistake, Big Brother isn’t your pal. He is to be respected and revered but also feared.

Love and fear

Stalin famously wrote that if you killed 100 people among which 5 of them were enemies of the State, that wouldn’t be considered a bad ratio. During the 1930’s, Stalin’s own secret police, the NKVD, hunted down, arrested, and executed about a million people who opposed Stalin and his regime, a period now known as the Great Purge. Stalin’s methods included mass arrests for even minor deviations from Party orthodoxy. Torture, sleep deprivation, overnight disappearances, misinformation, widespread censorship, and the rewriting of historical records (including the erasure of people from official documents and modifying photos) were all common practice. Even children were encouraged to inform on their dissident parents who opposed Stalin. Does that ring a bell? It should, because these are the very same tactics used by the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In the novel, the Party’s secret police, the “Thought Police”, has no limits in its willingness to kidnap, torture and “vapourise” (an euphemism for not only killing someone, but completely erasing them from any record) anyone that they might suspect – often without real proof – of conspiring against the Party. A facial expression, an unconscious whisper in a dream, or even a late reaction would be enough to justify vapourisation if the Party considered it problematic.

Winston mentions that a certain Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, along with Emmanuel Goldstein and Big Brother, were once prominent figures in the Revolution. He also describes a period called The Great Purges (interestingly, the exact same term used for Stalin’s mass arrests and executions), during which all the leaders of the Revolution were arrested for counter-revolutionary ideas, except Big Brother. According to the Party, Goldstein escaped and founded the rebellion group Brotherhood. The others were tried as traitors in phony public trials, where confessions were squeezed out of them under duress, before they were eventually released and finally executed.

Well, this mirrors the events in Soviet Union when Stalin came to power. He too orchestrated a series of public trials against political figures and army officers that opposed Stalin, built on either circumstantial or fabricated evidence (the so-called Moscow Show Trials). The NKVD employed several means of torture, including beatings, prolonged sleep deprivation as well as a gruesome method called strappado, in which a person’s hands were tied behind their back and then suspended in the air by the wrists. Some of the accused were forced to confess for crimes they could not have possibly committed, for avoiding torture and/or fear their families would be punished.

The purpose of these trials was clear. First, they portrayed Stalin as a saviour, a fierce leader who would wipe out traitors of the State. Second, they served as a warning: if even high-ranked officials could be found guilty and purged, then no one was safe. So, to the ordinary citizen, Stalin became a figure to be both admired and feared. That is precisely the emotional response the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four expected people to feel when they saw Big Brother: love and fear.

Surveillance and Control

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Thought Police monitors people’s behaviour but also their thoughts through the use of telescreens and informants. The regime encourages family members and friends to report on suspicious behaviour, to the point that parents become afraid of their own children. Winston describes this atmosphere well: “It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak—’child hero’ was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.”

For example, Winston meets Mrs. Parsons’ children who were recruited by the party into the Spies, a youth organization created with the intent of reporting any suspicious behaviour deemed disloyal from friends or family. Children were indoctrinated to be loyal only to the Party and to love it above all else, superseding even loyalty towards their own family. Children who denounced their parents would be hailed as “child heroes”, not condemned as traitors.

Stalin’s regime also encouraged citizens to report suspicious activity from their friends and family members. Most of them complied, probably out of fear of becoming targets themselves. Youth organisations such as the Young Pioneers (almost certainly an inspiration for the Spies in the novel) taught children that Stalin was their true “father” and that the Party was their real “family”. Teachers and officials drilled into them that any patriotic child should inform the authorities of any transgressions, even those committed at home.

Restricting education and language

It may seem paradoxical that the majority of the population in 1984 are proles, lower-class individuals who are required to perform menial work, live in poorer districts, and have their rights severely stripped away. Why, then, do they not revolt? Since their lives are most affected by the regime, and they make up the largest percentage of the populace, why don’t they attempt to overthrow the Party?

Well, it isn’t paradoxical once you consider that the proles are largely kept uneducated. You see, to dictators, ideas are dangerous. An informed population may begin to come up with ideas of alternative ways of living or being governed, or question the competence and legitimacy of the ruler. That is why most dictators greatly restrict the amount of information that circulate around. The dictator might still encourage basic literacy though, but only so that people can work in low-status jobs that ultimately benefit the regime.

That is exactly the Party’s strategy in Orwell’s novel. Most citizens could read and write, but only so that they were able to perform the necessary jobs to keep the system going. But the Party ensured that proles never become educated enough to develop critical or rebellious thoughts. In fact, Nineteen Eighty-Four introduces the novel concept of Newspeak, an engineered language created by the Party designed to eliminate words such as “rebellion” or “liberty” from the vocabulary. And there is a reason they do that. By controlling language, the Party determines which words are allowed and which aren’t. If a word for a certain idea is absent in a language, the idea itself is unlikely to be conceived (e.g., if the concept of “rebellion” does not exist, it will be hard for people to imagine rebelling).

And this reveals why authoritarian leaders prefer a largely uneducated population. By making sure they do not learn sufficient to question authority, the regime can more easily justify limiting their rights by claiming that each restriction is for the best interest of the nation and, by extension, of themselves. It might start as simply as limiting access to information, which will escalate to limiting group gatherings, supressing free speech, banning any sort of political opposition and, ultimately, eroding personal freedom itself.

What, then, does the Party do to the better-educated middle-class citizens, such as Winston? They are strictly monitored as the Party sees them as the most likely group to commit acts against the Party’s interests. This is why we learn from O’Brien that the Party had always been following and monitoring Winston. All those subtle transgressions (facial expressions, unconscious mutterings, lack of euphoria during Hate speeches, outings with Julia, etc.) were all recorded by the Party – Winston never stood a chance.

When things start to go south, start a war!

In the novel, the three superstates are locked in a perpetual war. Not because they cannot find a compromise, but because they are actually willing to sustain conflict.

To me, this was a very confusing and paradoxical idea. Why would any regime (totalitarian or otherwise) want to prolong war, when all war does is to bring expenses to the State, drain resources, jeopardise the State’s safety, and decrease popularity of their leader?

But Orwell, once again, demonstrates a formidable understanding of totalitarian logic. If history taught us anything, is that if there is something that tyrants seem to like to do is going to war. And there are two main reasons for that. First, when domestic support begins to wane, finding a foreign enemy to fight against diverts attention away from internal issues, such as economic crisis, shortages or famine. Second, the existence of an external threat unites the population. Through strategic propaganda, a totalitarian regime can redirect negative emotions away from itself and towards an outside enemy.

The daily Two Minutes Hate ritual, in which Party members are required to watch propaganda videos about enemies of the State, illustrates this perfectly. It actually mirrors similar propaganda films and newsreels that were shown during Stalin’s reign, which portrayed the NKVD as heroes while dehumanizing and humiliating supposed traitors. The purpose of the Two Minutes Hate ritual is twofold: first, it channels hatred towards a common enemy of the Party, and, second, it creates the illusion of bonding with Big Brother and the Party. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, those enemies are, of course, Goldstein and his Brotherhood, as well as Eurasia (or Eastasia, depending on the current alliance), Oceania’s rival superstate, which citizens know virtually nothing about.

This brings me to a second point: isolation. Totalitarian regimes thrive when people live in closed societies, where knowledge of the outside world is virtually non-existent or entirely controlled. Did you notice how isolated Oceania is from the rest of the super-continents? How isolated London is with respect to the other cities? The proles have almost no access to information about life abroad, aside, of course, the narratives the Ministry of Truth lets out. This is intentional, as isolation is a very effective method to keep citizens oblivious to alternative and better ways of living, thus preventing dissidence and prolonging the longevity of the Party.

“Truth is what the Party says is true”

Orwell once said: “He who controls the past controls the future”. Boy, was he right!

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party has complete control over history through a systematic manipulation of photographs, documents, and pretty much every piece of information that contradicts its interests. Why? Because truth poses a fundamental problem to totalitarian regimes. After all, truth implies the possibility of falsehoods; ideologies can be questioned, evidence can be analysed, and debates held. All of these things are inimical to totalitarian regimes. Even if a dictator proclaims that something is true, someone may question it with actual verifiable evidence.

Thus, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is the Party which defines truth. They do not hesitate in lying, falsifying documents, news, announcements and even erasing science from the vocabulary. For example, at one point, the Party falsely advertises that food supplies are better than ever, but they are simply throwing red herrings. The reality, as Winston describes it, is that the country is getting poorer. A striking example of this process is the chocolate ration:

“And sure enough […] came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise […] that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. […] All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April. […] It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours?”

In this specific example, the Party is reshaping reality entirely. Through the combination of doublethink and a dosage of fear, nobody questions the “facts” put out by the Party, even when they contradict themselves. The same happens to Oceania’s foreign policy. The nation may be at war with Eurasia yesterday, but if the Party decides it is better to be at war with Eastasia today, the records are immediately rectified and any evidence to the contrary is swiftly destroyed.

In other words, whatever preserves the Party’s interests becomes the truth.

Again, there is a clear parallel in Stalin’s regime. Stalin censored pretty much anything that could cast doubt on the perfection of his rule: price increases, food/medicine shortages, crime/unemployment rates, disasters (either natural or man-made) were all topics banned or altered by Soviet propaganda.

You would think that the elaborate photoshop work that the Ministry of Truth did might have been the product of Orwell’s fruitful imagination. If so, you’ll be surprised to learn that Stalin ordered one photo of himself seated beside Lenin to be retouched: his face smoother, looking bigger, his shorter left arm physically corrected, and the two closer together. These were Stalin’s efforts to show people his closeness to Lenin and to reinforce the idea that he was Lenin’s natural successor.

Also, do you remember the three outcasts in the novel: Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford. They had once been members of the Revolution, fighting alongside Big Brother, only to be arrested, tortured, forced to confess their “crimes” and executed. Maybe the Party thought their usefulness ended, and saw them politically expendable as they knew too much. Interestingly, this is exactly what Stalin did to some of his staff. For example, Nikolai Yezhov, who was head of the NKVD and one of the chief architects of the Great Purge, was arrested based on largely false allegations that he was conspiring against the Soviet state. Stalin was in dire need of a scapegoat for the very purges Yezhov carried out, and Yezhov simply became the right target. After his arrest and eventual execution, Stalin had Yezhov erased from an official photograph in which both men stood by the Moscow Canal (see photo above).

Stalin also forced collectivisation in order to support the ever-growing industry. Peasants, who were by far the largest group of people in the USSR, lost their private property and were forced to work on collective farms (farms run by the state). Refusing meant either torture, death or a ticket to a gulag – concentration camps for slave labour. Ukraine, which was then part of the USSR, was hit particularly hard. Stalin imposed unrealistically high grain quotas on Ukraine, and regardless of whether the harvest met the targets or not, Stalin still confiscated whatever foodstuff was available. Anyone caught hiding food or picking leftover grain was imprisoned or shot. Famine swept across Ukraine and the population starved.

What did Stalin and his comrades do? They publicly denied there was famine: statistics were falsified, people caught talking about it faced imprisonment or execution and anything related to the topic was censored. Stalin even invited select foreign reporters, who he believed could be manipulated, to deny the existence of any famine to the whole world.

When love is broken…

One of the most disturbing moments in the novel occurs at the end, when Winston is tortured and brainwashed by O’Brien until he finally embraces Big Brother in his entirety. One interpretation that should be discarded immediately is that this embrace was a sort of resignation or deceit, that Winston only professed his love for Big Brother in order to escape a difficult situation. No. After the torture in Room 101, Winston genuinely believes that Big Brother brings happiness and safety.

How did the Party achieve this astonishing transformation?

Well, here Orwell is as much a philosopher as he is a novelist. No matter how deeply one loves another person, one’s self-preservation always comes on top. More specifically, O’Brien was cognizant of Winston’s rat phobia; the Party had been surveilling him for years and, and it likely recorded the moment in Mr. Charrington’s room when Winston told Julia of his fear of rats. O’Brien has no hesitation in threatening Winston with a cage of large, ravenous rats, ready to be released onto his face. Overcome by fear, Winston betrayed the person he loves most, Julia: ‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!’.

When Winston and Julia meet after the harrowing torture at the Ministry of Love, Julia explains:

“’Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something—something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, “Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.” And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.’”

And Winston? He agreed thinking: “He had meant it. He had not merely said it, he had wished it.”

But remember that as soon as Winston saw O’Brien’s rats in Room 101, he immediately begged for forgiveness and was willing to do what O’Brien wished of him. Yet, O’Brien insists:

“You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him”.

This confused me as hell. Why would O’Brien even think that someone who fiercely hated Big Brother could ever authentically come to love him? Surely, that stretches credibility.

Alas, I’ve come to realise that the line between love and hate is much more tenuous than it appears…

When hate turns into love

Consider an abusive relationship. From the outside, it can be difficult to understand why anyone would endure the behaviour of an abusive partner. Friends and family might insist that the partner is a piece of rubbish and the victim should find someone better. But if you have ever been in such as situation, you know that advice often falls on deaf ears.

There is a whole field of psychological research now shedding light on this behaviour: cognitive dissonance. Think about it this way: at the beginning of your relationship, things may be going pretty well. Your partner shows affection, allowing you to build an idealised version of them. When the partner later becomes abusive, you recognise that they are hurting you. You now hold two conflicting beliefs: you love your partner, but he is causing you pain. To resolve this internal conflict, you might start to believe that they didn’t really mean to be abusive. Or perhaps you think they were under stress and you failed to recognise that it is partly your fault. Abusers often also intersperse periods of violence with brief acts of affection, which get disproportionately magnified, creating an even stronger emotional bond with the abuser.

Likewise, research into political psychology has revealed why people may remain loyal to totalitarian leaders who are clearly harming them.

Philosopher Hanna Arendt, who lived through both world wars, wrote extensively about totalitarianism. Like Orwell, she saw totalitarianism as a system that reshapes reality by controlling what people think, seeking to dominate human beings on every possible level. Using strategies such as isolation, propaganda and terror, Arendt argued that totalitarianism creates a closed world in which the regime’s ideology becomes the only truth. If facts contradict the ideology, they are either supressed or dismissed as counter-revolutionary.

Arendt argued that when people feel lonely, socially disconnected and devoid of meaning, they become more vulnerable and more likely to embrace a system which offers identity, belonging and purpose. To Arendt, totalitarian regimes exploit this psychological void. Individuality and personal connections are purged because they get in the way in transforming individuals into an emotionless mass that is easier to control. Totalitarianism wants people who are predictable, interchangeable and devoid of identity; or, in Arendt’s own words, superfluous.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, that’s precisely the type of individuals that the Party seeks to “create”. As mentioned above, Orwell’s premise was that every single person harbours within themselves the instinct of self-preservation, even to the point of betraying the people they love most. Once Winston realises that he cannot possibly love anyone more than he fears his own excruciating death, human bonds, or any social connection for that matter, lose all significance. With his identity shattered and his place in society compromised, only a sense of inner emptiness remains – a psychological void.

Human beings hate to be in a position where they feel meaningless. The Party capitalises on this loneliness and disorientation, drilling into Winston that a life of servitude to Big Brother is the only worthy purpose he can possibly serve. This is how the Party turned people who once hated Big Brother to “love” it. After breaking them to the core, Big Brother becomes everything they would ever need, giving people a sense of belonging, identity and meaning.

In other words, it wasn’t the direct fear he endured in Room 101 that somehow magically flipped Winston’s loyalty. His memories weren’t distorted or replaced. What the Party managed to do was a complete psychological destruction: they erased any vestige of emotions and used the resulting emptiness as a blank canvas onto which the Party imposed their ideology.

What happened to Winston and Julia?

Of course, you and I, and everyone else who finishes the novel, want to know what happened to both Winston and Julia. The story is deliberately ambiguous about their ultimate fate, but here is something important I would like to emphasise. Winston’s and Julia’s memories of their torture, and of their hatred for Big Brother, were not erased or somehow replaced with artificial memories more amenable to the Party. No. Both Winston and Julia remain fully aware of their betrayal towards one another, but those acts are viewed with complete detachment, holding no personal meaning. Just take a look at these passages in the novel:

“They almost passed one another without a sign, then he turned and followed her, not very eagerly”.

“It did not matter, nothing mattered. They could have lain down on the ground and done that if they had wanted to. His flesh froze with horror at the thought of it.”.

“[…] she looked directly at him for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike.”

“’And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer.’”.

“He had made up his mind that he would accompany her as far as the Tube station, but suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold seemed pointless and unbearable.”

Winston and Julia never met again. Their harrowing experiences in Room 101 created such a deep psychological trauma that they cannot even bear the idea of being in the same space. That’s how devastatingly effective O’Brien’s methods were at breaking them.

As for Winston’s and Julia’s fate, we can only speculate. What is clear is that neither Winston nor Julia posed any threat to the Party any longer. Perhaps they continued in their respective jobs for as long as they remained useful and contributed to the strength of the regime. Alternatively, perhaps both were eventually “vapourised”, murdered as a warning to everyone else bold enough to defy the Party. Maybe their stories were told in a similar vein to those of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, the disgraced trio who were tortured, coerced into confessing fabricated crimes, and then released, only to wander meaninglessly and broken in a society that shunned them, until finally being executed.

Conclusion

Nineteen Eighty-Four was a deeply depressing read. Being accustomed to dystopian fiction where the protagonist somehow always manages to prevail, this novel was certainly a surprise.

Winston’s and Julia’s plans of resisting the Party collapse the moment they are betrayed by those they trusted most. Arrested and tortured in the Ministry of Love, both Winston and Julia are eventually released, but remain forever psychologically broken. Incapable to think independently, devoid of emotions, and cut off from any possibility of human connection, they become malleable subjects for the Party’s indoctrination. While they once hated Big Brother with absolute conviction, now they profess unconditional love for him.

Dark and relentlessly claustrophobic, Orwell wrote a story that draws a quite pessimistic view of humanity. Strangely enough, reading Nineteen Eighty-Four today, it probably makes just as much sense as it would have made had I read it at the time of its publication. Looking at the political situation around the world, it aches me to see how extremism, disinformation, and political intolerance are gaining ground across both Western and Eastern societies. Orwell intended this work as a warning of what a world rid of truth and democratic values could become. The fuse has already been laid; I worry about what might finally set it alight…

Final note

My interpretation of Nineteen Eighty-Four has mostly focused on the parallels between the ideology of the Party and Stalinism. While that resemblance is undeniable, Orwell repeatedly emphasised that his novel was a critique of totalitarianism in all its forms.

Indeed, when we look at the past (and present) tyrannies, we begin to notice they share strikingly similar methods: Adolph Hitler’s systematic persecution and extermination of entire groups of people; Muammar Gaddafi’s deliberate ban of history, geography and foreign languages; Idi Amin’s reign of terror marked by mass disappearances and political assassinations; Kim Il Sung’s isolationist policies aimed at controlling and restricting people’s movements and information access, are just a few examples present in many dictatorships.

And that is what Orwell intended to illustrate with this novel: that the dangerous ideologies and appalling practices of the Party are not confined to any one place or time epoch. They could emerge anytime… anywhere…

Mindlybiz

Mindlybiz

Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Review

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