1984

Over this past month of January, I have had the pleasure to read George Orwell's 1984. It was amazing.  I loved listening to Orwell go into detail about every part of this new Britain, dominated by a seemingly all-knowing Big Brother and the story of a frail rebel with hopes of overthrowing this police state. But while reading this book I was shocked by it's realisticeness and accuracy.

To start, everything Winston, the protagonist, owns is marked "Victory" (Victory Gin, Victory Cigarettes), implying he bought it from a super-corporation, possibly owned by the government. Is this so different from our lifestyles of buying everything from a mega-corporation; getting our chocolate from Mars, our phones from Apple, our soda from The Coca-Cola Company.

Another example is this idea that the government should control all information going in and out of the state. In Soviet controlled Russia in the mid-to-late 20th century, a revolution started when dictators like Khrushchev and Stalin refused their people the basic right to read foreign texts or let anyone know what happens within their regime. In fact, the Ministry of Truth in the book, a government building where all media is censored, sounds exactly like the Goskomizdat in Russia, the place where government agents would censor all information within the state   Even today, Kim Jong-Il and his son Kim Jong-Un censor all information in order to keep their population in a state of mindless worship through obliviousness to the outside world. In fact that is exactly what is happening in Oceania.

Big Brother, the dictator of Oceania, has a large array of surveillance complete with omnipresent posters that read "Big Brother is Watching You". His methods include watching peoples' living spaces by requiring them to keep a telescreen that acts as a camera, patriots eager to report wrongdoings, and random checks by the police. Quite recently, a scandal broke out where we learned of the US's extent of using the Patriot Act where the government had been hacking into our emails and tapping our phone lines, confining us to the privacy of an average citizen of Oceania.


This book might have seemed like a work of fiction when it was published in 1948, an entertaining story of a man trying to fight against all odds to destroy something that brought only terror to everyone. Yet now, 80 years later, it's not a work of fiction, it's a prophecy.