1984 reflection essays

A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , completed in 1948 and published a year later, is a classic example of dystopian fiction. Indeed, it’s surely the most famous dystopian novel in the world, even if its ideas are known by far more people than have actually read it. (According to at least one survey , Nineteen Eighty-Four is the book people most often claim to have read when they haven’t.)

Like many novels that are more known about than are carefully read and analysed, Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually a more complex work than the label ‘nightmare dystopian vision’ can convey. Before we offer an analysis of the novel’s themes and origins, let’s briefly recap the plot.

Nineteen Eighty-Four : plot summary

In the year 1984, Britain has been renamed Airstrip One and is a province of Oceania, a vast totalitarian superstate ruled by ‘the Party’, whose politics are described as Ingsoc (‘English Socialism’). Big Brother is the leader of the Party, which keeps its citizens in a perpetual state of fear and submission through a variety of means.

Surveillance is a key part of the novel’s world, with hidden microphones (which are found in the countryside as well as urban areas, and can identify not only what is said but also who says it) and two-way telescreen monitors being used to root out any dissidents, who disappear from society with all trace of their existence wiped out.

They become, in the language of Newspeak (the language used by people in the novel), ‘unpersons’. People are short of food, perpetually on the brink of starvation, and going about in fear for their lives.

The novel’s setting is London, where Trafalgar Square has been renamed Victory Square and the statue of Horatio Nelson atop Nelson’s Column has been replaced by one of Big Brother. Through such touches, Orwell defamiliarises the London of the 1940s which the original readers would have recognised, showing how the London they know might be transformed under a totalitarian regime.

The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records so they are consistent with the state’s latest version of history. However, even though his day job involves doing the work of the Party, Winston longs to escape the oppressive control of the Party, hoping for a rebellion.

Winston meets the owner of an antique shop named Mr Charrington, from whom he buys a diary in which he can record his true feelings towards the Party. Believing the working-class ‘proles’ are the key to a revolution, Winston visits them, but is disappointed to find them wholly lacking in any political understanding.

Meanwhile, hearing of the existence of an underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood – which has been formed by the rival of Big Brother, a man named Emmanuel Goldstein – Winston suspects that O’Brien, who also works with him, is involved with this resistance.

At lunch with another colleague, named Syme, Winston learns that the English language is being rewritten as Newspeak so as to control and influence people’s thought, the idea being that if the word for an idea doesn’t exist in the language, people will be unable to think about it.

Winston meets a woman named Julia who works for the Ministry of Truth, maintaining novel-writing machines, but believes she is a Party spy sent to watch him. But then Julia passes a clandestine love message to him and the two begin an affair – which is itself illicit since the Party decrees that sex is for reproduction alone, rather than pleasure.

We gradually learn more about Winston’s past, including his marriage to Katherine, from whom he is now separated. Syme, who had been working on Newspeak, disappears in mysterious circumstances: something Winston had predicted.

O’Brien invites Winston to his flat, declaring himself – as Winston had also predicted – a member of the Brotherhood, the resistance against the Party. He gives Winston a copy of the book written by Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood.

When Oceania’s enemy changes during the ritual Hate Week, Winston is tasked with making further historical revisions to old newspapers and documents to reflect this change.

Meanwhile, Winston and Julia secretly read Goldstein’s book, which explains how the Party maintains its totalitarian power. As Winston had suspected, the secret to overthrowing the Party lies in the vast mass of the population known as the ‘proles’ (derived from ‘proletarian’, Marx’s term for the working classes). It argues that the Party can be overthrown if proles rise up against it.

But shortly after this, Winston and Julia are arrested, having been shopped to the authorities by Mr Charrington (whose flat above his shop they had been using for their illicit meetings). It turns out that both he and O’Brien work for the Thought Police, on behalf of the Party.

At the Ministry of Love, O’Brien tells Winston that Goldstein’s book was actually written by him and other Party members, and that the Brotherhood may not even exist. Winston endures torture and starvation in an attempt to grind him down so he will accept Big Brother.

In Room 101, a room in which a prisoner is exposed to their greatest fear, Winston is placed in front of a wire cage containing rats, which he fears above all else. Winston betrays Julia, wishing she could take his place and endure this suffering instead.

His reprogramming complete, Winston is allowed to go free, but he is essentially living under a death sentence: he knows that one day he will be summoned by the authorities and shot for his former treachery.

He meets Julia one day, and learns that she was subjected to torture at the Ministry of Love as well. They have both betrayed each other, and part ways. The novel ends with Winston accepting, after all, that the Party has won and that ‘he loved Big Brother.’

Nineteen Eighty-Four : analysis

Nineteen Eighty-Four is probably the most famous novel about totalitarianism, and about the dangers of allowing a one-party state where democracy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and even freedom of thought are all outlawed. The novel is often analysed as a warning about the dangers of allowing a creeping totalitarianism into Britain, after the horrors of such regimes in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere had been witnessed.

Because of this quality of the book, it is often called ‘prophetic’ and a ‘nightmare vision of the future’, among other things.

However, books set in the future are rarely simply about the future. They are not mere speculation, but are grounded in the circumstances in which they were written.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that most dystopian novels, whilst nominally set in an imagined future, are really using their future setting to reflect on what are already firmly established social or political ideas. In the case of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four , this means the novel reflects the London of the 1940s.

By the time he came to write the novel, Orwell already had a long-standing interest in using his writing to highlight the horrors of totalitarianism around the world, especially following his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. As Orwell put it in his essay ‘ Why I Write ’, all of his serious work written since 1936 was written ‘ against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’.

In his analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his study of Orwell, George Orwell (Reader’s Guides) , Jeffrey Meyers argues convincingly that, rather than being a nightmare vision of the future, a prophetic or speculative work, Orwell’s novel is actually a ‘realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials’ – indeed, as much of Orwell’s best work is.

His talent lay not in original imaginative thinking but in clear-headed critical analysis of things as they are: his essays are a prime example of this. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in Meyer’s words, ‘realistic rather than fantastic’.

Indeed, Orwell himself stated that although the novel was ‘in a sense a fantasy’, it is written in the form of the naturalistic novel, with its themes and ideas having been already ‘partly realised in Communism and fascism’. Orwell’s intention, as stated by Orwell himself, was to take the totalitarian ideas that had ‘taken root’ in the minds of intellectuals all over Europe, and draw them out ‘to their logical consequences’.

Like much classic speculative fiction – the novels and stories of J. G. Ballard offer another example – the futuristic vision of the author is more a reflection of contemporary anxieties and concerns. Meyers goes so far as to argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia ‘transposed’ into London of the early 1940s, during the Second World War.

Certainly, many of the most famous features of Nineteen Eighty-Four were suggested to Orwell by his time working at the BBC in London in the first half of the 1940s: it is well-known that the Ministry of Truth was based on the bureaucratic BBC with its propaganda department, while the infamous Room 101 was supposedly named after a room of that number in the BBC building, in which Orwell had to endure tedious meetings.

The technology of the novel, too, was familiar by the 1940s, involving little innovation or leaps of imagination from Orwell (‘telescreens’ being a natural extension of the television set: BBC TV had been established in 1936, although the Second World War pushed back its development somewhat).

Orwell learned much about the workings of Stalinism from reading Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1937), written by one of the leading figures in the Russian Revolution of 1917 who saw Stalinist Russia as the antithesis of what Trotsky, Lenin, and those early revolutionaries had been striving to achieve. (This would also be important for Orwell’s Animal Farm , of course.)

And indeed, many of the details surrounding censorship – the rewriting of history, the suppression of dissident literature, the control of the language people use to express themselves and even to think in – were also derived from Orwell’s reading of life in Soviet Russia. Surveillance was also a key element of the Stalinist regime, as in other Communist countries in Europe.

The moustachioed figure of Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four recalls nobody so much as Josef Stalin himself. Not only the ideas of ‘thought crime’ and ‘thought police’, but even the terms themselves, predate Orwell’s use of them: they were first recorded in a 1934 book about Japan.

One of the key questions Winston asks himself in Nineteen Eighty-Four is what the Party is trying to achieve. O’Brien’s answer is simple: the maintaining of power for its own sake. Many human beings want to control other human beings, and they can persuade a worrying number of people to go along with their plans and even actively support them.

Despite the fact that they are starving and living a miserable life, many of the people in Airstrip One love Big Brother, viewing him not as a tyrannical dictator but as their ‘Saviour’ (as one woman calls him). Again, this detail was taken from accounts of Stalin, who was revered by many Russians even though they were often living a wretched life under his rule.

Another key theme of Orwell’s novel is the relationship between language and thought. In our era of fake news and corrupt media, this has only become even more pronounced: if you lie to a population and confuse them enough, you can control them. O’Brien introduces Winston to the work of the traitor to the Party, Emmanuel Goldstein, only to tell him later that Goldstein may not exist and his book was actually written by the Party.

Is this the lie, or was the book the lie? One of the most famous lines from the novel is Winston’s note to himself in his diary: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’

But later, O’Brien will force Winston to ‘admit’ that two plus two can make five. Orwell tells us, ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.’

Or as Voltaire once wrote, ‘Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust.’ Forcing somebody to utter blatant falsehoods is a powerful psychological tool for totalitarian regimes because through doing so, they have chipped away at your moral and intellectual integrity.

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”

1984 is a novel which is great in spite of itself and has been lionised for the wrong reasons. The title of the novel is a simple anagram of 1948, the date when the novel was written, and was driven by Orwell’s paranoia about the 1945 Labour government in UK. Orwell, a public school man, had built a reputation for hiself in the nineteen thirties as a socialist writer, and had fought for socialism in the Spanish civil war. The Road To Wigan Pier is an excellent polemic attacking the way the UK government was handling the mass unemployment of the time, reducing workers to a state of near starvation. In Homage To Catalonia, Orwell describes his experiences fighting with a small Marxist militia against Franco’s fascists. It was in Spain that Orwell developed his lifelong hatred of Stalinism, observing that the Communist contingents were more interested in suppressing other left-wing factions than in defeating Franco. The 1945 Labour government ws Britain’s first democratically elected socialist governement. It successfully established the welfare state and the National Health Service in a country almost bankrupted by the war, and despite the fact that Truman in USA was demanding the punctual repayment of wartime loans. Instead of rejoicing, Orwell, by now terminally ill from tuberculosis, saw the necessary continuation of wartime austerity and rationing as a deliberate and unnecessary imposition. Consequently, the book is often used as propaganda against socialism. The virtues of the book are the warnings about the dangers of giving the state too much power, in the form of electronic surveillance, ehanced police powers, intrusive laws, and the insidious use of political propaganda to warp peoples’ thinking. All of this has come to pass in the West as well as the East, but because of the overtly anticommunist spin to Orwell’s novel, most people fail to get its important message..

As with other work here, another good review. I’m also fascinated that Orwell located the government as prime problem, whereas Huxley located the people as prime problem, two sides of the same coin.

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George Orwell

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on George Orwell's 1984 . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

1984: Introduction

1984: plot summary, 1984: detailed summary & analysis, 1984: themes, 1984: quotes, 1984: characters, 1984: symbols, 1984: theme wheel, brief biography of george orwell.

Historical Context of 1984

Other books related to 1984.

• Full Title: Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel
• When Written: 1945-49; outline written 1943
• Where Written: Jura, Scotland
• When Published: June 1949
• Literary Period: Late Modernism
• Genre: Novel / Satire / Parable
• Setting: London in the year 1984
• Climax: Winston is tortured in Room 101
• Antagonist: O'Brien
• Point of View: Third-Person Limited

Extra Credit for 1984

Outspoken Anti-Communist. Orwell didn't just write literature that condemned the Communist state of the USSR. He did everything he could, from writing editorials to compiling lists of men he knew were Soviet spies, to combat the willful blindness of many intellectuals in the West to USSR atrocities.

Working Title. Orwell's working title for the novel was The Last Man in Europe .

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — 1984 — How Orwell’s 1984 Is Relevant To Today’s Audience

How Orwell's 1984 is Relevant to Today's Audience

• Categories: 1984 Dystopia George Orwell

About this sample

Words: 1927 |

10 min read

Published: Feb 8, 2022

Words: 1927 | Pages: 4 | 10 min read

Works Cited

• Azar, B. (2016). A study of the significance of dystopia as a literary genre. IJLLIS, 5(3), 51-57.
• Bloom, H. (Ed.). (2009). George Orwell's 1984 (Vol. 23). Infobase Publishing.
• Burgess, A. (2009). 1984, by George Orwell. English, 58(221), 142-144.
• Gleason, W. A. (2007). George Orwell's 1984. Salem Press.
• Goodman, P. (2019). George Orwell’s 1984 in light of Trump’s presidency. The Guardian.
• Greenberg, J. (2017). The relevance of George Orwell’s “1984” to the contemporary world. Annals of the American Thoracic Society, 14(1), 11-16.
• Huxley, A. (1958). Brave New World Revisited. Chatto & Windus.
• McCarron, K. (2015). 1984 by George Orwell: a comparison to the world. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 174, 3619-3625.
• Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. Harcourt Brace and Company.
• Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. Viking.

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1984 essay questions.

Compare and contrast Julia and Winston. How does each rebel against the Party, and are these rebellions at all effective?

Trace Winston's path towards destruction. Where do we first see his fatalistic outlook? Is his defeat inevitable?

Discuss the role of technology in Oceania. In what areas is technology highly advanced, and in what areas has its progress stalled? Why?

Discuss the role of Big Brother in Oceania and in Winston's life. What role does Big Brother play in each?

Discuss contradiction in Oceania and the Party's governance, i.e. Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Peace. Why is such contradiction accepted so widely?

Discuss and analyze the role O'Brien plays in Winston's life. Why is he such a revered and respected character, even during Winston's time in the Ministry of Love?

Discuss the symbolic importance of the prole woman singing in the yard behind Mr. Charrington's apartment. What does she represent for Winston, and what does she represent for Julia?

1984 is a presentation of Orwell's definition of dystopia and was meant as a warning to those of the modern era. What specifically is Orwell warning us against, and how does he achieve this?

Analyze the interactions between Winston and the old man in the pub, Syme, and Mr. Charrington. How do Winston's interactions with these individuals guide him towards his ultimate arrest?

Analyze the Party's level of power over its citizens, specifically through the lens of psychological manipulation. Name the tools the Party uses to maintain this control and discuss their effectiveness.

Outline the social hierarchy of Oceania. How does this hierarchy support the Party and its goals?

1984 Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for 1984 is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Describe O’Briens apartment and lifestyle. How do they differ from Winston’s?

From the text:

It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and...

What was the result of Washington exam

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how is one put into the inner or outer party in the book 1984

The Outer Party is a huge government bureaucracy. They hold positions of trust but are largely responsible for keeping the totalitarian structure of Big Brother functional. The Outer Party numbers around 18 to 19 percent of the population and the...

Study Guide for 1984

1984 study guide contains a biography of George Orwell, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• 1984 Summary
• Character List

Essays for 1984

1984 essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of 1984 by George Orwell.

• The Reflection of George Orwell
• Totalitarian Collectivism in 1984, or, Big Brother Loves You
• Sex as Rebellion
• Class Ties: The Dealings of Human Nature Depicted through Social Classes in 1984
• 1984: The Ultimate Parody of the Utopian World

Lesson Plan for 1984

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to 1984
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• 1984 Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for 1984

• Introduction
• Writing and publication

History of Now

What Does George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Mean in 2024?

Now 75 years old, the dystopian novel still rings alarm bells about totalitarian rule

Anne Wallentine

In recent years, some conservative American groups have adopted the slogan “Make Orwell fiction again,” a line that suggests the dystopian depictions of totalitarianism, historical revisionism and misinformation found in George Orwell ’s 1984 are now reality. Liberal groups may agree with some of those concepts—but would likely apply them to different events.

Seventy-five years after its publication on June 8, 1949, Orwell’s novel has attained a level of prominence enjoyed by few other books across academic, political and popular culture. 1984 ’s meaning has been co-opted by groups across the political spectrum, and it consequently serves as a kind of political barometer. It has been smuggled behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War and used as counterpropaganda by the CIA; at moments of political crisis, it has skyrocketed to the top of best-seller lists.

The language and imagery in the novel—which Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange , once called “an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears”—have also been reinterpreted in music, television, advertisements and films, shaping how people view and discuss the terror of political oppression. The terms the book introduced into the English language, like “Big Brother” and “thought police,” are common parlance today. “ Big Brother ” is now a long-running reality TV show. 1984 -like surveillance is possible through a range of tracking technologies. And the contortion of truth is realizable via artificial intelligence deepfakes . In a world that is both similar to and distinct from Orwell’s imagined society, what does 1984 mean today?

Jean Seaton , director of the Orwell Foundation and a historian at the University of Westminster in England, says that 1984 has become a way to “take the temperature” of global politics. “It goes up and down because people reinvent it [and] because people turn to it … to refresh [their] grasp on the present. It’s useful because you think, ‘How bad are we in comparison to this?’”

In 1984 , three totalitarian states rule the world in a détente achieved by constant war. The all-seeing Party dominates a grimly uniform society in the bloc called Oceania. As a low-level Party member, protagonist Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite historical records to match the ever-changing official version of events. As a Party slogan puts it , “Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past.”

Winston begins to document his contrarian thoughts and starts an illicit affair with a woman named Julia, but the two are soon caught and tortured into obedience by the regime. Ultimately, Smith’s individuality and attempt to rebel are brutally suppressed. While most contemporary societies are nothing like the book’s dystopia, in the context of today’s proliferating misinformation and disinformation , the Party’s primary propaganda slogans—“War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength”—don’t seem all that far-fetched.

According to Orwell’s son, Richard Blair , the writer thought his novel would “either be a best seller or the world [would] ignore it. He wasn’t quite sure which of the two it would be.” But soon after its publication, 1984 ’s best-seller status became clear. The book has since sold around 30 million copies. It most recently returned to the top of the American best-seller list in January 2017, after a Trump administration adviser coined the doublespeak term “alternative facts.”

“It’s a very relevant book … to the world of today,” Blair says. “The broad issue [is] the manipulation of truth, something that large organizations and governments are very good at.”

Many other dystopian novels carry similar warnings. So why does 1984 have such staying power? Orwell’s novels “all have exactly the same plot,” says the author’s biographer D.J. Taylor . “They are all about solitary, ground-down individuals trying to change the nature of their lives … and ultimately being ground down by repressive authority.”

1984 , Taylor adds, is the apotheosis of Orwell’s fears and hypotheses about surveillance and manipulation: “It takes all the essential elements of Orwell’s fiction and then winds them up another couple of notches to make something really startling.” Orwell’s precise, nightmarish vision contains enough familiar elements to map onto the known world, giving it a sense of alarming plausibility.

The novel traces the dystopian future onto recognizable London landmarks. “The really scary thing for the original readers in 1949 was that although it was set in 1984, it’s there: It’s bomb-cratered, war-torn, postwar England,” says Taylor. The University of London’s Senate House inspired the novel’s “ Ministry of Truth ,” as it had housed the Ministry of Information during World War II’s propaganda push.

Born Eric Blair in 1903, Orwell had a short but prolific writing career, chronicling politics, poverty and social injustice before his early death from tuberculosis in January 1950, just seven months after 1984 ’s publication. Though an accomplished essayist, Orwell is best known for 1984 and Animal Farm , his 1945 satire of Stalinist Russia.

Born in Bengal when the region was under British colonial rule, Orwell studied at Eton College but left the school to follow his father into the civil service. He became disillusioned with the colonial British Raj while serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days . In 1927, Orwell returned to England and Europe, where he immersed himself in working-class poverty to write Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier . He fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, almost dying from a throat wound. The conflict reinforced his socialist politics : “Everything he wrote after that was against totalitarianism [and] for democracy,” Blair says.

Orwell wrote 1984 while battling tuberculosis on the Isle of Jura in Scotland, aware that his condition was deteriorating as he wrote the novel, Taylor says. Upon finishing the manuscript, he went to a London hospital for treatment, where he married editorial assistant Sonia Brownell from his hospital bed. The writer died three months later at age 46. Blair, whom Orwell had adopted with his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, shortly before her death in 1945, was 5 years old at the time.

Though Orwell described 1984 as a warning rather than a prophecy, scholars have demonstrated significant interest in mapping the author’s imaginings onto the modern world. “When I started writing, what I was involved in was something you could call ‘Orwell Studies.’ And now there's an Orwell industry,” says Taylor, who has published two biographies of the author. (His latest , released in 2023, was informed by new primary source material.)

Taylor attributes this popularity to Orwell’s “uncanny ability … to predict so many of the things that trouble us here in the 2020s.” He notes that in the United Kingdom, Orwell mainly draws political and literary audiences, while in the United States, scientific circles are increasingly curious about Orwell’s foreshadowing of modern technology and surveillance methods.

“There’s something about his work that keeps getting reinvented and reactivated” in relation to events that happened well after Orwell’s death, says Alex Woloch , a literary scholar at Stanford University. “I think of Orwell as a text that people can turn to in confronting many different kinds of political problems, and particularly propaganda, censorship and political duplicity.”

Orwell’s “main relevance in the U.S. was forged during the Cold War,” Woloch says. A democratic socialist and anti-Stalinist, Orwell was able to “represent the contradictions of the communist ideology, the gap between its self-image and its reality.” 1984 and Animal Farm “were understood as the exemplary anti-communist texts ,” embedded in U.S. curriculums and widely taught in the decades since.

“With the end of the Cold War,” Woloch adds, “Orwell’s writing could be claimed by many different people who were arguing against what they saw as various forms of political deceptiveness,” from the Marxist Black Panther Party to the ultraconservative John Birch Society .

“It’s very difficult to think of another writer who’s so much admired across all parts of the political spectrum,” Taylor says. “He’s almost unique in that way.”

Adapted to the needs of a broad range of readers, 1984 took on a life beyond its author and its pages. In her forthcoming book, George Orwell and Communist Poland: Émigré, Official and Clandestine Receptions , Krystyna Wieszczek , a research fellow at Columbia University, explores the use of 1984 as a tool of resistance. The novel “provided an easy-to-use vocabulary … that [readers] could use to name the phenomenon” of oppression, Wieszczek says. Copies were smuggled into Poland and other countries behind the Iron Curtain that divided Eastern Europe from Western Europe, some even in the diplomatic bag of a secretary to the French Embassy in Warsaw.

In the 1950s, a CIA operation sent Animal Farm and other “printed matter from the West [into communist countries] in gas-filled balloons,” Wieszczek says. But many Poles objected to this tactic, fearing a reprise of the devastating and unsuccessful 1944 Warsaw Uprising . Through distribution points across Europe, the U.S. also sent millions of copies of anti-communist literature, including 1984 , to Poland. According to Wieszczek, surveys suggest that as much as 26 percent of Poland’s adult population—around seven million people—had some access to clandestine publications in the 1980s. Polish émigré imprint s like Kultura in Paris also ensured banned publications reached audiences in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. Cheekily, one of Kultura’s editions of 1984 even used a “Soviet militant poster as a cover,” Wieszczek says.

“Many people read 1984 as a very negative, pessimistic book, but … it had a kind of liberating impact … for some readers,” she explains. They were reading a banned book about banned books that reflected, to an extent, their own circumstances.

“ 1984 is a horrible book,” Wieszczek adds. “You never forget—it stays with you, this big pressure on the chest and the stomach. But somehow, it brought hope. There was this man on other side of the Iron Curtain who understood us. … There is hope because people understand.”

A protean text for political, intellectual and underground movements, 1984 has also resonated in popular culture. Its myriad artistic interpretations are explored in Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 . The novel inspired television shows, films , plays, a David Bowie album (though Orwell’s widow, Sonia, turned down the artist’s offer to create a 1984 musical) and even a “ Victory gin ” based on the grim spirits described in the novel. It was cited in songs by John Lennon and Stevie Wonder and named by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as one of his favorite books. And its imagery continues to inform the public’s perception of what might happen if 1984 weren’t fiction after all.

In January 1984, an Apple Macintosh ad directed by Ridley Scott aired during the Super Bowl. It depicted a maverick woman smashing a Big Brother-esque screen that was broadcasting to the subordinate masses, and it ended with the tagline , “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’” The implication was that buying Apple products would set people apart from the crowd. In an Orwellian twist, although the ad positioned Apple as the underdog against the dominant IBM, the company actually had a competitive market share, claiming 25 percent to IBM’s 24 percent at the end of 1983.

While the term “Orwellian” can be used to describe Orwell’s style, “the classic use … is for politicians [who] grotesquely misuse language for ideological purposes and use language to disguise or pervert reality rather than to expose it,” Woloch says. Today, the phrase has become a “floating signifier,” Taylor says. “It’s so regularly used it doesn’t actually mean anything.” He cites a politician misusing “Orwellian” to complain about a perceived personal injustice (a canceled book contract).

“[Orwell’s] books have such widespread currency that you can use him to describe anything, really,” Taylor adds. “The word can mean anything and nothing at the same time.”

This is ironic, given how precise Orwell was about language. The reduction of language and creative thought to “ Newspeak ” in the novel figures largely in the population’s oppression. Orwell “was passionately committed to language as a contract crucial to all our other contracts,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Orwell’s Roses . He is “an exemplar of writing as the capacity to communicate other people’s experience,” Seaton says, “… so to read Orwell is, in a sense, to defend language and writing.”

Orwell’s main question, according to Woloch, “is how, as a thinking person and a fair-minded person, … do you confront the genuine pervasiveness of political problems that make up the world that we’re in?” The scholar quotes Orwell’s famous line from a 1938 New Leader essay : “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”

“The big three themes [of 1984 ] that people ought to bear in mind,” Taylor suggests, “are the denial of objective truth, which we see everywhere about us, every war that’s currently taking place anywhere in the world and in quite a lot of domestic political situations, too; the manipulation of language … and the use of words to bamboozle people; and the rise of the surveillance society. … That to me, is the definition of the adjective ‘Orwellian’ in the 21st century.”

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Anne Wallentine | | READ MORE

Anne Wallentine is a writer and art historian with a focus on the intersections of art, culture and health. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she writes for outlets that include the Financial Times , the Economist , the Art Newspaper  and Hyperallergic .

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• The Weekend Essay

What Orwell got right

The more the world in which Nineteen Eighty-Four was written has changed, the more it has stayed the same.

By Robert Colls

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever” — O’Brien, “ Nineteen Eighty-Four ”

George Orwell didn’t get everything right. Contrary to popular myth, he often got things wrong. In “Old George’s Almanac” ( Tribune , December 1945) for instance, he predicted that the US and Soviet Russia would do a postwar deal at Britain’s expense, that the Americans would suffer a postwar depression, that Germany would fall into banditry, and that Asia would turn xenophobic. He started the war thinking the British people wouldn’t fight and ended it expecting a collapse in the birth rate. He once argued that you could show your solidarity with people by killing them.

He didn’t get everything right in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , either. There wasn’t a nuclear war or revolution, and whatever system we live under now, it is not a paranoid left-fascist dictatorship. We’ve never had anyone or anything remotely resembling Big Brother. There is no “terror”. We have not been looted of our law or language. Our institutions haven’t been wiped out – they creak on. Some of this happened in other places – Nagasaki and Hiroshima took the bomb, and foul tyrannies took over in eastern Europe and elsewhere – but not all at once and not all in the same way. The Marshall Plan stabilised western Europe and Nato defended it. If you see a Big Brother in the sky above London, it’s more likely to be a rap star.

Then there are those things that have happened but not in the way Orwell imagined. It’s possible to see the novel’s three great global formations in the post-1945 settlement – Oceania in the West, Eurasia in Russia, and Eastasia in China. But the world we live in now is a messier, more volatile place than Orwell’s power blocs, and although proxy wars across continents have never stopped, no wars have been fought directly between the three great civilisations (call them what you will). Decolonisation of the old European empires complicated the world order even more, and the rise of a fourth geopolitical formation, the European Union , has yet to register.

We all have TV, but not like Winston’s TV, which receives as well as transmits information and instruction. We have mobile phones instead, billions of them, one in every back pocket, but what they receive and transmit goes first and foremost to capitalist corporations in God knows where, not a vast central state apparatus in London. Pens have become scarce in our world as well as in Winston’s, but not because everyone now uses dictaphones; and no one makes a phone call in Nineteen Eighty-Four . We have a national lottery like the world of the novel has a national lottery, but ours is not a fraud because people do occasionally win. Nothing works properly in their world, and little seems to work properly in ours, but the reasons are different. In Oceania, the problem is state centralisation and for us the problem is market diffusion.

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I could make a long list of all our travails compared with all their travails but whatever they are, they are not comparable. Vape lounges are everywhere, but they are not where you go to get vapourised. Pornography is easily available but how much is self-generated? Horrible histories are what middle-class people buy for their children at Waterstones, not what kids are forced to read at school (“In the old days, before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city we know today”). Gay love, if that is what Winston shares with O’Brien, is no longer hidden. Capitalism, if that is what we have, has been transformed, not abolished. Communism has fallen but, according to the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg , Russian security services still appear to be spooked by a shabby little building in Ivanovo calling itself the George Orwell Library. No one talks any more of the Laws of Motion of Capital, and those who do don’t believe it. We are so much richer now (UK GDP is six times more than it was in 1948) but not, as Orwell argued, by holding on to the empire.

All these features of a world Orwell did not imagine have brought their own quandaries that he would have recognised. With a camera computer in every pocket, we have become our own watchers of the watched. Orwell’s newspeak had teams of people employed to reduce language beneath the threshold of everything that makes us human, but this isn’t Twitter, and it can’t be squared with the imminent quantum leap that world media is about to take with AI. Nobody is in control. Since 1949, far from seeing the submergence of the individual by the state, we have seen the rise of mass narcissism regardless of the state. The US saw an attack on its seat of government on 6 January 2020 by a rabble holding mobile phones to their faces. Everything is there to be selfied; and everything selfied is all there is. Orwell feared “fellow travellers” who kept their influence secret. Now we have “influencers” who do it in the daylight.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four , the Party seeks to control all speech and therefore all thought. Our elites also prefer their own ways of speaking and thinking, but they monitor our language by their control of public and business institutions, not party edict. We live in a society increasingly policed by graduates. Come, comrade, show me your language and I will show you how to free your mind. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

Orwell never set out to predict. He merely set out the problem and the problem was not the accuracy of his warnings but the hell he unleashed in a book.

Winston and Julia live in a sealed space that has no beginning or end. I say “space” but what I mean is “mind”. As in a nightmare, everything in Nineteen Eighty-Four is about not knowing who or where you are. There is no God . There are no morals. There is no politics. There is no culture. There is no trust. There can be no friends. Soon there will be no thought, only conformity. In the name of redeeming everyone, the state is devoted to destroying everyone. If you transgress, you will surely die. If you don’t transgress, you have lost your mind. Losing your mind, after all, is the point. O’Brien the chief inquisitor is a lunatic, a liar and a psychopath but he knows everything because he has the power to contain everyone. “Nothing exists except through human consciousness,” he says. The Party has abolished objective truth. It has almost abolished the family; the orgasm is next. O’Brien says he could identify as a soap bubble if he wanted to, and float in the air, and as his mind “contained Winston’s mind”, we can see how it works. Gravity only matters when the Party is forced to deal with the real world. “Doublethink”, a sort of dialectical method of thinking treacherously in opposites, allows all this to be true and untrue at the same time. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Winston is insane as well, remember. Not as mad as his interlocutor, still holding on to an idea of the world as it is, but sick enough in ordinary circumstances to imagine raping and murdering Julia only minutes after meeting her. It is Julia, the anti-intellectual in a system of mindless hate run by intellectuals, who is the true hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four . Not Winston, and not O’Brien, even though he gets all the best lines.

In such circumstances we assume that self-surveillance is normal and self-censorship rife. Julia had been self-censoring for years. Winston is learning how, and for a time we think O’Brien and the Brotherhood were (must have been) masters of it. In other words, we feel there must be widespread self-censorship in their world just as we feel there must be in ours. But it’s hard to tell. I’m doing it now. Either way, nobody wants the Two-Minute Hate – “an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowtorch”. WAR IS PEACE.

There are two refrains. One is, “We are the dead” – to which Julia dryly responds, “We’re not dead yet.” And the other is, “If there is hope, it lies in the proles” – a statement Orwell notes as a “mystical truth” and a “palpable absurdity”.

Yet he believed it. In so far as he had a politics, Orwell believed in the common decency and good sense of the English people. He spent the first half of the Second World War working for the BBC’s Eastern Service, broadcasting to the Indian subcontinent. He spent the second half writing about how ordinary people in England saw themselves and their country – not in books and theories, not in newspaper editorials, not in political parties or great leaders, but in each other, out there on the street, in the garden, in the four-ale bar, at work and at home and in the armed forces. What Gramsci rather abstractly called the “national popular”, Orwell cleverly called “My Country Right or Left” ( Folios of New Writing , 1940).

If there was hope it could only be with the proles, and yet right from the start in his notes for Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell recognised their “equivocal” position in the resistance movement (if there is a resistance movement). Big Brother fell but we don’t know who to (although Sandra Newman’s 2023 novel Julia makes a good stab at it). At first his publisher saw Nineteen Eighty-Four as Orwell’s “final breach” with socialism, worth a “cool million votes to the Conservatives”. Orwell was quick to reject this, but he was never slow to identify that mixture of condescension and distaste in left intellectual circles towards working-class people. As for now, our elites still prefer their own hierarchy of virtue to the democracy of other people, and no one pretends that Labour is a working-class party. For the people, maybe. By the people, not. As the American writer Thomas Meaney has remarked in these pages , the globalisation that was wished upon them now feels like a putsch.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in the Hebrides between 1946 and 1948 and published by Secker & Warburg on 8 June 1949. Orwell died seven months later in University College Hospital off Euston Road in London. Since then we have all learned to live with “Big Brother”, and “Orwellian” has joined “Shakespearian” and “Dickensian” in an elite company of adjectives. Even the Staggers’ best writers do it. Bruno Maçães’s recent Orwellism – “The globalisation of conflict ultimately means that the only universal principle is conflict itself” – is so good it could be a fake.

We are not talking here about ways of getting things wrong. We are not talking either of “Old George’s Almanac”. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a literary work before it is a political work, taking its cue from a wide range of fiction including, for example, novels as different as Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937) and CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945). It was never meant to be a prophecy. Orwell caught what he saw as a last moment in our history and bound it to what was certainly the last moment in his own, to create a hell on Earth that, once born, could never be unborn.

Tortured and beaten and looking in the mirror on legs that look like sticks, Winston is horrified to see that it is him and we are horrified to see that it is Belsen. Orwell once called the work of Salvador Dalí a “direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even… life itself”. Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four is not being raped and murdered. It is what being raped and murdered might feel like. It is a work of art stamping on the human imagination forever.

Robert Colls is the author of “George Orwell: English Rebel” (OUP)

[See also: Salman Rushdie’s warning bell ]

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Essay: Reflective essay based on Kolb’s (1984) cycle of reflective learning

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This essay is a reflective essay based on Kolb’s (1984) cycle of reflective learning I will be reflecting upon my experience as part of a group in which the end result was presenting a group presentation. Reflective practice is a mixture of deliberate and calculated thinking alongside more spontaneous thoughts (Neilson, Stragnell & Jester, 2007). Kolbs (1984) cycle consists of four stages. The first stage is concrete experience, which is when the experiences occur or are completed. The second stage is the reflective observation stage whereby the person reflects on the experience. The next stage is abstract conceptualisation this is concluding and learning form the experience. The final stage is active experimentation which involves planning and trying out what you have learned. Kolbs model creates an action plan similar to that in Gibbs (1988) model. In compression in John (2017) model the emphasis is more on retrospective reflection rather than active experimentation.

Concrete experience: we were split into groups in our seminar. I was in a group of 5 and I was lucky enough to know one member of my group but I had never met the other four (who all new each other). From the first group meeting I nominated myself to be the leader and so was involved in delegating tasks to the other team members. This was difficult as at least one of our team members were absent per meeting despite this, due to there being at least 4 team members per meeting there was no social loafing, as predicted by (Klung & Bagrow, 2016). Due to not everyone turning up to every meeting it was hard to contact those who were absent to explain to them what they needed to do creating extra work. However due to social media I was able to make contact with them and explain the tasks to the absent team members. The creation of the PowerPoint was a gradual process that we started during our first seminar and was completed four days before we were due to present our presentation. We faced similar challenges which were also faced in multidisciplinary team (MDT) meeting (Kassianos, 2015) such as availability problems with everyone taking different modules and so having a different schedule and outside of university commitments made it challenging to find a time that suited everyone. I was lucky enough to get on very well with all group members the group was very cohesive which in turn produced a positive group working environment. We ran through the presentation before we presented it to the group to time our PowerPoint and to reduce everyone’s anxiety. Everyone in the group was apprehensive about presenting but the overall nerves were no more than you would normally expect.

Reflective observation: before the first seminar began I was made aware that we would be split in to groups this made me feel anxious as I had no idea who my group members would be and what they would be like. During the seminar I felt relief when I knew I was in a group with a friend of mine but I was still nervous and felt apprehensive towards the other group members. However as I introduced myself to the other members and they introduced themselves to me I felt my anxiety lessen as found by (Marletta, Sarli, Caricati & Mancini, 2017). Although apprehensive and anxious I was excited about the opportunity to make more friends and get to know more of my class mates. The other thing that I found to be anxiety provoking was the thought of the presentation and the fact that I had to rely on other people to produce a good standard of work to be complied in the presentation. I had to rely on the rest of the group members having good presentation skills I think it’s this reason why I decided to take the lead for the first few sessions which could have resulted in some members not feeling able to speak up this has also been found in MDTs by Lichtenstein et al. 2004. I felt angry and irritated about some members lack of commitment as not everyone turned up to every meeting with some people missing meetings more than one occasion I found this to be frustrating as it produced anxiety about the quality of the information within the presentation. Research has found that the group dynamic is effected by each members dedication to the end goal the presentation (Forsyth, 2018). As a results of this the absent members received a debrief of what we disused at the meeting from me. At points I might have been a bit overbearing and my frustration may have come across. As we discussed how we wanted to present our presentation I felt confused as there was a suggestion by a team member that we should all dress up as e.g. a psychiatrist and other suggestions (right before we presented our presentation to the class) of using a stick man to explain our chosen roles. This all produced heated debate which made me feel uncomfortable and resulting in me taking a step back as the role of leader and not really contributing to this debate which was ultimately solved through negotiation (McGrath & Holewa, 2006).

Abstract conceptualisation : although initially anxious about the social interaction involved in this task I made great friends and cemented pre-existing friendships within the group which I will take away from this task. I have learned that despite being anxious the apprehension experienced when I first met my group members wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be and I coped really well. This was the first time I have ever been group leader I have learned that I am good with organising people and delegating tasks. However I might be overly controlling and rigid. This comes down to having overly high expectations of myself and others. My slight perfectionist personality streak came out resulting from self-inflicted pressuring myself to come out of university with a good degree. I have also learned that I am not very good with coping with conflict, when there was conflicting ideas about how to present the presentation. This conflict which caused me to take a back seat as leader and to dissociate from the group I think this is due to prior childhood trauma. Other members of the group, because of different life experiences to mine, were comfortable and sat with the disagreement with some members thriving off it. Most of the group as a whole were anxious about the pentation although one member wasn’t because they are used to giving presentations.

Active experimentation: based on what I have learned from this experience in future team work (and If I am ever involved in a MDT) I will try and be less overbearing and controlling. This will be achieved by putting more trust in people and their ability to work effectively and letting them run with their own ideas instead of micromanaging them. This strategy was found to be effective in MDT team (Fay, Borrill, Amir, Haward & West, 2006). I will try not to retreat from conflict by engaging and contributing rather than avoiding and/or running away from it. I think as a non-confrontational person if I develop the confidence to participate when there is conflict in future I will be able to help the group resolve differences and negotiate a solution in a calm and inclusive manner. This will make me a better leader as well as a better team member.

My overall conclusion from this experience is that I can be a leader and that I can lead effectively although admittedly can be over controlling in this role. I have also learned that presentations are nothing be scared of or to shy away from and that the feeling of apprehensive in relation to public speaking is normal.

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Mitch McConnell: We Cannot Repeat the Mistakes of the 1930s

By Mitch McConnell

Mr. McConnell is the Senate minority leader.

On this day in 1944, the liberation of Western Europe began with immense sacrifice. In a tribute delivered 40 years later from a Normandy cliff, President Ronald Reagan reminded us that “the boys of Pointe du Hoc” were “heroes who helped end a war.” That last detail is worth some reflection because we are in danger of forgetting why it matters.

American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines joined allies and took the fight to the Axis powers not as a first instinct, but as a last resort. They ended a war that the free world’s inaction had left them no choice but to fight.

Generations have taken pride in the triumph of the West’s wartime bravery and ingenuity, from the assembly lines to the front lines. We reflect less often on the fact that the world was plunged into war, and millions of innocents died, because European powers and the United States met the rise of a militant authoritarian with appeasement or naïve neglect in the first place.

We forget how influential isolationists persuaded millions of Americans that the fate of allies and partners mattered little to our own security and prosperity. We gloss over the powerful political forces that downplayed growing danger, resisted providing assistance to allies and partners, and tried to limit America’s ability to defend its national interests.

Of course, Americans heard much less from our disgraced isolationists after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Today, America and our allies face some of the gravest threats to our security since Axis forces marched across Europe and the Pacific. And as these threats grow, some of the same forces that hampered our response in the 1930s have re-emerged.

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