1984 by George Orwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
EVERYONE NEEDS TO READ THIS.
Holy macaroni! I'd say Orwell was prophetic in his description of 2020-2021. So much of this book has already been implemented in today's world. Just different names. I think this is by far the scariest book I've read. It leaves the reader chilled at the end. Truly dystopian, and what makes it super creepy is how real it is in today's world. Very scary - if we don't "wake up and smell the coffee!"
In a nutshell: this book is what happens if We The People sit back and continue to think that "it could never happen here." It is a book that shows what happens when we continue to turn all things over the Government, to those in power, and turn to them whenever something doesn't go the way we think it should. If we continue to turn to the government, it will continue to usurp more and more power. This is also a book about how that happens on a worldwide scale. The honest truth is that still today, the Globalists are reaching for world domination. If we turn a blind eye, this book will become 100% reality.
Some of my highlighted quotes:
"The Ministry of Truth — Minitrue, in Newspeak* — was startlingly different
from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of
glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the
air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its
white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" (1984, Part I, Chapter 1)
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“It was not by making yourself heard, but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.” (1984, Part I, Chapter 2)
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“The frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event “It never happened!”, that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.” (1984, Part I, Chapter 3)
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“But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case, must soon be annihilated, and if all others accepted the lie which the party imposed, if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth. Who controls the past, ran the party slogan, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.
“And yet the past , though of it’s nature, alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now, was true from everlasting to everlasting.
“It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. Reality Controlled, they called it in Newspeak. Double think. (1984, Part I, Chapter 3)
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Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back; a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case. They were a few metres apart when the left side of the man’s face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see. (1984, Part I, Chapter 6)
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On giving up in the face of a mountain of lies & the importance of always paying attention to what is currently going on with our government and society:
"Who cares?” And why we should care. Because it is in paying attention - over time - that we begin to see the plan that was laid for us.
“Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own school days, Winston remembered, in the late 50s, it was only the helicopter that the party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had invented aero planes? It was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. ’I thought we’d always been at war with Eurasia,’ she said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. ’Who cares?’ she said impatiently. ’It’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.
“Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths.” (1984, Part II, Chapter 5)
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“If he persisted in talking about such subjects [the tricks, plans, clues and traps regarding how the party manipulated them as a society] she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people whom can go to sleep at any hour, and in any position. Talking to her he realized how easy it was to present sn appearance of orthodoxy, while having no grasp whatever of what ‘orthodoxy’ meant.
“In a way, the world view of the party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.
“By lack of understanding they remained sane, they simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.” (1984, Part II, Chapter 6)
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“The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, but at the same time robbing you of all the power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened, you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties, which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, or a tear, a word spoke to a dying man, could have value in itself. The Proles [short for Proletariats], it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a Party or a country or an idea. They were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life, he did not despise the Proles, or think of them merely as an inert force with would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The Proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions, which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort, and in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter, as if it had been a cabbage stalk.” (1984, Part II, Chapter 7)
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This one particularly happens today. Why war is profitable:
“The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced but they need not be distributed. And in practice, the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The essential act of War is destruction. Not necessarily of human lives but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking to the depths of the sea materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed. A floating fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labor that would build several hundred cargo ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labors, another floating fortress is built.
“In principle, the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bear needs of the population. In practice, the needs of the population are always under estimated with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life. But this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate politics to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increase the importance of small privilege, and thus magnifies the destination between one group and another. By the standards of the early 20th century, even a member of the inner party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy, his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food, drink, and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motorcar or helicopter, set him in a different world from the member of the outer party, and the members of the outer party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom they call the “Proles”. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty, and at the same time the consciousness of being at war and therefore in danger, makes the handing over of all power to a small cast seem a natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
“War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary destruction but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labor of the world by building temples and pyramids, budging holes and filling them up again, or even producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchal society. What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits. But it is also necessary that he should be a credulous, and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words, it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and since no decisive victory is possible, it doesn’t matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. (1984, Part II, Chapter 9)
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“The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish, once and for all, the possibility of independent thought.” (1984, Part II, Chapter 9)
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The solid truth about "democratic-socialism/socialism/communism":
“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for Oligarchy is Collectivism [Communism]. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called abolition of private property, which took place in the middle years of the century, meant, in effect, the concentration of private property in far fewer hands than before, but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. No individual of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything and disposes of the products as it thinks fit.” (1984, Part II, Chapter 9)
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“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this: The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We’re not interested in the good of others. We’re interested solely in power. Not wealth, or luxury, or long-life or happiness. Only power, pure power.” (1984, Part III, Chapter 3)
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