"George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist and critic most famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)" (Biography.com).
As we have been discussed in class, Nineteen Eighty-four is a strong criticism about the society where Orwell was immersed in at the time he wrote it. We have to bear in mind that this novel was published when WWII finished and the Cold War was just starting.
Winston, 1984's main character, was against the system of life where he was forced to live in. During the novel, we can see many signals of it. For example, when he wrote:
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free,
when men are different from one another and do not live alone -
to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the
age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink - greetings!" (Orwell 26).
At that time, he felt he was dead in life. He was tired of living the life he was supposed to, tired of not having freedom in any aspect of his life, and tired of not living the life he would like to. Unfortunately, when he decided to have a double life, working for the Big Brother and having and affair with Julia, he made a mess of it. He was caught, tortured and in the end, it was not a happy ending.
This novel showed us two main ideas. First, unless we - society - change the way we live, this story may become true, and in the future, we may live in the same way Winston and Julia had to. Second and the one that I want to refer to, there is a paradox between victory and defeat, where there is also an useless hope of freedom.
After Winston and Julia's little rebellion against the Big Brother, there was expected to have a happy ending, where they could survive without being controlled by any totalitarian entity and it did not happen. That prompted me to think whether something similar happened in history and I remembered two events: The Ukrainian Holodomor (death by forced starvation) and The Berlin Wall.
Maybe the first one does not ring a bell to many of you so I will try to briefly explain it. Between 1932 and 1933, Stalin had ascended to the power, introducing an agricultural program in which he forced farmers to cede their lands and equipment to the Soviet Ukraine and to join collective farms, thinking that production would increase. Famine began and many of them refused to give up what they had. Some farmers who saw this policy as a threat for their lives tried to Stalin then introduced another policy called "class warfare", which had as its main purpose to deal with the resistance to join. The people who resisted were called kurkuls and that class was the target of troops and police because they had to eliminate them. This massacre was hidden from the rest of the world: Soviet authorities denied any death caused by their policies and hid the information about how many people were dying.
The other example may be easy to recognize, since it is something we studied at school. As you may remember, in 1961 the German Democratic Republic (GDR) built a wall that divided Berlin into two sides: West Berlin and East Berlin.
This wall had special surveillance of tower guards located on top of it, who were in charge of activating their defense in case of Western citizens started to invade the East trying to threat the population with "fascist elements" that would not allow East citizens to build a socialist state. However, the hidden truth was that this wall was built in order to shun people from the East ran away from there into the West. Many people tried to escape from poor conditions given in the East by "jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high speeds" (History.com Staff).
Unfortunately, around 180 escapees were killed when they tried to run away from East Germany.
As you may perceive, this dystopian novel may have taken something from the past (Ukrainian holodomor) and may have foreseen what happened before (Berlin wall). Both events have something in common with 1984. As Winston, many people tried to get their freedom from powerful entities (Soviet Union and The Big Brother); nevertheless, when they thought they had made it, they were caught and killed. This made me think a lot about something we discussed in class: the useless hope of freedom. Winston, farmers and people from East Berlin who tried to cross the wall knew that they should not have done what they did. To defy the authority has its consequences and for them death was the only answer. Their bravery and hope of freedom was punished, not allowing them to get what they desperately wanted.
When Winston and Julia were caught, the voice through the wall said:
"Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!" (Orwell 177).
Freedom in those moments were something unthinkable. In that sense, I reckon Orwell foresaw some events in the future where freedom and death were strongly connected. That can also work as a reminder for us.
"'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'" (Orwell 31).
Do you agree that 1984 foresaw what happened in our history? Do you think something similar will happen?
In order to finish with my entry, other thought-provoking pictures.
References:
Connecticut Holodomor Commitee. Holodomor Facts and History. n.d. 15 Nov. 2014. <http://www.holodomorct.org/history.html>
"George Orwell" Bio. A&E Television Networks, 2014. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
History.com Staff. Berlin Wall. 2009. 16 Nov. 2014. <http://www.history.com/topics/cold- war/berlin-wall>
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-four. London: Penguin Books, 1954.
From my point of view, Orwell was a visionary. He had the ability to imagine how society will develop in the future and used his ability to write 1984, but he also predicted how society will be in our times; for instance, the use of propaganda, as in Oceania. Today's media is the connection for state propaganda. The news of the last decade's most important events support the way in which people behave. In that sense, the controlled pieces of information that people receive make them believe that this is the real natural world, people do not query about those events. Following that idea, the censorship of information in which we live in is taking control of our lifes because we are being offered with programs like facebook in order to keep us away from what matters. Moreover, when Wikileaks revealed government secrets, the US tried to block, censor this information and eliminate the website as if it had never existed. Finally, the US government is playing to be the Big Brother nowadays.
ResponderEliminarI also would like to point out that while I was reading your post and you mentioned the useless hope of freedom I remembered the scene in Batman: The Dark Knight Rises when the prisoners were trying to escape even though the knew it was almost impossible, but the had the hope of doing it some day because they knew about this kid who could escape. Here is the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjffIi2Pl7M and here is the legend of the kid that escaped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ToqIQ_jgpU.
That was one of the points I was expecting from my classmates. Thank you Melanie. Yes, I was also thinking about the US government as the Big Brother. From Bush to Obama, information has been controlled by them. It is also serious the issue about propaganda and the power social media have nowadays. I think you made a point there. As you may have noticed, there are many examples, not only in real life, where we can find this useless hope of freedom. I'm sure the rest of my classmates have more brilliant ideas.
ResponderEliminarConstanza,
ResponderEliminarI like the way you connected contemporary ways of control with Orwell's novel, such as Facebook, the NSA files, and so on. But allow me to clarify some points of soviet history:
1.- Stalin had not the entire power of the USSR. He was the general secretary of the Communist Party. There's a process called Democratic Centralism, which meas that every decision of the party (and so of the country) have to be discussed and debated, from the Party base to the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The process has to be very analized and structured.
2.- Thanks to Stalin administration, the Soviet Union achieved a lot of advances and prosperity for its people. Free education with high uality standards, the literacy rate skyrocketed, the child mortality rate dropped substantially, and the recently agrarian country was able to arm itself with guns and tanks quickly enough that they won World War II, those where just a few of the achievements during the so-called "Stalin's dictatorship".
3.- There's no clear evidence whatsoever that the Holodomor was forced by the central Comittee of the Soviet Union or by a "crazy decision" from its General Secretary. However, there's a lot of historical references that state that there was economical blockades during the first years of the Soviet Union's history. Those blockades where perpetrated by different countries that where enemies of the USSR, such as Japan, United States, FInland, Poland and Turkey. Famine and starvation was a generalized phenomenon not only suffered in Ukraine, but also in other countries that had no soviet influence at all such as Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Mongolia and Korea produced by these blockades.
Additionally, if that amount of death rates were completely real, there was no possibility that The Soviet Union had won "The Great Patriotic War" (the russian name for Worl War II), since 22 million civils only died during the German Invasion.
(This response continues with another one just below...)
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Eliminar5.- To talk about the Berlin Wall we have to make a reference to a political process called "Imperialism"
EliminarAccording to Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism is the process in which big capitalists deplete the natural resources within its own territory. IN order to still have profits, they have to expand to other countries, continuing exploitiation of the (proletariat) masses.
The Berlin Wall stopped that and protected Eastern Europe from a total cataclysm.
Additionally, The German Democratic Republic was th one who wanted a reconciliation betweeen the two sides of Germany. However, it was the West German side who denied any possibility of cooperative work. In fact, West Germany never recognized GDR as a country at all.
6.- Josepp Goebbels, prime minister and minister of propaganda and communications of NAZI Germany, was one of the most notorious falsifiers of Soviet history, spreading myths such as the extensive famine, the influence and conspiration of the jews inside the Soviet Government, etc. Additionally, those books where the principal books forpropaganda used by United Kingdom and the U.S. to excuse their influence within Latin American dictatorships or cruel wars in different territories like Vietnam (3 million civilians killed) or Korea (North Korean civilians killed by the U.S. army).
Finally, I have to consider that this author, besides his work with English secret services with espionage and denouncement of people, acussing them of having communists behaviours, has done one the main masterpieces of Distopic and Science fiction literature. Nevertheless, we have to be really clever and identify the main purpose of George Orwell when he wrote Animal Farm or 1984: striking the USSR and its supporters, defending the only system that can save the world from the communist threat: Capitalist Democracy.
(The texts I used for this response were:
"Another View of Stalin" by Ludo Martens
"The State and Revolution". by Vladimir Lenin.)
I knew you would answer with these arguments :) I just have to say that this is the information I gather and since it is history, it can be told from different points of view. In this case, these perspectives show us a bigger one.
ResponderEliminar