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Post subject: 1984 Posted: January 7th, 2007, 7:33 am |
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Joined: 15 January 2006 Posts: 1543 Location: somewhere
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1984 is a book by George Orwell, and it's extremely depressing. Not a feel-good romantic comedy at all.
It's about a guy called Winston Smith and he lives in the year 1984 under the facist government of Big Brother. There's signs everywhere that say "Big Brother is watching you" and their slogan is, "Freedom is Slavery. War is Peace. Ignorance is strength." They brainwash people into loving Big Brother and nothing else. Everyone is basically emotionless, besides the love of Big Brother and the hate of his enemies. Winston, however, does feel and think like a normal person, and he hates big brother. There are thought police, who patrol your thoughts, and if you even think of blaspheming against Big Brother they take you during the night and you become and "unperson", that is, they kill you, and you are said to never exist. All record of your existence is removed, and people just forget after a day or two. A television type-instrument is in every room, and it doesn't just transmit pictures to you, it patrols your movements and everything you say, so if you're caught blaspheming, that's the end of you. And children turn in their parents too. Very freaky. So Winston wants to rebel, but he doesn't know how...
Has anyone read this book? If you haven't, I really recommend it.
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Post subject: Posted: January 7th, 2007, 7:49 am |
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Joined: 19 September 2006 Posts: 2126 Location: england
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i've read this twice now, and i absolutely love it. it is rather depressing, but there's also a sharp satirical edge to it that verges on black humour.
that last line is absolutely chilling. i mean the sentence itself is harmless enough, but it's what it means - what it means they've done to him.
the scariest thing about the books is that so much of it is based in reality - when he was fighting in the spanish civil war, orwell saw for himself how people really did try and change history by reporting atrocities that never happened and ignoring ones that did; and stalinist russia really would make people "unpersons" by erasing all records of them and doctoring pictures etc.
orwell's one of my favourite authors - i've read 1984, animal farm, and a bunch of his essays, and i really like his style.
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Post subject: Posted: January 7th, 2007, 12:30 pm |
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Joined: 04 June 2005 Posts: 4449 Location: Northern USA
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That sounds really creepy and depressing, but really good! I'll have to check it out sometime...
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Post subject: Posted: January 8th, 2007, 3:54 am |
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Joined: 03 May 2005 Posts: 4717 Location: Middle-earth Country:
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I've read it, and Animal Farm. Both quite depressing ![Tongue :p](./images/smilies/tongue.gif) Still...it gives a reality check about letting anyone get that much power ![Lost :lost:](./images/smilies/unsure.gif) Not exactly....<i>entertaining</i> reads, but powerful and thought-provoking ![Yes :yes:](./images/smilies/yes.gif)
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Post subject: Posted: January 8th, 2007, 10:01 am |
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I've read 1984 and Animal farm as well. Very thought-provoking how the theme of 1984 can still be applied to modern times. The surveillance society is here and our every move is already recorded through cameras, sattelites and GPS tracking. Most of it is for convenience and security reasons, but the debate is still important. How much do we need it and how. Also the way we talk about things, the speech acts, do we name people terrorists or freedom fighters, when talking about increased surveillance, is it for security reasons or for controlling people...
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Post subject: Posted: January 8th, 2007, 10:30 pm |
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Joined: 10 June 2005 Posts: 1871 Location: Minas Tirith Country:
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1984 is a brilliant book. I read it two years ago and I loved it. My dad told me about it.
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Post subject: Posted: January 8th, 2007, 10:35 pm |
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Joined: 08 December 2006 Posts: 1344 Location: My own little world....
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I've been wanting to read this book for quite some time (actually ever since I read Animal Farm and absolutely loved it), but I've never gotten around to checking it out. I'll have to go get it when I finish the book that I'm on right now.
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Post subject: Posted: January 14th, 2007, 10:50 am |
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Animal Farm is great as well. It's been quite a while since I read it, but it was scary... the psychology he uses. It was so clearly based on things you could recognize from our society.
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Post subject: Posted: January 15th, 2007, 4:06 am |
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Joined: 15 January 2006 Posts: 1543 Location: somewhere
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It's quite remarkable. Society is definitely similar to the way he percieved it to become, all the way back in 1948! Though not to the extremities he described in his novels, thank god.
It inspired lots of authors as well, because it was so original. V for Vendetta is one example. It definitely has some aspects taken from 1984, like the all ruling facist government.
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Post subject: Posted: January 15th, 2007, 3:54 pm |
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Joined: 12 July 2005 Posts: 8885
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I read 1984 before. I thought it was very chilling but very good as well.
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Post subject: Posted: March 25th, 2007, 11:19 pm |
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Joined: 19 January 2007 Posts: 257 Location: New York
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An absolutley amazing book...I honestly think everyone should make an effort to read it at least once in their life. Orwell got so many things right...1984 was written in the 40's, and it just astounds me how well he was able to percieve the threats to our liberty that we are experiencing today.
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Post subject: Posted: March 27th, 2007, 6:10 am |
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Joined: 19 September 2006 Posts: 2126 Location: england
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^ i agree that it's scary how close we in the west have come to the 24-hour surveillance world of 1984, but it's important to remember that it's not just a case of orwell predicting the future - like i said in my previous post, he was writing about what was happening at the time in russia, and what had happened during the spanish civil war and in germany under the nazis. the idea of people being filmed every second of every day was new, but the general idea of surveillance wasn't - just think of the secret police forces in stalinist russia and nazi germany. and the 'two minutes of hate' isn't far off the brainwashing used in the hitler youth. orwell simply took what was really happening and pushed it to the extreme - his futuristic world isn't a random prediction but a natural progression from the world he himself was living in.
i'm not trying to detract from what orwell did because he was a fantastic author and it's a fantastic book, i'm just trying to point out that it's important to recognise where the book came from and remember the period of time that brought it about - it's when we see that our surveillance society comes from the dictatorships of the 1930s/40s that we realise its true horror and full implications.
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Post subject: Posted: March 30th, 2007, 3:30 pm |
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Joined: 10 October 2005 Posts: 226 Location: lost and forgotten
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I've read it, but I can't say I enjoyed it very much... To me it seems that a person had to be pretty paranoid to write such things. But I am probably the only one who feels like that...
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Post subject: Re: 1984 Posted: March 11th, 2018, 3:26 am |
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Joined: 02 January 2007 Posts: 3563 Location: The Lakeshore of Annúminas Country:
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Recently saw a live play of 1984, and it really brought the heaviness to life, and there were some creepy paralells to to the world of 2018.
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Post subject: Re: 1984 Posted: March 11th, 2018, 5:34 pm |
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Joined: 21 November 2014 Posts: 3922 Location: Angband & Mordor Country:
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It's funny but a member of another site was mentioning that he had just watched an excellent documentary on George Orwell, and was impressed by all the "predictions" he had made that had actually transpired.
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Post subject: Re: 1984 Posted: March 11th, 2018, 10:31 pm |
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Joined: 05 March 2017 Posts: 2665 Location: I've been where Aragorn hasn't, but I now live in a cross between Hobbiton and Rivendell. Country:
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The human race as depicted in 1984 is dozens of IQ-points above the pathetic putrid scum allowing itself to be BSed by Facebook, Google, Amazon and Co. Now the half-ounce-brain set are allowing microphone gadgets into their homes, willingly (though without the least doubt totally brainlessly) giving that extreme of organized crime (which is what Anglo-Saxon Capitalism ends up as being by definition), intimate information that would make Joseph Goebbels of Nazi infamy, and pretty much all of his true successors in some following decades, drool maniacally. Human stupidity seems by now even to have exceeded the infinity once thought of by Albert Einstein (compared to human stupidity, he considered the infinity of the astronomical universe to be debatable). Maybe those 11-dimension astrophysics (quantum version?) have some probability, in the sense that human stupidity can no longer fit into the simple world of the four dimensions of Einstein’s space-time. That cesspit just ain’t big enough.
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