1984: history, politics

[jbor]

> Orwell never mentions communism, Stalin, the Soviet Union, or, for that
> matter, the United States (and most occurences of the word "china" are
> references to ceramics) in 1984

      With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British
    Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers,
    Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. ...
    Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite
    Western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the
    south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating
    portion of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet.
      ... In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc,
    in Eurasia it is called neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it
    is called by a Chinese name usually translated as death-worship,
    but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self.
      ...in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about
    1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality
    was more and more openly abandoned.
      ... It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars,
    revolutions and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world
    that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political
    theories. But they had been foreshadowed, by the various systems,
    generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the
    century and the main outlines of the world which would emerge
    from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. (Part 2, Ch. 9)

best


on 30/4/03 8:37 PM, jbor wrote:

> I don't think this identification of "the Party" as a meritocracy (either as
> described by Daniel Bell or J.S. Mill) is at all accurate. Neither the "beetle
> men" nor Winston or Julia, nor characters like Parsons or even O'Brien, fit
> that mold in the slightest. The four Ministries form a lumbering bureaucracy:
> the model is Stalinism. Members of the Outer Party are as marginalised and
> effectively as powerless as the proles.
> 
> And class differences haven't been eradicated in Oceania at all, although in
> real terms the proles do seem to have a better time of it than Winston & co!
> 
> All that said, I don't see any real nostalgia for the "capitalists" in their
> stove-pipe hats either. The furtive memories and glimpses of pre-Revolution
> times paints this group as more of an aristocratic rather than a political
> elite: Lords and landowners rather than MPs.
> 
> There are some interesting details which I'm noticing again this time through.
> In Victory Square "there was a statue of a man on horseback who was supposed
> to represent Oliver Cromwell" (Part 2, Ch. 1), who is thus apparently one of
> the enduring idols of Big Brother's Ingsoc.
> 
> The depiction of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, the three "original leaders
> of the Revolution" Winston saw once in the mid-60s at the Chestnut Tree Café
> (part 1 Ch. 7), suggests that something more positive was once a possibility,
> before B.B. seized control.
> 
> And I can't help but see Winston's faith in the proles as deriving from Orwell
> rather than from the character himself. When Winston first sees the prole
> woman hanging out the nappies and singing the lyrics churned out by the
> versificator, her voice and singing is described as "powerful": "she sang so
> tunefully  as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound." But
> the interesting detail is in the initial description of her:
> 
> The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court
> below a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar ... (Part 2, Ch. 4)
> 
> The simile here can't be Winston's. It's quite intriguing.
>