London is a crumbling city of violence and oppression populated by an increasingly impoverished citizenry.  Cameras are everywhere watching everyone.  People speak in guarded tones, fearful that someone will overhear them say something that is contrary to the ever changing political orthodoxy.  History is despised and altered at a whim.  Intent on interfering with every aspect of people's lives, the institutions of society have been abolished or subverted to the state and the transparent doublespeak betrays a ruling party drunk with power.

But let's leave 21^st century Britain and turn our attention to George Orwell's (1903-1950) 1984; a tale unparalleled for pure distilled and bottled despair.  This slim little 1948 novel of oppression, paranoia, and general inhumanity is the touchstone by which all other dystopias are tested.  It has entered our language with words like "doublespeak," "thoughtcrime," "unperson,"  and "Big Brother," which was both the personification of universal tyranny and the title of a popular "reality" television programme that just did not get it.

1984 is the most vivid depiction of future tyranny that we have; probably because Orwell had a perfect model for Big Brother in Stalin and for the fanaticism of Ingsoc in the  Communists.  Orwell's Oceania is the most severe system of oppression ever devised; second only to my old boarding school.  Through the eyes of a minor party member, Winston Smith, we see what existence is like under the rule of the party of Ingsoc.  Life in Oceania is hopeless and Smith knows that he is doomed from the instant he even thinks of resisting his masters.  It is a decaying world of shortages and spiralling poverty with the only growth industries in armaments, surveillance, and brainwashing.  War is perpetual between a triumvirate of police states, each as bad as the others.  Television is everywhere and can see as well as be seen.  You can't even turn the damn things off, which makes life like an unending stint in a garage waiting room.  Books and newspapers are constantly rewritten to support the current party line.  There isn't even solace in love, for the family is being systematically destroyed, sex is in the process of being outlawed,  and any emotional attachment is regarded with jealousy by the state.  The word "touchy" springs to mind.

George Orwell

Winston Smith is no revolutionary.  In fact, his crime against the state is nothing worse than to keep a diary and dating another minor party member.  For this, he is entrapped, arrested, tortured, and brainwashed by the ironically named Ministry of Love as if he was the most dangerous man in the world.  As his mind is destroyed, he is told by his torturer O'Brien that the future is a human face being stamped by a boot over and over again forever.  The book ends with Smith sitting alone in a cafe drinking gin, utterly defeated, brainwashed into loving Big Brother, and waiting for an inevitable bullet in the back of the brain. 

So, are we having fun yet?

The only consolation we as the readers can take from 1984 is in the hubris and solipsism of the Party.  They think that they can literally shape reality because they can shape men's minds like putty.  In the infamous Room 101 they can make a man literally think that war is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery, and two plus two equals five.  If they can do that, then they can make the world in their own image.  Or can they?  We have a very real example of that sort of mindset in the late and unlamented Soviet Union, where the Communists discovered that reality is a very hard wall even for dictators to slam into blindly.  Instead of being masters of the world, the Communists were a circle of paranoid old men who came to believe their own lies and ended up rulers of an empire that collapsed under the weight of its own rotting timbers. 

Couldn't have happened to nicer guys.

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