The Styrous® Viewfinder

George Orwell ~ 1984

First Edition - June 8, 1949

Today is the birthday of the man who vividly foresaw what the future had in store for us and wrote about it.

1984 is a dystopian speculative fiction novel by the English writer George Orwell published on June 8, 1949 by Secker & Warburg. It thematically, centers on repressive regimentation of people and their behaviours and mass surveillance. It was Orwell's ninth and final completed book.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has been often regarded as a classic and has been acknowledged for its impact on twentieth-century literature.

Orwell described his book as a "satire", and a display of the "perversions to which a centralised economy is liable", while also stating he believed "that something resembling it could arrive". It popularised "Orwellian" as an adjective, and many terms used in it have entered common usage, including "Big Brother", "doublethink", "Thought Police", "thoughtcrime", "Newspeak", as well as the expression "2 + 2 = 5". If any of this only sounds vaguely familiar to you, open a newspaper or turn on a TV to see what's happening around the world today.

In 2003 it was listed at number 8 on The Big Read survey by the BBC. It has been adapted across media, most famously as a film in 1984 starring John Hurt, Suzanna Hamilton and Richard Burton. There is an excellent recap of the plot on the Unsolicited Advice video (link below).

Orwell was inspired, if that's the correct word, by his work making propaganda during World War II in praise of Stalin.

Soviet painter and graphic artist, Guminer Yakov Moiseevich, was one of the many artists who produced propaganda for Russa. In 1930 he worked on exhibitions Defense of the USSR, The History of the Soviet Party of the Soviet Union (1939-1940). Below is a 1931 Russian poster for the first five-year plan of the Soviet Union by Yakov Guminer [ru] reading "The arithmetic of an industrial-financial counter-plan: 2 + 2 plus the enthusiasm of the workers = 5." I

Yakov Guminer poster 1931

Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, was born on June 25, 1903, was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic. His best known works are Animal Farm (1945) and the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in industrial Northern England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Since I've come to know that land I need to read the book.

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Blair/Orwell was born on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal Presidency (now Bihar), British India, into what he described as a "lower-upper-middle class" family.

Through a scholarship he was able to attend Eton College.

Arthur Koestler said that Orwell's "uncompromising intellectual honesty made him appear almost inhuman at times". Ben Wattenberg stated: "Orwell's writing pierced intellectual hypocrisy wherever he found it." According to historian Piers Brendon, "Orwell was the saint of common decency who would in earlier days, said his BBC boss Rushbrook Williams, 'have been either canonised—or burnt at the stake'". Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review describes Orwell as a "successful impersonation of a plain man who bumps into experience in an unmediated way and tells the truth about it".

Orwell had many extramarital affairs while married to various wives. In a letter to Ann Popham he wrote: "I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her badly, and I think she treated me badly, too, at times, but it was a real marriage, in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work, etc."

On March 21, 1940, Orwell wrote a review of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler for The New English Weekly, in which he analysed the dictator's psychology. Asking "how was it that he was able to put [his] monstrous vision across?," Orwell tried to understand why Hitler was worshiped by the German people:

The situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches ... The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.

Orwell was also openly against homosexuality. Daphne Patai said: "Of course he was homophobic. That has nothing to do with his relations with his homosexual friends. Certainly, he had a negative attitude and a certain kind of anxiety, a denigrating attitude towards homosexuality. That is definitely the case. I think his writing reflects that quite fully."

Orwell used the homophobic epithets "nancy" and "pansy", for example, in expressions of contempt for what he called the "pansy Left". The protagonist of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock, conducts an internal critique of his customers when working in a bookshop, and there is an extended passage of several pages in which he concentrates on a gay male customer, sneering at him for his "nancy" characteristics, including rhotacism. Stephen Spender "thought Orwell's occasional homophobic outbursts were part of his rebellion against the public school".

Orwell provoked arguments by challenging the status quo, but he was also a traditionalist with a love of old English values. He criticised and satirised, from the inside, the various social milieux in which he found himself.

George Orwell died on January 21, 1950, from a burst artery in his lungs, which was a fatal hemorrhage caused by severe, long-term tuberculosis. He was 46 years old.

The CBS American television series Westinghouse Studio One, broadcast the first adaptation of the 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four on September 21, 1953; it Starred Eddie Albert, Norma Crane and Lorne Greene.

A 1984 British dystopian film written and directed by Michael Radford, based on the George Orwell 1949 novel. Starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton and Cyril Cusack, it follows the life of Winston Smith (Hurt), a low-ranking civil servant in a war-torn London in Oceania, a totalitarian superstate ruled by Ingsoc and its leader Big Brother. Smith struggles to maintain his sanity and his grip on reality as the regime's overwhelming power and influence persecute individualism and individual thinking on both a political and a personal level.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was Burton's last screen appearance; it was released two months after his death and is dedicated to him. It was released in the United Kingdom on 10 October 1984 by Virgin Films. It received positive reviews from critics, with many highlighted Deakin's cinematography and use of bleach bypass. It was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Art Direction, and won two Evening Standard British Film Awards for Best Film and Best Actor.

Nineteen Eighty-Four movie poster

On January 22, 1984, there was an American television commercial that introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer (link below). It was conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas, and Lee Clow at Chiat/Day, produced by New York production company Fairbanks Films, and directed by Ridley Scott of Blade Runner fame. The ad was a reference to the George Orwell noted 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised "Big Brother". English athlete Anya Major performed as the unnamed heroine and David Graham as Big Brother.

There is a placa in Barcelona named after him. There is an excellent examination of 1984 by Unsolicited Advice on YouTube (link below).