George Orwell's 1984

And that would be...?

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

From August.

R2, That sounds like Animal Farm

I finally read it for the first time a couple months ago and, yep, I definitely get the hype

[quote] That sounds like Animal Farm

Oh rats!

R1, it must be , " Do it to Julia."

In 1984, I read 1984 high school eng class

It was amazing, and has stayed on my mind all these years.

It was published in the 1940-50’s maybe? What a mind. I felt he warned us so effectively that we could never let it come to be. Turns out I was very naive.

Is the last line, “I love my Big Brother.” ? Chilling.

Peace DL people🩵

They already employed the double speak revisionist history gaslighting crap used by the government in that novel when the White House said they had the Epstein client list on their desk one day and then the next day said it NEVER existed. Frightening shit indeed.

Plus "Ministry of Truth" style rewriting of history R9. Lots of examples of this.

From 2017

Bill Moyers is lucky he didn't live to see the rest of Trump's second term.

I dont know what line OP is referring to from 1984, but the one that I found most chilling was

[quote]If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

Maybe that is the one OP means. Or not

The Two Minutes Hate is basically Fox News.

R13 - OP is confused because the line he has posted is from Orwell's Animal Farm - not Nineteen Eighty-Four.

No, R8 -- it's "He loved Big Brother."

Here's a link. Scroll down to the end.

I found Room 101 more frightening than Room 237.

The part about the greasy gin . . .

Or Room 222,R17.

Ok but if “big brother” was a hung dom daddy, I probably would love him too!

I wonder what happened to Julia.

I read an interesting comment recently by someone I can't remember. He felt the totalitarian future will be like Brave New World. It will be so seductive, pleasurable and angst-free that people will clamor for it.

When the leaves turn from green to brown

And autumn shades come tumbling down

To leave a carpet on the ground

Where we have laid.

I had trouble finishing it because it was so depressing.

Try Animal Farm then, R24.

Here ya go, R24.

TRANSWOMEN ARE WOMEN TRANSMEN ARE MEN 2 + 2 = 5

What horror would your room 101 contain?

"He loved Big Brother" is definitely the most depressing line in the novel. Not really because of the words alone, but that because - at the end - Winston really does love Big Brother. Hence he's been totally broken.

What makes me chuckle, though, is the right and left both swear blind 1984 applies to the other side.

"He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy."

1984 was anti-communist BS. The year was merely the current year, 1948, reversed.

Birthing people. Chest feeding. Unhoused. Sex worker. Yes, the Left is also dabbling in Orwellian speak.

R31, it was anti-Soviet. Orwell was a socialist. Are you honestly pro-communism?

The most chilling line I remember from 1984, r2 is, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

How final that is... but how profound.

[quote] Ok but if “big brother” was a hung dom daddy, I probably would love him too!

Unfortunately, Big Brother is just Julie Chen.

R34 is Mark Twain.

Whenever I take up "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility," I feel like a barkeeper entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I mean, I feel as he would probably feel, would almost certainly feel. I am quite sure I know what his sensations would be -- and his private comments. He would be certain to curl his lip, as those ultra-good Presbyterians went filing self-complacently along. ...

She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see. - "Jane Austen," published in 2009 in Who Is Mark Twain?

Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book. - quoted in Remembered Yesterdays, Robert Underwood Johnson

To me his prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death. - Letter to W. D. Howells, 18 January 1909

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it. - Following the Equator

I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone. - Letter to Joseph Twichell, 13 September 1898

R22 sounds like the essay “amusing ourselves to death” by Neil postman. To me, brave new world is definitely more similar to our current western society while 1984 rings more former Soviet bloc/china (probably deliberately so?)

There was a really good British TV adaptation by Nigel Kneale in the 1950s with Peter Cushing as Winston.

Orwell was really writing about his own experience working for British intelligence during WWII.

Wrong, r33 and r31.1984 was anti-authoritarianism, specifically totalitarianism. He hated German/Spanish fascism as well as the Stalinism in Russia. Those are ideologically very different things but they both result in misery for people living under those governments.

Another very disturbing part (of a disturbing book) is the children of Winston's neighbour (the Parsons) - snitching little shits who are being trained to recognise and report any thoughtcrime. It culminates in them reporting their own father for saying something anti-Big Brother in his sleep - despite Parsons seemingly being very loyal to Big Brother.

It's clear the parents are afraid of their own children because they're effectively another version of the telescreen - constantly monitoring their parents within their own home - knowing their loyalty to the party is far greater than any loyalty they have for their own parents.

It shows the following generation will have a lot less thoughtcrime as they've effectively been trained almost from birth and don't have any memory of a life before Big Brother, hence their devotion is absolute.

I've read the book two or three times and I still think it's by far the most disturbing novel I've ever read. It amuses me when people say things in their everyday life are like 1984 because it shows they probably haven't read it.

Actually, R33, Orwell started out as a socialist until he realized they didn't give a shit about the poor and working class, they only hated the rich.

1984 is brilliant because it is a warning about totalitarian government, but also a warning about some really base and destructive drives in all of us, either to relinquish power and control or to acquire absolute power and control, amongst others.

I always wondered why Orwell focused so much on the (literal) frau that would hang clothes endlessly outside the little love shack Winston rented? If that woman existed IRL, DL would have a field day eviscerating her, I fear.

I used to teach a freshman honors seminar called Teenage wastelands, focusing on traditions of placing adolescents in dystopic societies (Hunger Game, the Unwound series, The House of the Scorpion, The Chrysalifd). But we began with Brave New World and 1984 as foundational texts—the Huxley a dystopia disguised as a utopia, where drugs and brainwashing combine to persuade the populace that life was fine, 1984 the totalitarian, high surveillance world oh Big Brother. Their first was a paper in which they picked one of the worlds to live in (there was no wrong answer). My choice was 1974, because awful as it was, you could still struggle to retain internal individuality, though the sociological world was oppressive. Almost 99% of the students chose the Huxley, saying there were lots of incentives pleasure and no messages that some people were superior to others.

I feel like we’re living in Orwell’s world, but social media and our highly medicated society may take us more into Huxley country.

Speaking of Orwell, why did DL grey out and cross out this thread ?

Very Orwellian don't you think?

Why is the threat disappearied?

Freaky

I read that book Orwell wrote about being bullied at a private school in England. He would wet the bed and bullied by the school mark, the headmaster, other pupils. It was a pretty bleak existence.

The Road to Wigan Pier