1984

I've changed my mind on 1984 substantially since I read it in high school, which was about 2013. At the time I was turned off by the blunt messaging and allegorical nature, which at that point I tended to interpret as flat or one-dimensional. In an old review from years ago I wrote; "There's little 1984 says that hasn't been said better since. Most of its insight boils down to catchphrases that you can apply to any political agenda you see fit. It's a weird mix of blatant, artless messaging and a Promethean moral that even right wingers can take to say 'hurr durr government bad' - which I know Orwell wouldn't have wanted."

In the intervening years I've soured a lot on the idea of nuance for its own sake and all that liberal New School nonsense about Writing and Good Novels, which is in fact often a guise for political inaction. That sort of thing has a place, but not everywhere. What nuance is there to be had in authoritarian rule? There is none. And a portrait of authoritarianism does not require nuance or both sides-ism, in fact would suffer from it. Now that I've lived it, I know it. And 1984 is exactly the kind of polemic you need to lay bare its cruelty, twist the knife.

Over the years, the part that sicks with me the most comes at the very end, where it's implied that only hope for revolution lies with the common people - the uneducated, belligerent poor, who are too wrapped up i. the struggles of their daily lives to give half a shit about Big Brother, and who are too large and unruly to be individually brainwashed, as the privileged few like Winston and Julia can be. Free thought lives with them, who are too numerous to control - except through deprivation. The common people are suffering, ignorant, deprived of material stability and support from the upper classes among whom independent thought is, again, thoroughly extinguished. So the chances of a revolution are very slim. But if it lies anywhere, it is with them. That's the politic I missed when I read this as a kid, and I think a lot of people miss it, which is a shame. Orwell was not broadly anti-government: he was explicitly antifascist and, prior to my initial interpretation, that does come across here for anyone willing to see it.