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Mostrando postagens com marcador 1984. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador 1984. Mostrar todas as postagens

quinta-feira, 23 de julho de 2020

1984 de George Orwell, resenhado em 1949 por Lionell Trilling, na New Yorker

Orwell on the Future

George Orwell’s “1984” predicts a state of things far worse than any we have ever known.

The New Yorker, June 18, 1949 Issue

 A landscape with rows of people one being dragged away.

Illustration by Leonardo Santamaria


George Orwell’s new novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (Harcourt, Brace), confirms its author in the special, honorable place he holds in our intellectual life. Orwell’s native gifts are perhaps not of a transcendent kind; they have their roots in a quality of mind that ought to be as frequent as it is modest. This quality may be described as a sort of moral centrality, a directness of relation to moral—and political—fact, and it is so far from being frequent in our time that Orwell’s possession of it seems nearly unique. Orwell is an intellectual to his fingertips, but he is far removed from both the Continental and the American type of intellectual. The turn of his mind is what used to be thought of as peculiarly “English.” He is indifferent to the allurements of elaborate theory and of extreme sensibility. The medium of his thought is common sense, and his commitment to intellect is fortified by an old-fashioned faith that the truth can be got at, that we can, if we actually want to, see the object as it really is. This faith in the power of mind rests in part on Orwell’s willingness, rare among contemporary intellectuals, to admit his connection with his own cultural past. He no longer identifies himself with the British upper middle class in which he was reared, yet it is interesting to see how often his sense of fact derives from some ideal of that class, how he finds his way through a problem by means of an unabashed certainty of the worth of some old, simple, belittled virtue. Fairness, decency, and responsibility do not make up a shining or comprehensive morality, but in a disordered world they serve Orwell as an invaluable base of intellectual operations.
Radical in his politics and in his artistic tastes, Orwell is wholly free of the cant of radicalism. His criticism of the old order is cogent, but he is chiefly notable for his flexible and modulated examination of the political and aesthetic ideas that oppose those of the old order. Two years of service in the Spanish Loyalist Army convinced him that he must reject the line of the Communist Party and, presumably, gave him a large portion of his knowledge of the nature of human freedom. He did not become—as Leftist opponents of Communism are so often and so comfortably said to become—“embittered” or “cynical;” his passion for freedom simply took account of yet another of freedom’s enemies, and his intellectual verve was the more stimulated by what he had learned of the ambiguous nature of the newly identified foe, which so perplexingly uses the language and theory of light for ends that are not enlightened. His distinctive work as a radical intellectual became the criticism of liberal and radical thought wherever it deteriorated to shibboleth and dogma. No one knows better than he how willing is the intellectual Left to enter the prison of its own mass mind, nor does anyone believe more directly than he in the practical consequences of thought, or understand more clearly the enormous power, for good or bad, that ideology exerts in an unstable world.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four” is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and, like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present. Despite the impression it may give at first, it is not an attack on the Labour Government. The shabby London of the Super-State of the future, the bad food, the dull clothing, the fusty housing, the infinite ennui—all these certainly reflect the English life of today, but they are not meant to represent the outcome of the utopian pretensions of Labourism or of any socialism. Indeed, it is exactly one of the cruel essential points of the book that utopianism is no longer a living issue. For Orwell, the day has gone by when we could afford the luxury of making our flesh creep with the spiritual horrors of a successful hedonistic society; grim years have intervened since Aldous Huxley, in “Brave New World,” rigged out the welfare state of Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor in the knickknacks of modern science and amusement, and said what Dostoevski and all the other critics of the utopian ideal had said before—that men might actually gain a life of security, adjustment, and fun, but only at the cost of their spiritual freedom, which is to say, of their humanity. Orwell agrees that the State of the future will establish its power by destroying souls. But he believes that men will be coerced, not cosseted, into soullessness. They will be dehumanized not by sex, massage, and private helicopters but by a marginal life of deprivation, dullness, and fear of pain.
This, in fact, is the very center of Orwell’s vision of the future. In 1984, nationalism as we know it has at last been overcome, and the world is organized into three great political entities. All profess the same philosophy, yet despite their agreement, or because of it, the three Super-States are always at war with each other, two always allied against one, but all seeing to it that the balance of power is kept, by means of sudden, treacherous shifts of alliance. This arrangement is established as if by the understanding of all, for although it is the ultimate aim of each to dominate the world, the immediate aim is the perpetuation of war without victory and without defeat. It has at last been truly understood that war is the health of the State; as an official slogan has it, “War Is Peace.” Perpetual war is the best assurance of perpetual absolute rule. It is also the most efficient method of consuming the production of the factories on which the economy of the State is based. The only alternative method is to distribute the goods among the population. But this has its clear danger. The life of pleasure is inimical to the health of the State. It stimulates the senses and thus encourages the illusion of individuality; it creates personal desires, thus potential personal thought and action.
But the life of pleasure has another, and even more significant, disadvantage in the political future that Orwell projects from his observation of certain developments of political practice in the last two decades. The rulers he envisages are men who, in seizing rule, have grasped the innermost principles of power. All other oligarchs have included some general good in their impulse to rule and have played at being philosopher-kings or priest-kings or scientist-kings, with an announced program of beneficence. The rulers of Orwell’s State know that power in its pure form has for its true end nothing but itself, and they know that the nature of power is defined by the pain it can inflict on others. They know, too, that just as wealth exists only in relation to the poverty of others, so power in its pure aspect exists only in relation to the weakness of others, and that any power of the ruled, even the power to experience happiness, is by that much a diminution of the power of the rulers.
The exposition of the mystique of power is the heart and essence of Orwell’s book. It is implicit throughout the narrative, explicit in excerpts from the remarkable “Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” a subversive work by one Emmanuel Goldstein, formerly the most gifted leader of the Party, now the legendary foe of the State. It is brought to a climax in the last section of the novel, in the terrible scenes in which Winston Smith, the sad hero of the story, having lost his hold on the reality decreed by the State, having come to believe that sexuality is a pleasure, that personal loyalty is a good, and that two plus two always and not merely under certain circumstances equals four, is brought back to health by torture and discourse in a hideous parody on psychotherapy and the Platonic dialogues.
Orwell’s theory of power is developed brilliantly, at considerable length. And the social system that it postulates is described with magnificent circumstantiality: the three orders of the population—Inner Party, Outer Party, and proletarians; the complete surveillance of the citizenry by the Thought Police, the only really efficient arm of the government; the total negation of the personal life; the directed emotions of hatred and patriotism; the deified Leader, omnipresent but invisible, wonderfully named Big Brother; the children who spy on their parents; and the total destruction of culture. Orwell is particularly successful in his exposition of the official mode of thought, Doublethink, which gives one “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” This intellectual safeguard of the State is reinforced by a language, Newspeak, the goal of which is to purge itself of all words in which a free thought might be formulated. The systematic obliteration of the past further protects the citizen from Crimethink, and nothing could be more touching, or more suggestive of what history means to the mind, than the efforts of poor Winston Smith to think about the condition of man without knowledge of what others have thought before him.
By now, it must be clear that “Nineteen Eighty-four” is, in large part, an attack on Soviet Communism. Yet to read it as this and as nothing else would be to misunderstand the book’s aim. The settled and reasoned opposition to Communism that Orwell expresses is not to be minimized, but he is not undertaking to give us the delusive comfort of moral superiority to an antagonist. He does not separate Russia from the general tendency of the world today. He is saying, indeed, something no less comprehensive than this: that Russia, with its idealistic social revolution now developed into a police state, is but the image of the impending future and that the ultimate threat to human freedom may well come from a similar and even more massive development of the social idealism of our democratic culture. To many liberals, this idea will be incomprehensible, or, if it is understood at all, it will be condemned by them as both foolish and dangerous. We have dutifully learned to think that tyranny manifests itself chiefly, even solely, in the defense of private property and that the profit motive is the source of all evil. And certainly Orwell does not deny that property is powerful or that it may be ruthless in self-defense. But he sees that, as the tendency of recent history goes, property is no longer in anything like the strong position it once was, and that will and intellect are playing a greater and greater part in human history. To many, this can look only like a clear gain. We naturally identify ourselves with will and intellect; they are the very stuff of humanity, and we prefer not to think of their exercise in any except an ideal way. But Orwell tells us that the final oligarchical revolution of the future, which, once established, could never be escaped or countered, will be made not by men who have property to defend but by men of will and intellect, by “the new aristocracy . . . of bureaucrats, scientists, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.”
These people [says the authoritative Goldstein, in his account of the revolution], whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal.
The whole effort of the culture of the last hundred years has been directed toward teaching us to understand the economic motive as the irrational road to death, and to seek salvation in the rational and the planned. Orwell marks a turn in thought; he asks us to consider whether the triumph of certain forces of the mind, in their naked pride and excess, may not produce a state of things far worse than any we have ever known. He is not the first to raise the question, but he is the first to raise it on truly liberal or radical grounds, with no intention of abating the demand for a just society, and with an overwhelming intensity and passion. This priority makes his book a momentous one. ♦

Published in the print edition of the New Yorker, June 18, 1949, issue.

quarta-feira, 14 de agosto de 2019

George Orwell redivivo: 1984 atual - James M. Dorsey (The Globalist)

1984 Revisited: The Rise of the Neo-Authoritarians

The graphic warnings in George Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984 are as relevant today as they were when it was first published 70 years ago.

The Globalist, August 8, 2019

The rise of a critical mass of world leaders, including Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and others in Europe, Asia and Latin America, has given 1984, George Orwell’s prophetic novel, published 70 years ago, renewed relevance.

Orwell’s dark vision: Live around the globe

In what may be the strangest turn of events after the end of the Cold War, Orwell’s graphic warning of the threat of illiberal and authoritarian rule and the risks embodied in liberal democracy are as acute today as they were in the immediate wake of World War II.
In many ways, Orwell’s novel could have been written today. It envisioned the rise of the surveillance state (witness China) and the emergence of what he called Newspeak, the abuse of language for political purposes and the perversion of the truth in ways that makes facts irrelevant (witness the Trump Administration).
The reality of Orwell’s 1984 manifests itself today in the emergence of illiberal and authoritarian rulers across the globe or, as in the case of China, the equivalent of the writer’s imaginary omnipotent party that rules a superstate he called Oceania.
The building blocks of the party’s toolkit have gained renewed currency: A thought police, the dominance of Big Brother enabled by surveillance, Newspeak and doublethink.
Most alarmingly, elements of Orwell’s vision are no longer limited to totalitarian regimes. Increasingly, democracies in crisis feature aspects of it too.

Media on the defensive

The media is reduced to the role of government scribe in China, the Gulf and other autocracies. The media is similarly on the defensive in democracies such as the United States, Hungary, India, Turkey, Russia and the Philippines.
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s advisor, revived Newspeak with her coining of the phrase “alternative facts” to justify demonstrably false assertions by the president and members of his administration. 
Newspeak also bolsters assertions by men like Trump and Hungarian and Filipino presidents Victor Orban and Rodrigo Duterte that mainstream media report fake news.
And it allowed Trump to last year tell a veterans association that “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Orwell’s novel is couched in terms of liberal versus totalitarian – the reality he confronted as a Republican volunteer in the Spanish Civil War and post-World War Two Europe.

Perverted civilizational models

It was a time in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany — with its all-in, completely perverted civilizational model — had been defeated. Pursuing a totalitarian vision inside a civilizational model of sorts is how Xi Jinping has reconceived the Chinese state. It is based on disregard for human and minority rights.
Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Russian and the Turkish Presidents, think about Eurasia in civilizational terms. Putin has translated that into redrawing borders in Ukraine and Georgia.
Meanwhile, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and Trump, are basing their rule at least in part on incendiary expressions of racial or religious supremacism. 
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s first unqualified condemnation of supremacism in the wake of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, truly constitutes a turnaround.

Common ground

What unites these leaders broadly speaking is their readiness to undermine minority rights, risking escalating cycles of violence and mass migration as a result of mounting insecurity and violence and promoting a political environment fueled by rising supremacism, Islamophobia and/or anti-Semitism.
That common ground enables China to employ cutting edge technology in its rollout at home and abroad of a surveillance state designed to invade virtually every aspect of a person’s life. 
At the cutting edge of Xi Jinping’s surveillance state, is his brutal clampdown on Turkic Muslims in China’s troubled north-western province of Xinjiang. He has launched the most frontal assault on a faith in recent history in a bid to Sinicize Uighurs and other Turkic minorities.
Xi Jinping, bolstered by China’s economic and political clout, has so far gotten away with what some have termed cultural genocide. 
That he is able to do so is made possible by a Muslim world that is largely populated by authoritarian and autocratic leaders. Even though Xi makes short shrift of their own religious brethren, they see China as a model of achieving economic growth without political liberalization.

Back to the future

While the writing is clearly on the wall, illiberals and authoritarians pseudo-sheepishly pay lip service to democracy or advocate distorted forms of a rights-based system while either denying or undermining basic rights.
Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov argues that what he called “incomplete democracies” where best equipped to manage volatility. 
In its ultimate consequence, that argument would allow illiberals and autocrats to throw any reference to democracy on the garbage pile of history.

quarta-feira, 24 de setembro de 2014

Reflexao do dia: George Orwell (sempre ele...)

Comprei, antes da viagem, dois livros que me acompanharam por 12 mil kms, mas que não pude abrir, devido justamente à concentração total nas coisas da viagem através dos EUA.
Como a Birmânia parece ter deixado para trás (esperemos que de forma definitiva) o Estado orwelliano que a caracterizou durante mais de quatro décadas de regime militar "socialista", eu havia comprado dois livros para conhecer melhor o país nesta fase de sua nova integração ao mundo.
O Brasil, inclusive, abriu uma embaixada em Rangoon (antigo nome da capital sob o império britânico), mas isto foi uma decisão companheira, adotada quando a Birmânia (ou Mianmar, como eles preferem ser chamados agora) ainda era uma ferrenha ditadura, o que combina totalmente com o espírito companheiro: basta ser ditadura, que eles são aliados incondicionais.
Enfim, os livros são estes:

George Orwell:
Burmese Days
Edição Penguin, de 1989, mas baseada na primeira edição que a editora fez em 1944, quando foram corrigidas adaptações que o autor teve de fazer em 1935, a pedido do editor comunista Victor Gollancz, e que seguiu a primeira edição americana de 1934, corrigida depois pelo autor.

Emma Larkin:
Finding George Orwell in Burma
Edição da Penguin de 2004, mas com um epílogo atualizado em 2011, depois que a ditadura organizou eleições, ainda controladas, mas já num processo de abertura gradual.

O primeiro eu comprei barato na Abebooks; o segundo na Amazon, pois se trata de livro relativamente novo.

Enfim, a frase que eu encontro na abertura do livro da Emma Larkin é a seguinte, muito citada, extremamente conhecida e no entanto absolutamente verdadeira:

Who controls the past controls the future;
who controls the present controls the past.

Nineteen Eighty-four

Perfeito para os dias que correm e para o que estão fazendo os companheiros, não é mesmo?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Hartford, 24/09/2014

terça-feira, 11 de junho de 2013

1984, versao 2013; patrocinio: Governo Obama - The Huffington Post

George Orwell's '1984' Book Sales Skyrocket In Wake Of NSA Surveillance Scandal

The Huffington Post  |  By  Posted:   |  Updated: 06/11/2013 5:29 pm EDT
On June 8, 1949, George Orwell published a novel describing a fictitious world gripped in the vise of constant war and a society held captive by the ever-watchful gaze of a shadowy totalitarian dictator known as "Big Brother." The book has since found relevance again and again in our modern world.
This week, in the wake of the ongoing National Security Administration surveillance scandal, dystopian classic 1984 is again experiencing a resurgence in popularity.
Sales of at least three editions of 1984 have skyrocketed in recent days, according toAmazon's Movers & Shakers page, which tracks items with the biggest positive sales change over the past 24 hours. Sales of the Centennial Edition of the book, for instance, had increased by more than 4,000 percent as of Tuesday afternoon. The book was ranked fifth on the Movers & Shakers list at press time.
(Orwell's Animal Farm, another dystopian classic, has also seen an increase in popularity of more than 250 percent.)
As the Los Angeles Times points out, President Obama even referenced 1984 last week as he defended the NSA's broad and controversial Internet surveillance program, details of which recently leaked to the public.
"In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance," Obama said.
Google searches for the novel, oft cited as one of the 20th century's best works of fiction, have also increased in recent days, notes Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed

domingo, 30 de janeiro de 2011

O Big Brother em acao: George Orwell is alive and kicking...

O Estado mais orwelliano do mundo, o que recomendaria uma segunda edição, revista e atualizada de 1984, mostra que é possível, pelo menos temporariamente, controlar o fluxo das informações nesta era de internet amplamente acessível.
Mesmo sendo disseminado o uso da internet na China, seus mandarins -- e hackers contratados especialmente para estes objetivos, espécies de thugs sob o comando do Grande Irmão -- demonstram que é possível, sim, isolar mais de um bilhão de pessoas do fluxo político da contemporaneidade. Talvez seja por pouco tempo, mas um George Orwell revisitado certamente teria muito a dizer sobre isso.
Um desafio para os cientistas políticos, para os simples observadores de relações internacionais.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

El Gobierno chino teme el contagio y censura la palabra Egipto en los ”microblogs’
El País, 30/01/2011

Pequim – Las autoridades chinas no quieren correr riesgos ante la posibilidad de un efecto decontagio de las protestas en favor de la democracia ocurridas en Egipto, Túnez y otros países musulmanes. Pekín ha bloqueado la palabra “Egipto” en los microblogs de portales como Sina.com y Sohu.com, que, cuando se efectúa una búsqueda, devuelven el mensaje “De acuerdo con las leyes, regulaciones y políticas relevantes, los resultados no pueden ser mostrados” o dicen que no han sido encontrados.

Los microblogs chinos son similares a Twitter -que, al igual que Facebook y Youtube, está bloqueado en el país asiático-, y se han convertido en una potente herramienta de difusión de información, aunque también de rumores, debido a la falta de confianza de los jóvenes en los medios oficiales. El servicio de Sina.com cuenta con más de 50 millones de usuarios, un campo de cultivo demasiado sensible para que los censores lo descuiden.

Pekín posee uno de los sistemas de censura de Internet más sofisticados del mundo, gracias, en parte, a tecnología suministrada por empresas extranjeras, con el que logra con bastante éxito controlar lo que pueden ver, leer y publicar sus 450 millones de internautas.

Las revueltas en Egipto y las imágenes de los tanques en las calles de El Cairo han traído a la memoria de muchos chinos los recuerdos de las protestas de Tiananmen, en la primavera de 1989, y la consiguiente represión a manos del Ejército, en la que murieron entre cientos y miles de personas, según las fuentes. Las manifestaciones, a favor de reformas políticas y democracia, fueron catalizadas por la corrupción y la inflación.

China es hoy muy distinta de la de aquellos años. La economía ha progresado a un ritmo vertiginoso y la conciencia política de la inmensa mayoría de los jóvenes -más interesados en ganar dinero que en pedir libertades- está anestesiada, en gran parte por la ausencia de información en los medios de comunicación y los libros de historia sobre lo ocurrido en 1989, y por la falta de cualquier debate político en una prensa totalmente controlada por el Gobierno.

Sin embargo, la corrupción sigue siendo rampante, las desigualdades sociales están entre las mayores del mundo, la inflación ha alcanzado niveles peligrosos (4,6% en diciembre pasado) y entre los intelectuales hay demandas crecientes de libertad y reformas.

La prensa oficial ha informado en los últimos días de las revueltas en Egipto, e incluso de los cortes de Internet y el servicio de telefonía móvil en El Cairo. Pero lo ha hecho de forma limitada, y ha aprovechado lo sucedido para lanzar un mensaje que más parece destinado al consumo de su propia población. El diario Tiempos Globales, publicado por el Partido Comunista, asegura hoy en un editorial que la democracia no es compatible con las condiciones existentes en Egipto y Túnez, y que “las revoluciones de color” -en referencia al término aplicado por primera vez para describir las protestas en favor de reformas políticas en las antiguas repúblicas soviéticas- no pueden lograr democracia real.

“La democracia está todavía muy lejos en Túnez y Egipto. Para que la democracia tenga éxito son necesarios cimientos sólidos en economía, educación y temas sociales. Cuando se trata de sistemas políticos, el modelo occidental es solo una de las opciones”, señala la publicación. Los dirigentes chinos han declarado en repetidas ocasiones que China nunca copiará el sistema de democracia occidental.

quarta-feira, 4 de agosto de 2010

1984, and the like (uma certa sensacao de deja vu...)

Deve ser estranho viver num Estado orwelliano: ou seja, um Estado que censura as comunicações, prende dissidentes, impede a entrada de obras "incômodas", cuida para que as pessoas não se prejudiquem a si mesmas tendo pensamentos, digamos assim, desviantes...
Claro que a obra de George Orwell é um exagero, pois se trata de uma novela. Ela representa o paroxismo do que seria viver num Estado absolutamente totalitário e policialesco, algo assim como uma Coréia do Norte pelo culto ao lider, uma Cuba pela miséria materia e moral, servidos por uma Stasi muito mais poderosa e onipresente, tudo isso elevado ao cubo, ao quádruplo, exponencialmente sei lá. Orwell não conhecia a União Soviética, ele apenas a conhecia de relatos e da ação dos soviéticos e seus aliados na Guerra de Espanha, e na própria Grã-Bretanha de sua época, uma época de stalinismo triunfante e de imbecilização dos comunistas (bem, não sei se melhorou desde então, talvez não; vale conferir no site do PCdoB).
Já andei por estados candidatos a réplicas de Orwell, ou melhor, cópias imperfeitas de 1984, já visitei alguns (vários, aliás), já me estarreci com o ambiente kafkiano que emanava de tudo (por sinal, li O Processo de Kafka num desses estados stalinistas).
O Brasil não tem condições de virar um Estado orwelliano.
Mas certas pessoas e movimentos se esforçam para construir um fascismo ordinário no país, aliás bem ordinário, desses que já despontam nos arredores.
Tem gente que adora ditaduras...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

“Guerra é Paz; Liberdade é Escravidão; Ignorância é Força”
Blog Reinaldo Azevedo
03/08/2010 - às 13:58

Os regimes autoritários têm grande preocupação com a linguagem. Não basta apenas calar a divergência: também é preciso submeter a língua a uma torção que inverta o sentido das palavras. George Orwell, no livro “1984″, foi ao ponto. Vocês se lembram qual era o lema do “Partido”?
“Guerra é Paz; Liberdade é Escravidão; Ignorância é Força”.

Em “Oceania”, a Polícia do Pensamento se encarregava de manter a ordem. Dicionário, por lá, nem pensar: o vocabulário foi escoimado das palavras que pudessem servir à expressão de um pensamento de oposição.

Em “1984″, o Ministério do Amor reprimia o desejo, além de torturar os rebeldes; o Ministério da Verdade se encarregava de censurar as más notícias e de criar mentiras a serviço do Partido; o Ministério da Fartura administrava a fome, e o Ministério da Paz conduzia os assuntos da guerra.

Os indivíduos tinham direito a seus “dois minutos de ódio” contra os inimigos em eventos patrocinados pelo Grande Irmão.

O livro é o retrato do horror. Para muitos, no entanto, trata-se de uma promessa de futuro.