George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, in which the all-powerful party led by ‘Big Brother’ controls every aspect of citizens lives, was written as a warning to his readers. As CliffNotes explains:
Orwell wanted to be certain that the kind of future presented in the novel should never come to pass, even though the practices that contribute to the development of such a state were abundantly present in his time.
Inevitably, what he predicted has come to pass and it is affecting all our lives. I also see signs that another dystopian novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, is beginning to come true.
Earlier in the year, we became aware of the existence of sensitivity readers. For example, if anything intended for publication does not comply with what the trans activists believe, they change it. Now they are trawling through published works and doing the same. The first author targeted that came to wide public attention was Roald Dahl, as his classic children’s novels were rummaged through for offending words and phrases. In Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Oompa-Loompas were changed to “small people” and Fantastic Mr. Fox’s three sons were changed to three daughters. This is what Winston – the main character in 1984 – had to do for the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth: he had to rewrite historical documents so that they matched the constantly changing party line.
Dahl’s books are for children, and it suggests that those driving this agenda believe that getting this ‘new content’ into children’s brains at an early age will ensure they will conform to the latest thinking and become what those in power want them to become. This is not unlike Aldous Huxley’s vision in Brave New World. Huxley described a dystopian future where children were brainwashed as babies into thinking whatever the leadership wanted them to think. Children were given flowers and books to hold and then they would be given an electric shock to ensure they developed an “instinctive hatred of books and flowers” and become the good little workers the state wanted. We are seeing a very mild form of this, but if this gets worse then children will have less choice as to what they can believe, think or enjoy.
Thoughtcrime is another of Orwell’s conjectures that has come true. When I first read 1984, I would never have thought that this made up word would be taken seriously; nobody should have the right to ask what you are thinking. Obviously, nobody can read your mind and surely you could not be arrested simply for thinking? However, I was dead wrong. A woman was arrested recently for silently praying in her head and, extraordinarily, prosecutors were asked to provide evidence of her ‘thoughtcrime’. Needless to say, they did not have any. But knowing that we can now be accused of, essentially, thinking the wrong thoughts is a worrying development. Freedom of speech is already under threat, but this goes beyond free speech. This is about free thought. Everybody should have a right to think what they want, and they should not feel obliged or forced to express certain beliefs or only think certain thoughts.
It is hard to understand why we are entering a world where most of Orwell’s predictions are becoming real and we are beginning to see Huxley’s predictions become real too. Worryingly, we are heading in that direction and, with some exceptions such as the Free Speech Union, few people seem to be concerned. Nothing good is going to come from this and it is making the world a more dangerous place in which to live. I want to live my life how my parents and grandparents lived theirs and I hope other teenagers want the same. I loved 1984, but I sometimes wish now that Orwell did not write it; it seems to have become a manual and not just a novel.
Jack Watson is a 14 year-old Hull City fan. You can subscribe to his Substack newsletter, Ten Foot Tigers, here.
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Well said.
I wish my 14 year olds could write like this they’re to busy watching cat videos on YouTube. We have 1984 kicking around the house not sure I’d want them to read it, although insightful especially considering what we are currently living through it is so utterly depressing which I guess is the point. They have read Animal Farm and the Moomins.
I remember watching the animated Animal Farm as a kid and being sad when the horse ( what was his name again? ) went away.
Loved Moomins as a kid, the animation though. And seeing as you’ve got me on a journey down Memory Lane, an unashamedly nostalgic share from a cracking duo…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IcTP7YWPayU
But surely this is all conspiracy theory. After all I am still able to cut my toenails whenever I want. Or should I soon expect a receptacle for the clippings that I must put out on the street for collection every 3 months? Will the Toenail Clipping Police check inside it for hair and beard trimmings? Hey maybe I should keep my mouth shut and not give the silly pretend to save the planet government any ideas.
Silly – more like the name of one of Kenny Everett’s characters ! old “Cupid Stunt”himself
Herself, you transphobe
Another cracker, Jack.
Keep at it, young Sir
Your writing will set you and others free.
Yes, well done. This young lad is wide awake and is seeing the evil in what most of his contemporaries think is ‘safe’ and ‘necessary’.
I have to say though that the more we see of ‘Agenda 2030’ the more it is looking like a classic public sector project. It is unrealistic, un-costed, fails to address any need that I can see in the citizens, and is just badly thought through.
Its biggest failing though, even bigger than assuming that everything they propose will work, is the assumption that the citizens will not see through their plans and will not put up a fight against them. They appear to assume that they can just propose what they want and do what they want, but they can’t. Already there is pushback and as more people wake up to it, this will grow and grow. Already their poorly thought out plans are looking increasingly flimsy and fragile as fantasy meets reality head-on.
That doesn’t mean the fight is over, far from it. But the notion that Agenda 2030 is going to be implemented in full without question or resistance by the citizens is false, imo. In a lesson I learned from Pixars ‘A Bugs Life’, there are still more of us than there are of them.
“…the citizens will not see through their plans …”
They aren’t worried about about anyone seeing through their ideas; they really believe their ideas are fantastic. What’s not to like?!
The first thing they are guilty of is classic left wing thinking…
There’s one missing here: Fahrenheit 451 by Rad Bradbury, describing a future world where it’s the job of firemen to locate and burn illegal libraries (all books are regarded as illegal) because books are both considered obsolete and a threat to the personal happiness of the member of the hedonistic and consumerist society of the time. Books are already being burned in Canada (referred to as flame purification) because they’re discomfortingly associated with a past people prefer to ignore because it didn’t conform to their present-day ideology.
And Max Frisch’s Biedermann und Die Brandstifter.
An excellent study of the evils of virtue signalling.
I am sure you will know it very well, RW!
Not at all, actually, and it certainly doesn’t belong to classic dystopian novels of the 20th century. I also have absolutely no idea why you’re bring this up here.
The so-called signalling theory is one of many idiotic psychobabble theories from the USA somehow seeking to establish that communication is never about what whas actually said but always about something the person brining it up really wants to believe in instead, even when, and actually just because, reality contradicted it. As such, it’s best ignored.
Regarding Max Frisch’s book: I had a quick google and found this potted summary: ‘Some of the major themes in his work are the search or loss of one’s identity; guilt and innocence (the spiritual crisis of the modern world after Nietzsche proclaimed that “God is dead”); technological omnipotence (the human belief that everything was possible and technology allowed humans to control everything) versus fate (especially in Homo faber); and also Switzerland’s idealized self-image as a tolerant democracy based on consensus — criticizing that as illusion and portraying people (and especially the Swiss) as being scared by their own liberty and being preoccupied mainly with controlling every part of their life.’ So I can see why it could be worth reading.
Thanks, Deborah T.
RW should read the play. It’s fantastic. I’m surprised RW hasn’t! And I bring it up here as another suggestion of something to read (following his suggestion of something to read).
We’re an odd crowd, here BTL on DS, aren’t we?!
Great book mind you it’s a few years since I read it (at school!).
Look into Julian Huxley. Aldous had inside information.
Jack
You are remarkable young man and it is great that you should be prepared to do this.
I agree there are many resonances with 1984 in our current time but I don’t think your examples nail them. In fact we in the West at the moment I would say we have more freedom to say and write what we want than most places and times. The resonance with Orwell is the way that governments and politicians seem to think nothing of lying and even contradicting themselves. Truth is apparently unimportant.
The Roald Dahl decision was essentially commercial. Puffin was trying to squeeze another market out of the Roald Dahl books. After all the original texts are still for sale. It is not so very different from Bowdler’s 1818 edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was acquitted (twice).
Vaughan-Spruce: the process is the punishment, and it effectively warns off less robust personalities.
Only in a corrupt Clown World, where criminals are running the show and wish to hide their crimes in plain sight, would a doctor be suspended for suggesting people dying suddenly should be autopsied. How very dare this doctor voice such a rational suggestion and expect to go unpunished! Are the mafia in charge of the medical authorities in Italy now too?
”What made Italians die at excess rates in 2022? We have no idea! We only know that Italian health officials do NOT want us to know the answer. Instead, they suspend doctors who recommend doing more autopsies.
I am sorry for the brave Italian doctor Valerio Petterle. I hope that he does not give up.
As the suddenly dying people are buried or cremated, we may never have the proof of why they died – which is exactly what Italian medical boards want.
A perfect crime needs a perfect coverup!
Dr. Petterle is not alone. When a brave British parliamentarian Andrew Bridgen suggested that excess deaths in the UK were a national emergency, he was falsely accused of antisemitism. Matt Hancock, a mastermind of British lockdowns, and Rishi Sunak, a WEF member who profited mightily from COVID vaccine companies, were at the forefront of these false accusations.
So, ignoring excess deaths and vilifying those who call for investigations into their causes is not a purely Italian problem.”
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/italian-doctor-suspended-for-suggesting
Well far be it from me to highjack a thread with off-territory incontinence but in this case it is worth it. Dr McHonk-Honk will see you now
https://odysee.com/@FintanDunne:5/MidazolThem:6
Speaking of 1984, is anyone aware of the US government’s new Restrict Act? It takes a lot to terrifying me but this is genuinely shocking. If this is passed the only result will be civil war.
On the surface it bans Tik-Tok BUT the bill also allows the US government to label any citizen they want a ‘security threat’, access all of their personal data, seize all of their assets, put them in prison for 20 years and fine them a million dollars. Oh the punchline… all with no judicial process or right of appeal plus the agency implementing this have complete immunity from freedom of information requests.
Welcome to East China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IENe0P7DwsY&ab_channel=MarkMoss
https://www.technocracy.news/warning-restrict-act-is-a-huge-orwellian-censorship-grab/
See my earlier comment, they aren’t even trying to hide the true purpose, because they think it’s fantastic – the Restrict Act!
Freedom Act, anyone?!
It doesn’t have to be this way
But will take more than whingeing + navel gazing
We need the French spirit
My advice to this young lad is to make yourself as self reliant as possible. That’s all any of us can do.
Only two things we can ever control:
1. Our expenses
2. Our emotions
We’re living in a horrifying creep towards a hybrid of Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Atlas Shrugged and Nineteen Eighty Four and countless other dystopian novels. One of the reasons science fiction is so readily dismissed by the wankerati is that it dares to speculare and asks difficult questions the normies don’t dare to ask.
My only hope is that these evil people are staggeringly incompetent, but the damage they’ll wreak over our world, potentially for decades, is what terrifies me.
Dear Jack,
I understand that you are only 14, but you are going to have to do a lot more research if you want to write for an adult publication. You might enjoy the recently published ‘The White Pill’ which is a quick survey of socialism and the USSR up to 1989, written for people born after that momentous event. It will provide you with a better background for understanding George Orwell’s satire.
Something tells me Jack can do research and that he isn’t going to stop. Despite the best efforts of the “Education” system.
George Orwell did not write 1984 as satire, he wrote it as a terrible warning of the future, following ww2 in Germany. I imagine you still think it satire although it seems to be the playbook for Western Governments. If so you are fearfully deluded.
Unfortunately Jack, the only way to return to the kind of life your grandparents or even parents had is to ditch all the technology which the younger generation love, and rely on so much, to entertain themselves and run their lives.
I’m now in my early 60s and my childhood in the 60s and 70s was similar to the one my parents had although we were a little more affluent and mobile since they had a car, but the household didn’t have a (landline) phone until I was in my mid teens. You largely made your own entertainment; if you wanted to meet a friend you went and knocked on their door.
I COULD return to that kind of lifestyle if I had to. I know HOW to live without a mobile; laptop/internet; very limited TV etc. I know how to cope during blackouts and without central heating.
The younger generations (age 40 and less) don’t know how to live like that and most of them couldn’t. And that’s what the Globalists are relying on to force their dystopia on society.
The onus is on everyone, particularly younger people, to change their own behaviour, but I see no evidence that they even understand that, let alone take the steps necessary to resist.
I’m looking forward to Jack’s commentary on Animal Farm. And I’m glad I’m not young.
Gosh this boy’s good! Well said Jack we need more of your kind.
Slight tangent, I went out the other day to a couple of “dos” with some former work friends all good and I think normally intelligent people mostly university educated. But they seem completely oblivious as to what’s going on. Indeed during the height of Covid nonsense they were to a man (and woman) all to happy to go along with the draconian rules, wallowing in telling me how the QR codes worked which tier they were in, wearing masks in restaurants when standing but not sitting etc etc. Not surprisingly I am of course the outlier and labelled a “conspiracy theorist” just for wanting to live a normal life and to keep my freedoms for me, my family and them. I’m finding it increasingly hard to understand their stupidity. Sorry but I can’t find any other word for it.
Same here. Apart from my Stand in the Park group, virtually all of my family, friends and acquaintances have signed up to the narrative and complied.
Ditto, although I do not have a S I T P group to share.
“I’m finding it increasingly hard to understand their stupidity”
I have been of the same opinion since Day One of the Scamdemic.
Jack, with young people like you around, there is hope for humanity. I am impressed with your intelligent and incitefull writing. Are there many young people who think the way that you do? Even my offspring who have now reached adulthood have been influenced by the things you speak of and have lost some of the clear thinking that you have, although they still care about the way things are changing and disagree with many of them. Now things are much worse than it was in their childhood, and I am concerned that each subsequent generation will be more brainwashed with these influences which will make them incapable of independent thought.
In the UK it seems that they are checking recycling boxes for the correct contents (BBC). I suspect that fines will follow! This is missing from 1984, but then the concept of recycling everything had not been invented. The reality is far from the ideal, much still being landfilled after my careful sorting.
It will disintegrate long before it will take control. It is just the fundamental nature of power. Don;t worry too much but carry a big stick.
The dystopian state Orwell wrote about, whilst fictional, was heavily based on real states of his time: National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and Spain, Communist Russia under Stalin. Orwell didn’t live to see the horrors of Communist China under Mao, but they were only a short time later. In the USA Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ was accumulating more power in the State and big corporations. In the (then) British Empire, surveillance, ubiquitous propaganda, conscription and state restriction on how citizens could use their money were a reality through ration cards as part of the War Effort. The problem is that most people who would remember these things are now dead and their children, the ‘Baby Boomer Generation,’ rose to power thinking the state would always look after them and having a very rose tinted via of central planning and Socialism (except in its nationalistic variants). Rather than admit they might of got in wrong, they are now doubling down on woke and NHS fanaticism and (as is always the case) trying to shift blame on the younger (‘Millennial’) generation and ‘Right wing extremists’ (i.e. anyone who’s political views are to the right of Karl Marx) for the dystopia that they have created in spite of all the warnings by Orwell and others along the way.