Winston unknowingly is under the watchful eye of Big Brother, who has telescreens and informants everywhere to note Winston's actions. With today's video cameras and listening devices, this fiction becomes reality. The Thought Police are comparable to communist governments and the media, trying to conform people to their standards and/or ideas. Love is also restricted, like the love Winston has for Julia. A person can no longer carry on a simple relationship without intervention from outside sources.

The novel was truly ahead of its time, and may still hold true for future generations. The primary reason "1984" remains popular is because it can still be applied to the world today. Orwell has written a marvelous story of the past, present, and future, allowing us to all live the life of the oppressed Winston Smith and see reality for ourselves.


A great book about what the world will be like in "1984"
This book is wonderful. It goes into detail about how the government can do pretty much whatever it wants. In the book the government controls all the people through tv and torture if you do not do exacly what they tell you to. People are punished for having their own opinions. This book is a must read, despite its age.


A chilling science-fiction story (with a message)
This is the best science fiction story ever written. In 1949, Orwell made his statement about dictatorial governments by writing a tale in which the entire world was dominated by three dictatorial supercountries, obviously based on the Russian communists of the time. In his story, a man from the nation of Oceania dares to secretly hate the countries figurehead leader, Big Brother. He must hide from the Thought Police and his more loyal comrades to join the revolutionary party, the Brotherhood, before he is discovered and tortured in the Ministry of Love, the nation's hypocritical law wnforcement. This book is a must for every fan of Brave New World or Animal farm, or any book of the like.


Toller Klassiker
Ich habe dieses Buch für meine Facharbeit mit dem Thema "The sexuality in 1984 and Brave New World" ausgewählt...ich bin noch nicht ganz durch mit dem Buch, aber meiner Meinung nach ist es sehr flüssig zu lesen und ser empfehlenswert. Ich denke jedoch, dass man ein hohes Level in Englisch haben sollte, um das Buch mit den Vokabeln richtig zu verstehen!Ich bin in der 12, im Englisch LK und ich finds toll! (Autor/in)


Gut, es mal gelesen zu haben
Ein Klassiker!
Und die bedrückende Stimmung ist schon sehr ergreifend. Ich habe während der Zeit, in der ich dieses Buch gelesen habe, auch das tagespolitische Geschehen ganz anders wahrgenommen. Insofern ist dies ein wirklich beeindruckendes Buch!
Allerdings eignet es sich wirklich keineswegs zur Unterhaltung, der gesamte zweite Teil des Buches ist eher was für Politikwissenschaftler oder Philosophen... und ja, ich habe viele Seiten einfach quergelesen weil es mich schon gelangweilt hat.
Das spannendste an dem Buch sind eigentlich die ersten 50 Seiten und die letzten 10.

(Autor/in)


Sehr spannend!
Sehr gutes Buch, fesselnd und spannend - und die Thematik scheint mit jedem Tag aktueller zu werden...

Ich habe das Buch unter anderem gekauft um meine Englischkenntnisse zu verbessern - für Anfänger ist es meiner Meinung nach etwas kompliziert aber für alle die über das Standard- Schulenglisch hinaus sind, ist es sehr gut zu verstehen.

Absolut zu empfehlen! (Autor/in)


Totalitarianism totally today
More than half century are gone since George Orwell depicted with 1984" a frightening picture of a totalitarian regime of oppression of all human individuality and freedom and absolute control. Principally he has only transcribed from reality, because the dictatorships of terror existed already, Nazi-Germany, Sowjetunion, Mao-China, GDR, Northern Korea and others. A better description in literary form is not thinkable! That`s all old hat? Not at all!
Orwell is about advising against mechanisms which lead to such slavery of people. And these mechanisms are still going, even with us. He wants that everybody develops a feeling in order to become able to stop such wrong developments. No wonder that this book was on the black list of many dictatorships. Why? A dog that is hit will bark! But we are all hit since in this time of a progressing media age the ideal presuppositions for the complete exertion of influence and control of people are given. In totalitarian regimes of today it is for example often practise to block websites, so that only certain information currents are available. Talking about opinion-forming. That is to say the advantages of linking ways of information in our days can be reversed at any time to a disadvantage. You believe what a majority says is right, because it is comfortable.
When Orwell wrote 1984" he thought of the Sowjetunion, but his observations of human psyche have universal validity. What he describes is the ideal type of a totalitarian dictatorship that comes automatically from the misleading human will of self-realization, being often enough wishful thinking that the paradise could be ordered on Earth, thanks to the human capability. This has nothing to do with prophecy when Orwell writes this. It is nothing than self-observation and self-realization of any reasonable human.
In 1984", similar to the Sowjetunion or the GDR or Cuba, there is a striking economy of scarcity which is being denied with the help of propaganda. Hence the ministry of economics is for Orwell the "ministry of abundance". This is a mark of totalitarian systems, that they misuse the language, twist everything, blackmail opponents and let them disappear when they get them. All for the alleged welfare of the community. Everybody understands the proper insanity but all surrender to the pressure and take part in the game. Reality sense is no longer needed, it dwindles ever more and the reversion to reason and to sustainable values is getting more and more difficult. "Why do you accuse me of not having unlocked the door?" is the question of the concentration-camp guard who stands in front of the court because the prisoners perished in the locked building. "I have not had an order to open it!"
At first one agrees with the lie until on is able to live under it by constant use. Who does not remember the propaganda of the Nazis about worthless lives and alike to praise man on one side as superior masters and at the same time devalue man by racism. That is always the same, self-elevation leads to fall. So much for ideologies where after man himself determines what is good and bad. In so far Orwell draws not the last necessary conclusions, that man cannot find truth in himself. Hardly he seems to have found it, at once it is turning destructively against him as is apparent in his "Animal farm".
Orwell says clearly in "1984" what is unjust. But, whence the individual freedom and self-determination of man should come when they cannot be given naturally, he is not able to say.
It is lost somewhere in the fog of humanistic wisdom which are always under suspicion of being misused as helpers for something else. Already the Bible warned: "woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who make out of darkness light and out of light darkness". Well, but how to avoid the evil?
It would be wrong to point at totalitarian systems and think that this could not happen to a democracy. Orwell knew about the fragility and sensibility of all man made power structures which have those above and those below. He knew that the so called free West could quickly slide into Totalitarianism. In Germany that happened very quickly. It is a deception tp assume that it would be different somewhere else. It was visible that a high culture could not withstand. And today? Sceptics discover also in our society the beginning of limitations of freedoms and of the misuse of information, even when this happens subtly. For example somebody who behaves like a Christian is in our days quickly branded as a fundamentalist or even thrown into the same pot with Islamists. Because of the relativism of today which regards as only truth that there is no binding truth it is ignored that exactly the Christians combine the notion of truth tightly to the notion of individual freedom, whereas this is not the case in Islam, because Islam has a political claim of power exertion.
It is true that Orwell makes clear that the reversal of the values goes together with the reversal of the words. "War and peace" is exchangeable with "just war". Sand this process is starting in the small, with verbal persecution and it is ending in the worst case with Holocaust. At first you are eliminated in words and then with all consequences. Marxism-Leninism possessed the impunity to call itself scientific knowledge. We laugh about it. But what about today? We have an extended faith in science. Today even the former marxists know that they were wrong. We have seen it a hundred of times what happens when man takes himself as last measure. His self-redemption programs are sentenced to failure. One day it will also be put an end to the personal freedom. Orwells book should be a warning. "1984" is one of the few books which everybody should have read. And it holds its actuality.
(Autor/in)


unerträglich
Es ist nun über 20 Jahre her, dass ich dieses Buch zum ersten und bislang einzigen Mal gelesen habe. Seitdem steht es bei mir im Regal. Ich denke nicht, dass ich es mir irgendwann noch einmal antun werde, es ein zweites Mal zu lesen. Es ist zu unerträglich deprimierend. Nur sehr wenige Bücher haben bei mir einen derart tiefen und bleibenden Eindruck hinterlassen. (Autor/in)


Defiance- 2+2=?
This book is a deep representation of the human mind in comparison to the mind of the world and society. If a single man feels one way, that is the way he feels. Even though his ideas may be different than what is normal, they are still his thoughts. Winston Smith is a man struggling between the past and the future and lost in the present. The Thought Police along with Big Brother make the laws, rules, theories, past, present and future, and all that is. Life in 1984 is Big Brother. When Winston falls in love with a woman named Julia, a forbidden act, he becomes hopeful in his efforts to defy Big Brother. The force of it's power and strength is too strong and over powering, and Winston is crushed. Winston is a grain of sand on a beach owned by Big Brother. One grain, in the world of 1984, cannot rule the beach. The beach, by definition, is all the grains of sand. Without each grain, the beach would cease to exist. Without the followers, The Party would die. The will for it to survive is to powerful to allow it to fall and die


You wanna be suicidal?
Orwell tells a story about Winston Smith, a man living in the utopian world of 1984! The book deals with his struggles, and eventually, the story's end is so depressing that in the end, you may want to commit suicide or take up liquor. BEWARE


Classic Liturature, bleak future, epic in scale
1984, written sometime in the 50's as far as i know. Takes Soviet Style goverment and brings out its darkest future. (Big Brother) Orwell himself a socialist, offers intelligent and passionate reflections of his anxieties. Read this novel before grabbing a 'why the USSR broke' book written by some self rightous Political Science phd. who unwittingly butchers Orwells 'big brother' to fit his narrow understanding. Not that there aren't good books on Soviet and Russian History, which you may want to look for after reading 1984


Thank our lucky stars government isn't like that...yet.
Orwell creates a frightening picture of how easy it is to manipulate human minds using extreme nationalism, unification from a common enemy, misplaced love, and the love of hating things. Readers ask themselves "WHY? Why do these people let themselves be subjected to such mind control?" Really it's all the people know. Somehow to them it makes perfect sense that the past doesn't exist. Scary. One of the best books I've ever read


1984: It should outsell the Bible
Most everyday at school, I am assigned reading. It never crossed my mind that a book with such power and meaning, 1984, could be read in a parochial school. I read it as a Sophomore last year, and now, as a Junior, am able to now fully understand the book and its tribulations. Orwell is the master teacher, and we should consider ourselves to be mere pupils, desiring to learn the craft of excavating the truth.


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