Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, published in 1949, is a dystopian novel about the totalitarian regime of the Party, an oligarchical collectivist society where life is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, public mind control, and the voiding of citizens' rights. In the Ministry of Truth, protagonist Winston Smith is a civil servant responsible for perpetuating the Party's propaganda by revising historical records to render the Party omniscient and always correct, yet his meagre existence disillusions him into rebellion against Big Brother, which leads to his arrest, torture, and conversion.
16 comments:
"1984" is an extremely important book. It has influenced the way we think of the media, mind control, government propaganda and a host of other things. It has invariably been on different lists of the best books of the 20th Century.
I've emailed the pdf file to everyone. Please read it over the winter break and come prepared to discuss the themes and events in the book.
It's only a 140 pages long - so even if you read just ten pages a day you will have finished it by the end of the break.
Uhm sorry sir there was something wrong with my Hotmail so had to delete all mails. Sir can you please send it again =)
This book is amazing!
Page 90 is blank though, sir.
Sir, my internet has just been given CPR today (28th december).. I had no internet for like a week..nonetheless, Im going to start reading asap. :) This seems like an interesting read.
sir page 90 is nowhere to be found! :(
Yo Owais, I don't know about you dude but I always prefer reading a good book like '1984' on high-quality paper rather than as a PDF file. Well, 'Different strokes for different folks' I suppose.:) Anyways, if you and anybody else would like to purchase the book in print (and let Mr.Roberts enjoy his holidays) you can get it at Magrudy's. At the time of me composing this comment, there are 3 copies available at Magrudy's Burjuman Centre, another 3 copies available at Magrudy's Dubai Festival City and one other copy available at Magrudy's Dubai City Centre. If anybody would like to make any enquiries about the availability of the book at any of Magrudy's shops or make reservations for the book, their call centre number is 04-3444009.
Hi there Nadine and Payam H.D, hope you're enjoying the holidays. For you and everyone else who prefers reading the book as a PDF file, here's page 90 of the PDF file:
Ever since the end of the ninteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient - a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete - was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention, have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process - by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute - the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
- continued below due to technical limits.
-continued from above due to tecnical limits.:
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanisation which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State Charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacturer is still a convenient way of expending labour without producing anything that can be consumed.
p.s. For the record, I don't intend to commit any copyright violations. I have manually copied this page from the book published by Penguin Books with the sole intention of assisting my fellow colleagues in the task of accessing the text therein.
Glad to be of service.:)
Thank you Sajid!
Sajid
You must have a heck of a lot of time on your hands to have typed out all that manually. I'm sure the others appreciate it though.
You're welcome Nadine! And no Mr. Roberts, I don't have a lot of spare time at my disposal because I'm too busy reading this truly gripping novel.:) It's the main reason why I haven't got the time to comment on all your other posts. I'm a bit of a slow reader and besides, I'm also simultaneously composing this really long list of all the new words I'm running into. But I'm not completely sure if anyone besides me owns the book in print and I thought to myself, ''If I won't help out Nadine and everyone else who shares her predicament - who will?''. In my opinion, this book is worlds better than both 'Lord of the Flies' and 'It Shouldn't happen to a Vet'. By the way, I 'discovered' a seemingly little-known fact whilst helping out Nadine which I think would be useful to every blogsite user - The maximum size limit for any comment is 4096 characters.:)
Note: That's 4096 characters, not 4096 words.
Wow. Thanks heaps Sajid. Really appreciate this! :)
im reallly enjoying this book :) thankuuu sooo much sajid!!!!!!!!!!!!1 really appreciate it man!!!!!!!!!!! :)
AWESOME book, a bit disturbing and shocking at times, but definitely unexpected! :D I've read another book that is somewhat along the same lines, once i find it i'll let you know :)
Sajid
He invents a lot of new words like newspeak and plusgood. I hope you're not making a note of them! :)
Sir, this is the reason why they have the television show 'Big Brother' in the UK, right? =P
[my other gmail doesn't work anymore :S so this is the one I'll be using from now on]
Rachel Long
10G1
"1984" is in my opinion a tad boring at times but an amazing book in the sense of how it is written and how he describes everything in detail and how he structures the book. It really show what you can actually do with the english language in ways that i to be honest thought were literally imposible to do, but it shows you that if you really put your head to it and you have a real interest in the english language you can actually be a genius.
So yeah in result to this i guess you can say i really enjoyed teh book on a whole.
Dylan 10B1
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