George Orwell's terrifying vision of the future:

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."

O'Brien, Inner Party member

IN BIG BROTHER'S LAND: "WE ARE THE DEAD"

A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent.

The Book

Illegal literature; possession
under penalty of death

Winston Smith is living in a claustrophobic nightmare, a totalitarian society in its very sense: the state utilizes total control over and demands total commitment from the citizens. His land used to be called Great Britain, but now it is called Airstrip One, the third largest province in the Anglo-Saxon superstate Oceania.

In Winston's Oceania, the Party — the pseudo-communistic Ingsoc — are the absolute rulers who enforce their inhumane system without mercy or remorse. Ingsoc is personificated by the resolute face of Big Brother, probably a completely imaginary person, and a threatening slogan: 

Big Brother is watching you.

Oceania is a society in decay, as the industrial production is totally focused on war. The world has been divided into three totalitarian superstates and the constant war for world domination is becoming more barbaric every year — defeat equals annihilation.

Winston is only a minor cog in the machinery, a Party bureaucrat at the Ministry of Truth, Ingsoc's monstruous propaganda apparatus. He is working with "corrections" of old newspapers, in other words a systematic forgery of modern history.

Winston is actually living a dangerous life. He is simply incapable of embracing the propaganda. Sitting in an alcove outside the range of his apartment's compulsory telescreen, a two-way television screen, he commits a severe so-called thoughtcrime. He writes a diary, a lonely dissident's confession: 

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!       

There are no laws and nothing is formally forbidden, but everything is potentially punishable, even a mere indication of dissidency. Winston lives in constant fear of being detected by the secret Thought Police. Even a slight eccentricity or a nervous mannerism may expose him. Detection will inevitably entail so-called vaporisation: imprisonment, violence, humiliation, torture, death and annihilation.

When he meets the young, uncomplicated and hypocritical Party member Julia, he first mistakes her for a Thought Police agent. It marks the beginning of a secret love affair and during their meetings he experiences passionate love and modest freedom for the first time in his life.

Hesitantly, Winston and Julia approach the Brotherhood, the secret rebellion which might or might not be a pure propaganda product. They are fully aware they have got perhaps half a year or a whole year if they are lucky before they will be arrested, interrogated, tortured, tormented in concentration camps and finally shot through the neck, unless they can encourage themselves to commit suicide in time.

When the day comes, they are thrown into a terror machinery beyond their nightmares. The minds of their tormentors are no longer human, but mechanised by indoctrination. Winston's torturer explains to him:

You must love Big Brother.  It is not enough to obey him; you must love him.

The price of freedom is betrayal. Death is the only escape from pain. God is power. Two plus two make five. In the Ministry of Love. In room 101.

Does it sound like science fiction? Actually, it is not. George Orwell's now world famous novel Nineteen Eighty-four was published the first time in 1949 and back then it seemed to be a conceivable future scenario. During the 1950s, readers of Nineteen Eighty-four looked obsessively for signs of Orwell's horrifying vision of the future coming true, just like readers of William Gibson's Neuromancer do today.

In those days, Europe was still a gloomy ruin landscape and the echoes of more than 40 million victims of the war lingered. Hitler's mincing-machine had just stopped and the horrors of Einsatzgruppen and Kz-lager had been exposed to the world. The totalitarian horror seemed to have no limits.

Stalin's mincing-machine was still operating, backed up by the world's largest army and expanding into Eastern and Central Europe. NKVD, later to become KGB, was the Thought Police of the Soviet Union and the Lubjanka prison — and even more so the Lefortovo prison — was the Ministry of Love. Needless to say, Nineteen Eighty-four was immediately prohibited in the Soviet Union and all satelite states. Citizens who managed to obtain a copy anyway could actually identify with Winston Smith quite easily. Milan Simecka, a dissident in communist Czechoslovakia, has written an interesting book about this entitled Our Comrade Winston Smith. Interestingly enough, Simecka does not see Nineteen Eighty-four as warning against communism exclusively, but as an universal warning.

However fantastic it may sound, every single ideological aspect in Nineteen Eighty-four has existed in real totalitarian or crypto-totalitarian states, although often in far less extreme forms and seldom explicitly. For instance, there was a thought police in Imperial Japan, history was forged in the Soviet Union, Hitler declared that he desired constant war, three aggressive superstates did arise after World War II, and so on and so forth. George Orwell knew what he was talking about, and he knew it very well.

Orwell's novel is, in my humble opinion, the best dystopian novel ever written. Big Brother's Oceania is thoroughly crafted which gives the story a sense of harrowing realism and alarming imminency even today, more than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union. Nineteen Eighty-four will probably remain unparallelled as the ultimate political horror. Like no other book, it explores the dark psychological depths and dehumanising mechanisms of totalitarianism. 

Finally, a few words from the philosopher Bertrand Russell:

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth more than ruin more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

Note: My appologies to Czech and Slovak readers for misspelling Simecka's name. I simply do not know how to make special symbols work in all browsers.