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For me the fundamental story was about class. All of the principles of Ingsoc were intentionally crafted as a way to prevent the middle class from deposing the
by Trasmatta 5y ago
For me the fundamental story was about class. All of the principles of Ingsoc were intentionally crafted as a way to prevent the middle class from deposing the high class with the assistance of the low class.
The surveillance, propaganda, double think, cult of personality, eternal wars, Newspeak, etc, were all just a means to that end. That's the boot stamping on the face forever.
I think a lot of people skip over Emmanuel Goldstein's "book within a book" in 1984, but I feel like it's one of the most important parts of the entire thing, because of how it lays all of that out.
- azernik 5y agoEspecially since, with his history in the party and his Jewish name, he's clearly supposed to be a reference to Trotsky. Orwell fought in a Trotskyist militia in Spain and hence is likely to use a Trotsky stand-in to express his own views.
- watwut 5y agoI don't find that clear reference at all.
- azernik 5y agoFor a mid-20th-century audience with a passing familiarity with contemporary communist politics, it would have been much clearer than to an arbitrary person today. Contemporary reviewers were very convinced, and also thought that the written passages from Goldstein's in-universe book were call-outs and/or parodies of specific passages in Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed", I don't know enough about that book to comment on parallels, but Orwell's contemporaries did not consider the Goldstein/Trotsky reference especially subtle.
- watwut 5y agoI have that passing familiarity and lived in soviet union and read a lot memoirs of dissidents. If did not appeared straightforward similarity.