Havana Cuba. – On June 8, 1949, the West found itself before the dystopian society portrayed by an English writer in his most successful novel. George Orwell had published 1984an essential book to understand how the totalitarianisma highly coercive system where information is manipulated and mass surveillance is practiced, in addition to political and social repression.
Concepts such as Big Brother ―omnipresent and vigilant figure―, the Thought Police and newspeak that seeks to transform language for repressive purposes, are inserted for the first time in the Western imaginary, in a global political context marked by the advance of socialism the Soviet Union in Eastern European countries, and the rise of openly pro-Soviet radical left parties and movements throughout the world.
Without being a marvel from the stylistic point of view,1984 presents an extrapolation of the practices of communism and fascism, offering one of the most appropriate readings to understand how and why totalitarianism seeks to annul individual liberties. The degree of subjugation in which the so-called “Orwellian society” takes place is terrifying, all the more so as there are plenty of immediate and real examples of such social, political, cultural and intellectual deformation.
Bureaucracy, propaganda, terror, cult of personality, corruption, rewriting of history, demoralized leaders, material and human misery, are some of the evils rooted in the universe of the novel, a lesson that should be more than enough for Peoples will avoid at all costs the presence of this kind of danger on the path to power.
Before he died, Orwell made it clear that with his novel he only wanted to describe “the perversions to which a centralized economy is exposed.” On the probabilities that what was narrated in 1984 could happen, he explained: “I don’t believe that the kind of society that I describe will necessarily happen, but what I do believe (…) is that something similar can happen. I also believe that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the brains of intellectuals in all parts of the world and I have tried to carry these ideas to their logical consequences.
1984 It has had countless adaptations to film, theater and television. It has inspired other literary productions and even musical works. In 2015 it was considered one of the 20 most influential books.
