George Orwell was an incredibly intelligent, albeit a worrisome, writer who desired to write for a specific purpose: he desired to create change. It is for that reason that he left his ineffective job at BBC, why he signed up for the Home Guard when he could not get into the military, and most importantly why he wrote the cautionary tales that he did.
George Orwell saw firsthand the struggles of a dramatic world unraveling in front of him, and reacted to it by writing to the rest of his generation, a warning and a plea, he designed worlds that the future could hold if ideas of Nazism or Stalinism took root and began to grow unchecked.
Animal farm was a warning for the future in a sense, but it was primarily a criticism as well as explanation of what went wrong in Russia. While he knew that Czar rule was bad for the people, he also knew that certain individuals took advantage of the revolution and ruined something that could have been beautiful.
1984 was directly warning the public of a future where government power is unchecked and privacy was sent to the wayside as well. This warning also has a few prophetic undertones as well. For example, the constant surveillance is partially true, as just about anywhere someone goes in the public they are being watched by a surveillance camera. Also acts that reduce freedoms, such as the Patriot Act, are hotly debated at first, but then the people seem to just become compliant, accepting it as a necessary loss of privacy and freedoms to fight our enemies.
By the way… The war in the Middle East is over and we have a new president, yet the Patriot Act still stands. Most people seem to have forgotten about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment