SMOKERS’ CORNER: OUT OF CONTEXT ORWELL |
George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, explores a fictional totalitarian regime that maintains absolute power by dismantling individual thought, memory and personal connection.
Orwell wrote the novel after witnessing the rise of fascism in Germany and, especially, the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union. A self-described socialist, Orwell fought against fascists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). But he critically differentiated between ‘democratic-socialism’ and the communism practised in the Soviet Union.
By the time Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, totalitarianism in Germany had fallen, but Stalinism persisted. Orwell was particularly disturbed by the Soviet Union’s trajectory, having already satirised it in his 1945 allegory Animal Farm.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he presented a warning about communism’s potential to create a terrifying dystopia. The term ‘Orwellian’ quickly entered political discourse as a universal descriptor for state overreach, the manipulation of truth and society’s tendency toward mass surveillance and the erosion of individual privacy.
From e-challans to clamping down on fake news, almost everything is lazily labelled as ‘Orwellian’ these days by people who do not understand exactly what George Orwell’s writing was critiquing
However, since the conclusion of the Cold War in 1991, one can argue that the term ‘Orwellian’ has been stripped of its original meaning, often serving as a catch-all phrase for any unpopular policy. Recently, a friend described the e-challan traffic cameras installed in Karachi as........