This classical dystopian novella, written by George Orwell, has long been an officially banned book due to its fortissimo political metaphoric nature. The details in the novella, if carefully examined, were macabre, as if they were a set of extreme prophecies being told by the witches in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. The protagonist, Winston Smith’s daily work was to falsify historical records, though in his heart he opposed his work intensely. His revolt and resentment were later exemplified by his sexual interaction with Julia, in which any fidelity to one's loved ones, if it isn’t ‘given in charity’ by Big Brother, was a clear action of betrayal and would lead to grievous punishment.
What was so sarcastic about the book was how it led people to couldn’t help relating the text to the world’s most dominant power existing when the book was written—the USSR. Even in the case of the word ‘Stalinism’, historians argue whether it could be simply equivalent to ‘totalitarianism’ as the technology was not advanced enough to supervise one’s daily life. The setting of the ‘telescreen’ in the book, at a time when television was far from a common thing, was such a newfangled idea that it created an atmosphere as if the world was a non-escapable prison. What’s more, the "Ministry of Plenty"’s action of controlling and destroying grains seems to me like an extension and exaggerated version of the policy of collectivization. Throughout the novella, the technique of oxymoron was pervasively implemented, and ontologies were put into a mess. It forces people to question: ‘Is the world ought to be like this?’
Often, when we talk about dictatorship, we are talking about the opposite of democracy, but what is democracy? It is not difficult to understand, after a short period of pondering, that effective democracy also needs to have a ‘leader’ at the top to function well, especially in terms of a large country. I once had a talk with my History teacher after class, asking, ‘It seems that the East and the West both state themselves as ‘democratic’ while possessing completely different ideological systems. So what is democracy anyway?’ The key point to understand this question is that democracy is, on its surface, a system where rulers are accountable to citizens, acting through their elected representatives. This is, though, the superficial appearance of the word as it can almost be certain that information will be lost or hidden, which imperceptibly infects one’s thoughts. The thing is, if in one case there are Groups a, b, c, d supporting presidents A, B, C, D, and in another case there is a ‘dominant’ group (proposed by the government, of course) supporting the only president E, then it could still be propagandized that it was the people’s will. From a statistical perspective, ‘partially authentic’ data could be created to mislead the public easily (again, this alludes to Stalin’s cult of personality!). Similar connections like this were so common in the book that I would sincerely recommend anyone to read it, as the depth of thoughts and the way you can infer the meaning was definitely unfixed. This little piece of a book review was just a random flow of record of my thoughts (as a student who is currently studying USSR’s history).