Counter-Currents
Winston & Julia, 1984
2,699 words
Love is best. — last line of Robert Browning’s “Love among the Ruins”
He loved Big Brother. — last line of George Orwell’s 1984
Reading Orwell’s 1984 once again, I was reminded of the Victorian lady who complained that she disliked Hamlet as it was full of clichés. So it might seem to us on the Dissident Right when confronted with Orwell’s masterpiece. Much of the book — which was originally titled in its draft stage The Last Man in Europe — is so familiar to us that it has its own recognizable glossary: Big Brother, Newspeak, Two-Minute Hate, telescreens, Room 101, War is Peace, memory holes, doublethink, The Ministry of Truth . . . 1984 contains the lexicon of our modern surveillance state. To a Dissident Right in search of an ur-text, our very own Little Red Book, Orwell’s last novel is taking on an almost Koranic centrality in our overview of the swiftly-changing West. In addition to being a grimly accurate prognosis of a rapidly decaying civilization, however, 1984 triumphs on another level: It is a love story.
It is, of course, a tragic love story, and it was also the last story its author would live to write. Orwell, a very sick man, retired to the remote Scottish island of Jura in 1948 to write 1984 (the juxtaposition of digits is striking). Suffering from chronic tuberculosis, he would be dead within two years, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes to the end. He must have felt like the last man in Europe.
Eric Blair — Orwell’s real name — intended 1984 as a critique of Communism, which makes the book’s relevance today all the more frightening. While the modern Left believe that totalitarianism is a utopia to be desired, we all risk our past being thrown down the Memory Hole, as is already happening, from the “decolonization” of academic curricula to each toppled statue. We risk, in short, the revival of Communism.
Although famously a socialist, Orwell referred to the “Pansy Left” — a phrase which, if coined today, would outrage an already perpetually-enraged Left. It is that Pansy Left, however, that effectively runs the West, an extension of Orwell’s own diagnostics concerning England in The Lion and the Unicorn, in which “England is a family with the wrong members in control.” That familial dysfunction has now gone global and is cemented not by Newspeak but, shall we say, Wokespeak.
Orwell himself would have had no time for political correctness. Delightfully, he writes to Anthony Powell in 1936:
It is so rare nowadays to find anyone hitting back at the Scotch cult. I am glad to see you make a point of calling them ‘Scotchmen’, not ‘Scotsmen’ as they like to be called. I find this a good easy way of annoying them.
The Guardian would have a self-righteous seizure over this today. In fact, the Left in general have gone rather quiet about the man who could lay claim to being Britain’s most famous socialist, certainly in the realm of literature. Perhaps there is a suspicion among the woke Left that, in writing 1984, Orwell rather gave the game away. This novel, after all, describes what today’s hard Left actually want — and because the Left’s main cultural talent is for destruction, those things which benefit ordinary people will fall first. One of those things is love and, as noted, 1984 is a love story. Amor vincit omnia, as Virgil wrote in the Eclogues. Love conquers all. The only conquering love does in 1984 is in its famous last line, effectively the last thing Orwell ever wrote: “He loved Big Brother.”
But before the commencement of his love affair with Big Brother, Winston has another affaire du coeur to pass through with Julia, whose surname neither we nor Winston ever learn. The lovers are painted with a brutal and honest brush. Winston is a physical cripple — a shade, perhaps, of Orwell’s tubercular self — and Julia is not attractive. “Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful,” we are told. I was once briefly introduced to Suzanna Hamilton, the actress who played Julia in the film of 1984 released in the same year. She was well-cast in that she was not Hollywood attractive (not hard-edged and vulgar, in other words) but had a vaguely pretty, homely face. That film version of the book, incidentally and if you haven’t seen it, is worth a look, largely because one of England’s most underrated actors (John Hurt) and possibly Wales’ finest (Richard Burton, Hopkins notwithstanding) produce a psychological tension entirely appropriate to Orwell’s atmosphere in the novel.
It is Orwell’s skill and technique to begin Winston and Julia’s affair in conventional ways which, in the context of the book, are given disturbing and psychologically wrought twists. They pass in the corridor, he admires her from afar, a note is passed, meetings are arranged. There is even a first date — of a fearful sort — at dinner. But this is no dating-app romance. Orwell’s first description of Julia is curiously disjunctive: “She was a bold-looking girl of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements . . .”
Perhaps Orwell was trawling his own romantic past to produce a strange composite. No one looks “about twenty-seven,” particularly in a world in which Winston notes constantly how prematurely aged everyone appears. Also, I am sure there are dark-haired women who are also freckled, but I haven’t seen many and I suspect they are rare, freckles being associated more with redheads and blondes. We are intrigued by Orwell’s description as we would be meeting someone with oddly-colored eyes.
His curious impression of Julia aside, there are two points concerning the role of women in 1984. The first was made admirably many years ago by British journalist Peter Hitchens, who pointed out that Orwell didn’t get everything right. Julia works for the “Junior Anti-Sex League.” It transpires that Julia is very sexually experienced (to Winston’s revolutionary delight), and appears to Winston on one occasion in make-up and stockings, wishing to be, in the room in which they meet, “a woman, not a Party comrade.” But her later sensuality and enthusiasm in bed notwithstanding, Orwell did not predict the rampant sexualization of culture we see today with his Anti-Sex League.
The second point is an almost throwaway sentence which may explain Orwell’s expulsion from today’s house of woke: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”
This is one of 1984’s truest prognostications, and one of its least mentioned. Admittedly, Julia is playing a part when she shocks Winston by hurling a Newspeak dictionary at Goldstein’s televised face during the Two-Minute Hate, but she knows how to play that part, having understudied her peers in the acting skills necessary to stay alive. As Winston has.
So, love is in the air. But so is hate. As 1984 temporarily Venn-nests with another great British dystopian novel, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Winston can’t help thinking about his new object of desire:
Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like St. Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.
You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.
Who doesn’t day-dream about their girl? Orwell shows rather than tells that the Party has destroyed, or at least temporarily debased, love, along with its other trophies. Love leads to sex, which leads to families, and families lead to disloyalty to your new family, the State. This is pure Leninism.
One of Orwell’s great strategies with this novel is to make the protagonist neither young nor old, but of a generation in transition. Winston has vague memories of life before the Party, and he retains some of the vestigial decency of earlier times. He meets an older, married lady shortly after his murderous mental episode over Julia:
It was Mrs. Parsons, the wife of a neighbor on the same floor. (‘Mrs.’ was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party — you were supposed to call everyone ‘comrade’ — but with some women one used it instinctively).
The Party may have warped love, but it can’t reach respect.
Freud would have come to Orwell’s attention, being very much in the post-war intellectual water supply, and after a textbook dream of Winston’s in which his mother is replaced by a naked Julia, “Winston woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.”
There is, to an English literary man, nothing more English than the Bard, himself a great poet of love, and Orwell would have been very much aware that in setting the first tryst between Winston and Julia in a bluebell wood he was obeying the rules of English pastoral. The pastoral tradition in English literature sees troubled couples run away to the wild wood, from which they return with their differences settled. Shakespeare uses it in both The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The fact that Gordon Comstock — Orwell’s alter ego in his earlier and partly autobiographical novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying — also has a penchant for love in the open air may indicate a wistful peccadillo of Orwell’s.
The pastoral doesn’t work out as happily for Winston and Julia, but it does help clarify exactly what their love affair means. The key passage in 1984, viewed as a love story, occurs just after Julia and Winston make love for the first time in the wood, as the doomed lovers realize what their love has begun;
But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
The climax was a victory, a political act. Perhaps this is why O’Brien announces, while he is torturing Winston, the Party’s intention of abolishing the orgasm.
The lure of the greensward is not without risk, however. Winston has suspected for some time that Julia has been following him. Usually, in the case of love, this idea appeals to the man, but Winston fantasizes about “smash[ing] her head in with a cobblestone”.
Orwell’s description of Winston and Julia’s love-making is as austere and organized as the rest of his prose. Orwell’s journalistic background (not least at the BBC, which becomes Minitrue, or the propaganda-controlling Ministry of Truth, in 1984) honed his writing style to a clipped perfection. This is not to say he is not occasionally drily funny. A man wears “a concertina-like black suit.” A room contains “a deep, slatternly armchair.” His sparse scene-setting is perfect for the sense of despair and hopelessness pervading almost every scene. Grit, dirt, grease, dust, sweat: These are the elements of Orwell’s laboratory. The bed on which Winston and Julia have sex is riddled with lice.
In passing, it is pleasant to note that Orwell, as all writers must, has his images which fascinate him. In 1984, a ruined woman neighbor is seen “fiddling helplessly with a blocked wastepipe.” The same desperate image occurs in The Road to Wigan Pier, as Orwell sees a woman from a train “kneeling in the gutter in a back-alley in Wigan, in the bitter cold, prodding a stick up a blocked drain.”
Of course, it is an old literary device to place the truth in the mouth of a lover, and so it is with Julia. But, in a sentence more chilling than anything in Goldstein’s book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, or Orwell’s appendix on Newspeak, Julia describes her memories of what she thinks of as the fruit known as an “orange”: “I’ve seen oranges. They’re a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.”
In English, oranges are not a yellow fruit, they are orange. It is Orwell’s genius to show us how language has already been reorganized so that the color “orange” no longer exists and is just a sub-set of yellow. The Party’s ultimate triumph will be to make the word “love” go the same way down the same Memory Hole as the word “orange,” so that love exists merely as a sub-set of something else.
As aware as we all are of the prophetic power of Orwell’s classic warning, occasionally the book takes those of us on the Right by surprise. Winston and Julia, after making love, are looking out from the window of the room which would soon become their Gethsemane. They see a woman whose body is described as that of
“a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous proportions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work until it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip.” A snippet of conversation passes between the lovers which would interest the modern feminist:
‘She’s beautiful’, he murmured.
‘She’s a meter across the hips, easily’, said Julia.
‘That is her style of beauty’, said Winston.
No fat-shaming for Orwell.
In the end — and it is a fate both these star-crossed lovers are more than aware awaits them — the Party, the State, has the decisive say concerning love: where it may exist, and where it may not. The pair is arrested in the room they love so much. “We are the dead,” Winston says, echoing a phrase first used by O’Brien when he was fooling Winston into stating his sympathy for the renegade and mythical resistance movement, “Brotherhood.” O’Brien agrees, from behind the painting: “You are the dead.” Love and death, just as linked in the contemporary mind as they always have been.
In the end, Orwell did not predict everything correctly in 1984, but that is hardly a criticism. The modern, bespoke dystopia we are now living in is actually a mixture of Orwell’s final novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Zemyatin’s We, which Orwell certainly read before writing 1984, also plays a part, providing Orwell with that peculiarly Central/Eastern European feel for the mechanical as an integral part of totalitarianism.
What totalitarianism does to love is encapsulated by Julia’s note, passed to Winston while she feigns a painful fall in order to have him help her up. He is petrified at the prospect of what it might say and, when he finally unfolds it among his work documents and away from prying telescreens, it reads: I love you. In the end, it is a fatal statement, a literal death sentence.
Finally, during the harrowing final torture scene, O’Brien plays the lovers off against one another, telling Winston that Julia had betrayed him. For once, O’Brien is telling the truth. She had given him up, just as he would give her up in Room 101. This makes Julia’s vow during their affair all the more poignant: “If they could make me stop loving you. That would be the real betrayal.”
Winston and Julia meet one last time after their ordeal and it is ugly and awkward, and Orwell does ugly and awkward very well.
Now that Orwell’s disturbing and prophetic final novel has been hard-wired into our DNA, as it were, we should remember that the Party — or our slightly cosmeticized contemporary version of it — sought not only to destroy liberty but also love, which for the damned lovers of 1984 is their only freedom, a freedom Winston cannot quite believe ever existed:
He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to be in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary.
During his final rant, during which he encapsulates the Party’s mission statement, O’Brien states that in the future there will be no love but that for Big Brother. Thus, love is not cancelled, merely reallocated, and perhaps for reasons hinted at by a drowsy, post-coital Julia:
When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that.
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17 comments
I think I will watch the film again this evening. I watched A Clockwork Orange again the other day . I found it less shocking now and perhaps less dystopian as compared to current Western society. After all, who wouldn’t want to pick up two girls for some afternoon in out while checking out the lastest album from Heaven Seventeen?
Ingsoc sought to eliminate love by restricting sex, but Woke knows that inflation is a better destroyer than restriction.
As for Orwell’s lack of fat-shaming, we have The Road To Wigan Pier to thank, where middle-class socialist Eric Blair, unlike his contemporaries actually went out among the working class and documented their lives. He therefore understands that a prole woman’s body bearing upon itself the marks of childrearing and labor has a beauty beyond the visual. Childbirth is the heroism of woman and heroism is always beautiful.
Childbirth is the heroism of woman
In Spartan society, the only people granted marked headstones were warriors who died in battle and women who died giving birth. According to Euripides’ Medea, the women faced the greater risk: “I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once.”
I first read “1984” as a teen, I reread it again a couple of months ago. I enjoyed it greatly the second time around, very perceptive, and insightful. Yes, he was off the mark about how the power elite would operate, but so was every other writer that tried to read the currents of the future. He said two things that I feel have came true, “We are the dead.” and “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”
I have a similar story. Read Nineteen Eighty Four (my copy spells out the numbers) as a teen, and then reread it (I wanted to find a quote, and ended up rereading the whole thing) just about 40 years later (or about 5 years ago). I had two reactions this second time. First, the book was not great in a literary sense. I have the 1400 page Everyman’s Library collection of Orwell’s essays, and he was much better as a writer in that medium than in fiction. Second, I was very impressed with both the acuity of his fictional observations, and their continued relevance to the (then) present situation two thirds of a century later. He really nailed the leftist mind, and the trajectory of society should it ever gain total power.
I find that Suzanna Hamilton was beautiful in 1984, and that is ironically now an item of nostalgia, for few British women have that look these days.
I thank the author for this well-crafted and insightful essay.
I found this paragraph of special interest, as it closely parallels my own long time thinking:
In the end, Orwell did not predict everything correctly in 1984, but that is hardly a criticism. The modern, bespoke dystopia we are now living in is actually a mixture of Orwell’s final novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Zemyatin’s We, which Orwell certainly read before writing 1984, also plays a part, providing Orwell with that peculiarly Central/Eastern European feel for the mechanical as an integral part of totalitarianism.
The three major dystopian works of the 20th century are conventionally given as We, Brave New World, and 1984. I have long argued for the equal inclusion of two other works among these dystopias, neither of which is usually recognized by mainstream literary critics as being of quite the same stature. The first is A Clockwork Orange. I was gratified to see that a scholar on the intellectual Right agrees. But I can’t help noticing that Dr. Gullick omitted the fifth and surely most contemporarily relevant of all the great dystopian fiction – Raspail’s Camp of the Saints!
Gullick is correct that today’s hellscape is a hybrid of all of these. Individually, none of the authors was wholly predictive of the future (though the jury is still out on Raspail). But in concert, the futures they foretold as warnings pretty much describe our present.
Your major dystopian works of the 20th century are excellent choices, but I’d also want to add Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury predicted that normies, not wanting to have their feelings offended, would be the ones demanding censorship.
“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred . . . Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it.”
Thank you. You might be right. I read Fahrenheit in grade school, and then again maybe a dozen years ago. Unfortunately, I used to read it here and there, on the train, at lunch, etc, (because it was such a slim paperback fitting easily into a jacket pocket), so I confess it didn’t make too much of an impression. Maybe I should take another look, studying it in the quiet of my home.
I am reading 1984 right now, slowly in between other books, and have reached the last part. I read three books by Orwell before, not this one. I am amazed how leftists today are managing to rewrite the history of whites, and this prompted me to finally read 1984. We know famous quotes such as this one: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.”
But there are other insightful ones. “The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they will exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what thyy used to be”.
They will only exist in Newspeak versions.
It was at a conference some ten years ago about the Western Canon that I was very happy to attend, only to start noticing that this Canon was being bent to fit a progressive understanding of history. Members of the Canon were assessed for their contributions to this progression and their limitations, and how other members who came later superseded them. No one saw anything in the Canon that contradicted this progression or pointed to a world very different from the current one. They were striving towards the present.
This rewriting is now accelerating, and will get far worse once whites become a minority and the training in doublethink is cemented everywhere. “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it…”
Jewish academics are masters at doublethink; think of Derrida’s attack on the logocentrism of the white race, his deconstructive style of reasoning. “…the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradistinction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when the Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.”
Thank you for your own work in exposing the agenda and methods of leftist historiography. You are correct to emphasize the link between declining white numbers and the intensifying of ideological attacks on white history and heritage. “Embracing diversity” is not really akin to “being nice to minorities”, which is how brain-cucked whites see it. It is a call for apathy in the face of full-spectrum alien imperialism.
One thing which Orwell gets really, really right is in his understanding of how a hostile elite can manipulate mass psychology to consolidate its own power. Consider this passage from 1984, Part 2, Chapter 9:
The speech [in Victory Square] had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot.
Sounds a lot like what has been going on in the Homeland these last 19 months, with mob violence being wrenched on and off by the Regime to suit its current political goals. The enemy is first the police and trad America, then anti-vaxxers and 6 January 2021 insurrectionists. It’s called a changeover, the war goes on, and nobody among the Party faithful has any idea.
It’s easy enough to say that Orwell “predicted” things like the surveillance state (I mean, there are cameras everywhere today, including in your telephone). But it is not so much the ubiquitous Thought Police telescreens watching the denizens of Oceania, it’s that the denizens are watching those same telescreeens. There’s the real power.
The Hurt-Burton film version (1984) really gets this right in scenes showing “news” footage of that total war which is going on somewhere on the farflung frontiers of the Malabar front. Even though it’s obviously recycled footage from World War II, the viewers’ eyes are locked on the telescreens all the more intently, trying to give meaning to what they think they are seeing. And in so doing, are swept up in the war fever.
The war is waged by the ruling groups against their own subjects, and the object is to keep the structure of society intact by preserving certain mental attitudes which support hierarchical society (as Orwell notes, recapitulating Burnham from The Managerial Revolution). Just as today’s hostile elites convince millions of people to tear down the icons of their own countries while holding up “Refugees Welcome” signs to the third world armies marching in to replace them, enlisting the masses in a war whose goal is the consolidation of a managerial-technocratic-oligarchic globalist elite.
Big Brother is watching you, maybe, but you are watching Big Brother. There’s the power. O’Brien has freedom of a sort in Airstrip One because he can, as Winston Smith observes, turn off histelescreen.
Something to think about in the continuing chaos…
He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different.
Exactly, this passage was always the most memorable for me from the book. I also commend the author of this article for saying what absolutely bears repeating – that 1984 is full of wonderful insights, descriptions and vignettes quite apart from the well-known cliches.
Excellent comment. What Orwell really grasped, as well as possibly anyone ever, was the nature of leftist psychology, as well as methods of consolidating power. I don’t think the generations (which very much includes my own) of school teachers who taught 1984, mainly as a tract against dictatorship and especially totalitarianism, fully grasped this.
I’m starting to think that Far Rightists need to reread 1984 at least every 5 years or so.
Many very interesting posts here, including contributions from two of my favourite CC commentators, Lord Shang and Sordello.
There are many takes on 1984 that not everyone notices, in some cases, I suspect, because they run counter to the reader’s own views.
My late father, who introduced me to Orwell in the 1970s, not only admired the purity of Orwell’s English style, but shared Orwell’s anti-Communist sentiments. However, as a devout Catholic anti-Communist, he did not see how profoundly Trotskyite the book is, an insight for which I am grateful to the late Jonathan Bowden.
Orwell, who fought in the Trotskyite militia POUM in Spain, was a forerunner of many former Trotsykites, whose hatred for Stalin led them ultimately into the neo-liberal camp, though he differed from most who went on that journey in that he was thoroughly English and not one of the “special people”.
My own personal and rather heretical perspective on 1984 more than forty years after my first reading is to note how wussy Winston is! Perhaps my experiences of life have hardened me, but whereas I identified with Winston as a teenager, now I find the character of the sinister inner party member O’Brien strangely alluring. Does not O’Brien possess dark charisma in abundance? Did Julia perhaps choose the wrong man? Imagine a denouement in which O’Brien initiates her into the inner party, and marries her to create a power couple! That would be an interesting alternative history.
Excellent comment, more interesting than any of mine.
(Thank you for your encouragement. If interested, I have written extensive comments recently to the following posts: Hampton, “‘Indigenous’ Isn’t Our Term”; and Quinn, “Red State Secession” and “Against Porn”.)
I was aware that Orwell started out as a Trotskyist, and never ceased being a socialist. Of course, one might legitimately inquire into what “socialism” actually entailed for him. I strongly suspect it was different in content from what the term means for Corbyn or, if you’re familiar with current American politics, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Jewish Socialist VT-Independent) and his full spectrum, rigidly ideological marxist/multiculturalist/”wokeist” acolyte, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Puerto Rican NY-Democrat).
Orwell’s “socialism” almost certainly arose in reaction to Britain’s class system, and as a function of his moral sympathy with its working class. British capitalism did have a long, incestuous history with the landowning class, and thus classical liberal, small-governmentalist exhortations to “pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps” no doubt rang much more hollow than they would have in a New World society of abundant real opportunity and mobility. Europe therefore had much stronger socialist movements than America did for a very good reason: inherited and, from an egalitarian moral perspective, unjust class privilege enshrined via numerous legal mechanisms was real, and, with increasing mass literacy and expanding communicative technologies, recognized as such and resented. I believe Orwell’s socialism was a less a hatred for professional or commercial achievement, and its sometime ensuing wealth, per se, let alone a desire to live under totalitarian terror and regimentation, than an economically unsophisticated plea for the common man, a desire to see laboring conditions improved, as well as for a more just distribution of national wealth in light of the injustices of the feudal past, and how the latter continue into the present.
If I’m correct wrt Orwell, this type of “socialism” is very different from the egalitarian resentment of true commercial accomplishments, as well as hard-edged lust for power (and for stealing other people’s money and possessions), which is the ‘moral’ essence of the socialism of Lenin, Mao, Castro, Sanders, Corbyn, etc.
As to Wussy Winston, I think he was supposed to embody an intelligent but otherwise ordinary Englishman. Honestly, I found the character to be very psychologically realistic. How would one behave under that type of tyrannical surveillance regime? John Hurt (no hero he) was a good casting choice in the 1984 film. And yes, O’Brien was by far the more charismatic figure (as the powerful often are next to the powerless). But still a very nasty piece of work.
I think people would be wise to re-read my Countercurrents article Retrieved From the Future/1985. 1985 is a discussion of 1984 written by Anthony Burgess. Burgess stated the major flaw of 1984 to him was that it didn’t show the family as a defiant part of resistance, because in the end totalitarian regimes are anti-family. Also, as Burgess stated in this book, Ingsoc and Newspeak are very much thought processes that would appeal to the young.
I didn’t really see Winston Smith as a wuss. He was on his own, and coped as best as he could. As Burgess pointed out, the name Winston Smith gets a laugh in England. It implies a kind of naive, heroic resistance that is impossible in such a repressive system as Oceania (and presumably Eurasia and Eastasia).
I also thought it might have been interesting to have O’Brien played by an American, as in reality, Oceania was an American state, with what remained of Britain as only Airstrip One. it would be hard to imagine an American actor of Burton’s power doing it.
I thought Suzanna Hamilton was a good choice. I don’t think a glamorous Julia would be helpful. The 1950’s 1984 with Edmund O’Brien had a very pretty Julia…well, it was the fifties. Suzanna also appeared in Weatherby, a film by David Hare (with Vanessa Redgrave), and is a understated classic of tension in England. Needs a review.
As for understanding how totalitarianism educates and indoctrinates people, I again recommending reading James Clavell’s The Children’s Story. It’s a subtle short story on how to control children.
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