While watching the movie Detachment, Adrian was in the classroom asking the students who had read Nineteen Eighty-Four. I have been fascinated by the book ever since, and then I learned about george Orwell's political satire novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, which claims that the more people read it, the more free people there are.
What was 1984? Under the tone of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the twenty-third Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles, the Soviet Union unsurprisingly boycotted the Olympic Games, unexpectedly our country returned to the Olympic Games, Xu Haifeng won the first gold medal of the Olympic Games in China, the World Cup was held in France as scheduled, Brunei broke away from Britain, an old man inspected the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, we recovered all the territory of Laoshan and so on. There are conflicts in the international situation, but more importantly, peace and development.
But in George Orwell's 1984, that wasn't the case.
It was a world of suffocating horrors, where dictators made the quest for power the ultimate goal, where humanity was completely snuffed out by power, freedom was completely denied, thought was severely clamped down, the people fell into extreme poverty, and the lives of the proletarians at the bottom became monotonous cycles.
London, as a metropolis, is a depressed scene in the author's pen, the whole tone is gray, and the description of big brother that appears on the first page can't help but make me smile, "The picture is the face of a man more than one meter long, who looks like he is forty-five years old, with a thick moustache, and the silhouette is still rough and thin." For some reason, the image that appears in my mind is that the appearances of Hitler and Stalin are gradually overlapping, and I believe that the author's political irony is also a metaphor for the two of them.
I don't have much to say about the plot and the imaginary foul-smelling dystopian society, but what makes me even more creepy is the society, the regime's revision of history to the point of heinousness.
When history can be tampered with at will, what is the meaning of the past and the future?
The protagonist's ruling clique in Oceania is a party called the British Society, and they have a slogan called "Whoever controls the past controls the future; whoever controls the present controls the past." It was creepy to hear, under the rule of the British Society, casually interfering in the past history, saying that this thing and that thing never happened, which is really more terrible than death and torture, because history is only in your memory, and you will eventually die, and from now on, no one will know this history, no one will know what happened in the past.
How did the British Society control the past by controlling the present? How did it tamper with history?
Originally, the British Society was set up as a party with four departments, namely the Ministry of Truth, which was in charge of news, entertainment, education, and the arts; the Ministry of Peace was in charge of war; the Ministry of Benevolence was in charge of law and social order; and the Ministry of Yumin was in charge of the economy. The protagonist, Winston, serves in the Ministry of Truth, and he sees a scene of destroying historical materials and tampering with historical information.
First of all, diplomatically, there are currently three major countries, Oceania, Eurasian countries, and East Asian countries, in addition to the current alliances, the previous relations with any other country, there is no word, that is, there is no record of the archives, and no one will mention it in the conversation. This is true of such a big thing as diplomacy, let alone those small things, and through the control of double thinking, people only remember the allies now, only the eternal enemies, as for the transformation of the allies, what agreements are signed with the devil, this kind of thing, this kind of thing, has not been, and will not be.
The second is the individual, a person is arrested by violent organs such as the thought police, you disappear is disappeared, the human world evaporates, except for the memory of you in the brain of your loved ones, you will not leave any traces, because all the traces you have left in this society have been erased, you have not been in this world, at this time, the meaning of human existence has become a kind of frightening thinking.
Finally, it is to tamper with the text. One is the data, such as the data predicted before the First Five-Year Plan is published, and when the First Five-Year Plan is over, the actual data is far less than the forecast data, then the work of the Ministry of Truth comes, recovering all the original data documents related to the prediction of the First Five-Year Plan, and modifying it according to the current actual data, but is the actual data now real? Only God knows. The same is true of speeches, memorabilia, and other archives, and if there is a discrepancy between what is happening now and the past, all the materials of the past are destroyed and reissued according to the current situation.
This process of constantly revising "history" is not only in newspapers, but also in books, periodicals, manuals, slogans, leaflets, films, audio tapes, cartoons, photographs, etc. In short, any kind of document with political or ideological overtones is within the scope of revision, every minute and second that has happened in the past must keep up with the times, and any opinion or news that conflicts with the present needs is not allowed to exist.
In this repressive society, history is no longer a mirror, but a mark on the blackboard, which can be erased at any time and filled at any time. What's even more frightening is that once it's altered, you won't find evidence that it's a falsification of history.
Suddenly I thought of the "Spring and Autumn Brushwork" in our Chinese history, people who write history books will write history books according to their own likes and dislikes, and how much real history is drowned in the long river of history, from the current point of view, how much history has been tampered with beyond recognition, not to mention that China has been the history of the previous dynasty since ancient times, and how much water is mixed with this history.
In tribute to the Taishi brothers of the State of Qi, who wrote straight books, the three brothers were killed, and they all went forward to write history according to the truth, paying tribute to the days when the truth existed and what happened did not have to be destroyed.