This was in part because his views on the limitations of capitalism were formed by what he observed in mid-20 th century Britain-that is, a nation caught in stagnating, late Industrial Age capitalism. military machine built around precision-guided weapons and the swift transmission of data.Īs a consequence, Orwell also underestimated how intrusive Western states and companies could become. But over the last eight decades, the United States has proved his assertion to be incorrect three times-first during World War II, then again during the Eisenhower-era Cold War buildup, and finally in the post-Vietnam rebuilding of the American military, when Reaganite defense spending combined with computers to create a powerful new U.S. He wrote in 1943 that “an economy ruled by the profit motive is simply not equal to re-arming on a modern scale.” That assertion might have been true of the Britain of the 1930s, which had a declining economy that had failed to adequately fund innovation. He never visited the United States, and so perhaps as a result did not grasp the resiliency of capitalism. Nor would Orwell have been surprised by President Trump’s limited vocabulary of words like “sad,” “bad” and “amazing.” In 1984, the government purposely dumbed down language, with “excellent” and “splendid” replaced by “plusgood” and “doubleplusgood.” government, prosecuting such a war, officially endorsed the use of torture, for the first time in its history. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at.” And just as young Americans today have lived with that anti-terror campaign all their lives, so too 1984’s hero, “Winston,” “could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.” Orwell would not be surprised that the U.S. In the novel, the government of “Big Brother” carries on a perpetual war that, as in American life today, “involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties.

The dystopian future Orwell portrays in 1984 helps illuminate our post-9/11 world. That’s especially impressive, given that he died in 1950. While spending the last three years immersed in the works of George Orwell for a book I was researching and writing, I often was struck by how often his writing speaks to the problems of today. Ricks is the author of six books, most recently Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, published this month (May 23) by Penguin Press.

1984 novel