this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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1984
Sometimes I’ll read it as a hopeful story and stop the chapter before they get arrested.
If you read it that way it starts as grumpy guy in totalitarian hellscape who hates himself and ends with him having found someone, being enlightened by resistance, and having a will to live.
(Of course the point isn’t to stop there. But sometimes I feel like reading the book again without being too gloomy.)
I think it also helps to understand the context of him writing the book. Specifically his experience as a libertarian socialist in revolutionary Catalonia and the oppression (incl executions and imprisonment) he and his comrades faced from Stalinist factions who treated the anarchists as threats to their power.
Why 1984 always hit more. Dude was writing from actual lived experience.
you should read his journals, he thought Hitler was too big of a bafoon to ever become a real threat. 1984 was pretty close to just a Stalin documentary though.
True but it was also his view on something that could happen to england. His view on how an established totalitarian system modelled after Stalinism could take hold and look like in the UK.
Basically written as a sort of warning.
yeah the more i learn about ww2 the crazier the things become that i didn't know about
It's a great book to bring perspective to the foggy real-world of politics.
Also, the book doesn't theoritically stop at the end when he dies, because all governments rise and fall throughout history.
I non-ironically consider it a hopefull book in those ways.