Read It In Books:Nineteen Eighty-Four.

"If you want a picture of the future imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever" 

The year 1984 was forty-one years ago now (I remember it well, it was the year I left school) which means that George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four (which came out in 1949, 35 years before 1984) is closer to the date in which the book is set than we are now. Yet, the book isn't a museum piece and is, sadly - and you may have heard this before, more relevant than ever. In a world of Trump, fake news, deepfakes, AI slop, and social media driven division we may no longer be that close to the year in question but we are frighteningly close to the themes in question.

Orwell introduces us to a world of 'doublethink', a world where the clocks strike thirteen, a world of Thought Police and the Ministry of Truth (as well as Ministires of Love, Plenty, and Peace - all of which do the exact opposite of what their name purports), a world that hosts a Hate Week, a world that has no laws but where you can still be sent to your own death ("vaporised") by the authorities, and a world where Big Brother is always watching you.

This world is London in Orwell's imagined future. No longer the capital of the United Kingdom but instead the chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. The official language of Oceania is Newspeak (WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH) and nothing remains of what London used to be, not even in the memories of those who lived in the before times.

"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull". Privacy had ended. Friendship had ended. Love had ended. They had been replaced by fear, hatred, and pain. War is permanent. Or at least it had been going on so long that anyone of Winston Smith's age could not remember a time without war. At one point we learn that an atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. 

Even culture is being destroyed, party members speak about "the beauty of the destruction of words", in this world there is no need for expression, for culture, for art, for empathy, or for love. Thirty nine year old Winston Smith lives in this world. He lives on the seventh floor of Victory Mansions. He risks his own life by writing a diary although he's not sure what he hopes to achieve by doing so or why he even bothers. He's not even sure what year it is. One thing he does know is that he works in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth

Julia is Winston's lover. At first he suspects she's a spy, an agent of the Thought Police, who has been sent to order him to commit suicide. He even, briefly, considers caving her head in with a cobblestone and raping her. But when she dangerously passes him a note it simply reads "I love you". Like Winston, she works for the Party, but also like him she secretly despises the Party. Winston and Julia share in their hatred of purity and their love of corruption. Whatever the Party stands for they are against, whatever the Party is against they are for. They want the Party destroyed but there is no way they can destroy it and instead they lived in permanent fear of it. Their 'embrace', Winston believes, is a 'political act'. Because everything is a political act.

O'Brien is one of Winston Smith's colleagues. An urbane man with "a prizefighter's physique" who Winston Smith can't help be curious about and feel that, for some reason, he may share his own tacit political unorthodoxy. In fact, Winston Smith becomes convinced of this to the extent that him and Julia arrange a meeting with O'Brien. A meeting in which O'Brien reveals some, but certainly not all, of the terrifying secrets of the Brotherhood, a clandestine group of unspecified number dedicated to bringing down the Party. They are in thrall to Emmanuel Goldstein.

Emmanuel Goldstein is the Enemy of the People. He had been a leading member of the Party, almost the equivalent of Big Brother himself, but had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities and believed the Party, and Oceania, should look to have peace with Eurasia. He has become the leading coconut at the shy of the daily Two Minute Hate. The primary traitor, the defiler of the Party's purity, and a heretic yet somehow one who is still alive. Even if nobody knows where.

The cinemas of Oceania show films of refugees being bombed in the Mediterranean (and the desensitised audience hoot with laughter at the cruel and inhumane spectacle), there's a thing called the Junior Anti-Sex League ("sexual intercourse was to be seen as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema"), and small children are disappointed when they can't attend a public hanging,

It's an unremittingly bleak vision but not one completely without precedent or, sadly, echoes in our present day. Much of it speaks to Trump's America (with anticipatory nods to Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution which took place in China between 1966 and 1976 and, of course, Stalinism in the Soviet Union - Goldstein is believed to be modelled on Leon Trotsky) only too clearly. It's interesting that young and attractive women are often "the most bigoted adherents of the Party" as they are in MAGAworld (Karoline Leavitt is odious even by the standards of Trump's administration) but it also speaks of Orwell's potentially problematic view of women (see also Gordon Comstock's borderline incel behaviour in Keep The Aspidistra Flying). You could excuse him by saying he was merely a man of his time. But in so many other ways he was not a man of his time. He was a man very far ahead of his time.

Despite the fact that this is a London, a Britain, unrecognisable some places do remain. Berkhamsted, Amersham, and, in London, Stepney and what used to be the church of St Clement Danes and St Pancras and Paddington train station get a mention (Trafalgar Square is now Victory Square and Nelson has been replaced by Big Brother - a minor change really - and St Martin-in-the-Fields is a museum devoted to war propaganda) and, like the proles - who are not recognised as human beings anymore - possibly even by Orwell himself, they are reminders of what there was before and what has been lost. The plan of the party is to isolate people from their memories. To not just remove freedom but to remove even the concept of freedom. Even the word 'freedom' is scheduled to be removed from the language.

The proles, not being seen as real people, are perversely freer than others but fritter away their lives in pubs and bookies talking about football and the lotto. In a prediction of AI, Orwell has them listening to songs that have been written without any human input whatsoever - made by a machine called a 'versificator'. Winston secretly wished they'd rise up and start a rebellion but it never seems likely to happen.

It's a compelling and addictive read about a terrible future. A warning that is still as relevant now as it ever was. At a time when those on the extremes of politics (both left and right - though the right are having a lot more success with it) would police our every word, our every action and when cruelty and division have become spectator sports. A world where the likes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin hold power. We're not living in the same world Winston Smith did. But, once, neither did he. It can happen here. It can happen anywhere.