Relevancy of George Orwell's 1984

Purewal, Nav. "Love Your Big Brother: What Orwell’s ‘1984’ Tells Us About 2009." PopMatters 12 June 2009. 18 June 2009 <http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/94848-love-your-big-brother-what-orwells-1984tells-us-about-2009/P0/>.

Nav Purewal illustrates the relevance of George Orwell’s 1984 in today’s society and current events. He introduces the reader to his topic by going into some amount of detail as to why this book has entered the depths of political culture with its neologisms and the ideas of a government lying to its citizens. From there the article takes a more serious analytical turn, going into detail about the finer similarities and lessons that could be learned from 1984 and how sometimes the words of Orwell are misconstrued to better suit a particular side’s argument.

Orwell critiques nationalism and after September 11, 2001, a portion of one of his essays was circulated about a minority of pacifists who blame Britain and America and wish to commit acts of violence against them. What the circulators of the passage failed to realize was that the rest of the essay is actually a critique on nationalism and actually offered material that could be defaming to the circulators. One such piece of evidence is that Orwell argued that nationalism makes an individual refuse to the similarities between similar camps of thought—a parallel between the different political parties.

The article also goes into some length of detail about the similarities between the Ministry of Love’s Room 101 used for the torture of thought criminals and the use of torture in the past administration which information about is getting released. The defense and similar types of torture in the book and in the current times can be shocking. The euphemisms for torture being used also shares the use of certain vocabulary used by the Ministry in 1984.

Purewal offers plenty of evidence about the relevancy of 1984 but argues for caution when quoting it.