Showing posts with label 1984. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1984. Show all posts

Monday, May 28, 2012

1984 IS HERE


So true..
Orwell's Prophecy Has Become Reality


Oh the irony..
..this picture symbolizes the statement above. 


Thursday, January 5, 2012

ALDOUS HUXLEY - THE ULTIMATE REVOLUTION

"The Ultimate Revolution"
by Aldous Huxley

(source: Internet Archive)

March 20, 1962 Berkeley Language Center - Speech Archive SA 0269

"And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell's book, Nineteen Eighty- Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it's a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.

Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I'm inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other."

(excerpt from the transcript)




"It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this, that we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy, who have always existed and presumably always will exist, to get people actually to love their servitude. This seems to me the ultimate malevolent revolution... This is a problem which has interested me for many years and about which I wrote, 30 years ago, a fable Brave New World which is essentially the account of a society making use of all the devices at that time available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible, making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, so to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some kind of a scientific caste system. Since then I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay that a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them 30 years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true. A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already, and that there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, this method of control by which people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs which by any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. I mean the enjoyment of servitude."

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

#OPFACEBOOK

05 NOV 11
URBAN MYTH?
OR WILL IT HAPPEN?


Let us hope..
for someone to shut it down.


Saturday, October 23, 2010

BRAZIL


All I can say is.. SIMPLY BRILLIANT!


Brazil is a 1985 science fiction fantasy film directed by Terry Gilliam. It was written by Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard and stars Jonathan Pryce. The film also features Robert De Niro, Kim Greist, Michael Palin, Katherine Helmond, Bob Hoskins, and Ian Holm. John Scalzi's Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies describes the film as a "dystopian satire".



The film centres on Sam Lowry (Pryce), a man trying to find a woman who appears in his dreams while he is working in a mind-numbing job and living a life in a small apartment, set in a dystopian world in which there is an over-reliance on poorly maintained (and rather whimsical) machines. Brazil's bureaucratic, totalitarian government is reminiscent of the government depicted in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, except that it has a buffoonish, slapstick quality and lacks a 'Big Brother' figure.



Jack Mathews, film critic and author of The Battle of Brazil (1987), described the film as "satirizing the bureaucratic, largely dysfunctional industrial world that had been driving Gilliam crazy all his life". Though a success in Europe, the film was unsuccessful in its initial North America release. It has since become a cult film.
- except from Wikipedia



runtime is over 2,5 hours so it is quiet a download.. those who are not gifted with a rapidshare account might want to find another way to obtain this masterpiece. Hell.. why not just buy it? That would be new.. for me ;D

Friday, June 11, 2010

WHY ORWELL WROTE "1984"


Eric Blair, pseudonym George Orwell, was a master writer and story teller. He wrote his first poem at the age of four or five, by dictation to his mother. In the last sixteen years of his life (born in 1903 - died in 1950) he wrote nine major books and 700 essays and articles.

In the essay WHY I WRITE, published in 1947, Orwell says:

"...In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (The Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity."

"...I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. ...Of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. ANIMAL FARM was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. ..."

As we all know, the book Orwell went on to write was "1984". It has since been translated into 62 languages and it, along with ANIMAL FARM, had sold more than 40 million copies by 1984. In the USA it sold 1,000 copies a day that year. Quoting Orwell again from WHY I WRITE:

"...All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. ..."

Not only figuratively but also literally was the writing of "1984" like a bout of some painful illness for George Orwell. Throughout its writing he was fighting tuberculosis and was at times admitted to the hospital where his typewriter was taken away from him. Undaunted he sat in bed, propped up on pillows, and wrote in longhand with ball-point pen. He was administered a newly developed drug to which he developed a severe allergic reaction. His skin flaked, his mouth became painfully ulcerated, his hair and nails fell out. After several months recuperating in the sanitorium Orwell returned to his home on the remote Scottish island of Jura, one of the most inaccessible spots in the British Isles, and finished writing "1984" in December 1948. He then went immediately back into hospital and was never again healthy enough to be discharged. "1984" was published in June 1949 and Orwell died seven months later on January 21st, 1950, at the age of 46.

In "1984" George Orwell describes how a hierarchical world tyranny is set up, how it stays in power, how it treats its people, and what life is like living under such a system. "1984" is in fact a coded blueprint for world tyranny, laying bare its structure and exposing its components.

Orwell wrote "1984" for us, the future, in the hope we would recognize the signs and symptoms of tyrannical world government and prevent its establishment in our world. Let's make sure he did not write in vain. ~ Jackie Jura

Saturday, April 10, 2010

1984

"Nineteen Eighty-Four"

From my top 5 book list,

In 1984, George Orwell warns of the terrifying dangers that man may create for himself in his quest for a utopian society. It warns that people might believe that everyone must become slaves to the government in order to have an orderly society, but at the expense of the freedom of the people. It is a dystopian novel about the totalitarian regime of the Party, mind control and the struggle of Winston Smith against the elite figure called Big Brother.



Since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the term "Big Brother" has entered the lexicon as a synonym for abuse of government power, particularly in respect to civil liberties.


"WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"
- a slogan of the Party (Quote from 1984)

Sunday, January 17, 2010

BIG BROTHER



 Incriminated, numbered, photographed, put on list AGAIN.
All this for going to a party.

Nice to feel protected by my government.

Nice to know they are still watching us.

Nice to feel the gentle touch of repression all over my body,
head to toe by two pair of hands, digging deep in every pocket, even tickling my balls.
Faced against a wall, legs wide & arms high, swallowing some cliché copjokes on top of it.
 Because I attended this party.

No explanation needed for being held inside the venue for hours.
Watch the news tommorow they said.
Just hold the numbers for your photo please.
Smile please.
No charges, just your government checkin' in again.
You have a nice day now, sir.

For going to a party in a legal venue.

Fucked up shit.