To Orwell/1984 fans, explain how "malevolent" the government Ingsoc is?

[wizzy555]

All Orwell is doing is truthfully representing how the the soviet union worked under Stalinism. Trying to read more than that into the book will fail because it is only there to provide a framework into which the real actions of Stalinism is to be placed into.

As someone who studied the book, I strongly disagree with this. The USSR provide a great deal of the basis for Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Orwell's creation is a hypothetical society in which the control is taken to an extreme never seen on earth. It is a possible end-point for the direction certain societies seemed to be taking at that point in time, and a warning of such, but it goes well beyond simply reflecting what was happening in reality.

That is your opinion and you perfectly entitled to it. However the KGB did not agree with you and attempted to use its agents in the UK to stop it being published in the same way the tried with Animal farm. They failed but in the case of Animal Farm they managed to get the initial publisher to drop and it a year to find another willing. Furthermore Orwell had to flee from Republican Spain in 37 because of denunciations to the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason of rabid Trotskyism by NKVD agents in the Spanish Republican government.

Well personally I would say it was a future where Stalinism was surpassed by an even worse extreme. I.e. this was a warning of where Stalinism would lead.

 

[Silvanus]

That is your opinion and you perfectly entitled to it. However the KGB did not agree with you and attempted to use its agents in the UK to stop it being published in the same way the tried with Animal farm. They failed but in the case of Animal Farm they managed to get the initial publisher to drop and it a year to find another willing. Furthermore Orwell had to flee from Republican Spain in 37 because of denunciations to the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason of rabid Trotskyism by NKVD agents in the Spanish Republican government.

I'm aware of all of this, but it does not run contrary to what I said. I acknowledged that the novel has a strong basis in the USSR.

As Orwell said, the future of humanity is a boot to its face, forever. Paraphrased slightly. He believed that our technological progress would do us in just like many people think we reached a point where our nuclear weapons would irrepairably destroy us. Orwell just thought our destruction would be cultural and perpetual rather than immediate and bathed in nuclear fire.

I agree for the most part, except with the word "would". Nineteen Eighty-Four is, as far as I'm aware, a warning, but not a prediction.

 

[FalloutJack]

As it would seem that the government in 1984 seems geared up to keep people perpetually paranoid and on their toes while angrily fixated upon a nebulous Enemy all for the purposes of keeping them in line, at the very last step using fear to break every last humanity you have within you to get their way...I would call that very evil. It's a bloody dystopia that sucks the life from everyone, even the loyal citizens, since they get zero benefit out of this, and the government just keeps on keeping on.