Talk Back

[Eisworth]

Somehow I managed to live into my mid-late-30's without ever reading this book. I've always meant to, but somehow I never got around to it until this past weekend.
I knew quite a bit about the book of course -- "Big Brother" is a firmly entrenched cultural icon, and any time issues of privacy or unlawful detention come up, someone will bring up the book 1984.

I found the book sobering and chilling, but not for the reasons I always hear cited.
What disturbed me most was the theme of controlling the past -- "Those who control the present control the past". This past Friday, I sat through "The Motorcycle Diaries" and watched Che' Guevara portrayed as a romantic and idealistic hero. There was no hint at all that he would mature into a man who would later write

"Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"

(thanks to SuperMilkChan for the reference)

I am not going to make moral judgments about Guevara; it just happened that my viewing this movie was juxtaposed with my reading of 1984, and it disturbed me.
The book provides a convenient metaphor for this in the language “newspeak”.
One of the avowed purposes of "newspeak" in the novel is to simplify language to the point where sentiments dangerous to The Party cannot even be expressed.
The metaphor I’m looking for is this:

A person’s life is a complex sentence written with erudite vocabulary and expressing many thoughts and ideas. As they recede into the past, this sentence gets translated into newspeak (though the translation depends on the translator) until finally all that is left is “doubleplusgood” or “doubleplusungood”.
_________________
Todd Eisworth
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Ohio University

[Quack Corleone]

Neat comparison between 1984 and The Motorcycle Diaries. Even though I liked the film (doubleplusgood road movie that uses music in a unique way!), I was surprised at the lack of mainstream critical attacks on its portrayal of Guevara. I'm glad you wrote about it, though!

As for 1984, do you know if Orwell's ideas about controlling the past in order to control the present were at all influenced by the reaction of the West to the Soviets changing of sides during WWII*? That's a question that's been bugging me, and I'm too lazy to actually do research on it. So I'm asking you. Hehe.

*More clearly, what I'm after is this: Was Orwell thinking of the way in which America and Britain "forgot" about the Soviet attack on Poland, Katyn, the political murders, failure to help the Warsaw Uprising (which Orwell wrote about as a journalist, and was one of the few in Britain who, despite being a socialist, condemned British passiveness), and the manmade Kulak starvation in the 30's, in order to justify thinking of Stalin as an ally?