Original subtitles

When I sit down to write a book,

I do not say to myself,

"I'm going to produce a work of art."

I write it 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.

My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship,

a sense of injustice.

Two and two.

Four.

-Again? - Four.

Good, there are people who'll tell you the answer's five.

Usually, they're called government.

Great leaders,

it becomes very important to them

that the people should believe that the answer's five.

They'll tell you lies.

They'll torture you.

They'll kill you.

At the moment of death,

you must still insist that the answer

is four.

April 18th, 1984.

Nobody keeps a diary today.

Because to do so would be punishable by death.

I don't care anymore.

I found this old book by chance.

I'm going to set down what I dare not say aloud to anyone.

This, in 1984, is London,

chief city of Airstrip 1,

a province of the state of Oceania.

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six,

I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.

I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories

and holding conversations with imaginary persons.

I knew that I had a facility with words

and a power of facing unpleasant facts,

and I felt that this created a sort of private world

in which I could get my own back

for my failure in everyday life.

I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels.

There's no such thing as "Rohingya."

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives

without knowing something of his early development.

His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in.

At least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages

like our own.

When I was not yet 20,

I went to Burma in the Indian Imperial Police.

In an outpost of empire like Burma,

the class question appeared at first sight to have been shelved.

Most of the white men in Burma

were not of the type who in England would be called gentlemen,

but they were white men in contradistinction

to the other and inferior class,

the natives.

In the free air of England,

that kind of thing is not fully intelligible.

In order to hate imperialism,

you've got to be part of it,

but it is not possible to be part of such a system

without recognizing it as an unjustifiable tyranny.

Even the thickest-skinned Anglo-Indian is aware of this.

Every native face he sees in the street

brings home to him his monstrous intrusion.

But I was in the police,

which is to say that I was part of the actual machinery

of despotism.

When I came home on leave in 1927,

I was already half determined to throw up my job,

and one sniff of English air decided me.

For five years, I have been part of an oppressive system

and it left me with a bad conscience.

Innumerable remembered faces,

faces of prisoners in the dark,

of men waiting in the condemned cells,

of subordinates I had bullied

and aged peasants I had snubbed,

of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist

in moments of rage

haunted me intolerably.

They killed my son! They killed my son!

No book is genuinely free from political bias.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics

is itself a political attitude.

Don't go into the school compound!

Don't!

Don't touch her!

Don't touch my mom!

Don't take her away!

I had reduced everything to the simple theory

that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong,

a mistaken theory, but the natural result

of being one of the oppressors yourself.

A society becomes totalitarian

when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,

that is,

when its ruling class has lost its function,

but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud,

but to be corrupted by totalitarianism,

one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.

Tonight, I wanted to take a few minutes

to discuss a grave threat to peace.

The threat comes from Iraq.

It arises directly from the Iraqi regime's own actions,

its history of aggression,

and its drive toward an arsenal of terror.

We're at war with the people of Eurasia,

the vile and ruthless aggressors who have committed countless atrocities

and who are guilty of every bestial crime a human being can commit.

They've laid waste to our land, destroyed our factories,

looted our homes, massacred our children, and raped our women!

When Iraq finally admitted to having these weapons in 1995,

the quantities were vast.

Less than a teaspoon of dry anthrax,

a little bit... about this amount.

This kind of thing happens everywhere,

but it is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification

in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment.

I've made the decision to conduct a special military operation.

Its aim will be to protect those who have been persecuted

in the Kyiv regime's genocide these past eight years.

Our goal therefore will be to de-militarize

and de-nazify Ukraine.

The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states

is not, as is sometimes claimed,

a temporary expedient of the same nature

as military deception.

It is something integral to totalitarianism,

something that would still continue

even if concentration camps and secret police forces

had ceased to be necessary.

Totalitarianism demands, in fact,

the continuous alteration of the past

and, in the long run, probably demands a disbelief

in the very existence of objective truth.

Had we not engaged in our special military operation,

they would have attacked Russia.

They, the Nazis, had long been preparing an attack.

How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?

Four.

And if Big Brother were to say not four but five,

then how many?

Four.

How many fingers, Winston?

Stop it! Anything! Five!

- Stop the pain! -No, Winston.

There's no use, you are lying. You still think you see four.

But it's five!

Two and two do not always make four, Winston.

Sometimes they make five. Again, how many fingers am I holding up.

August 26, 1946.

A few showers in the afternoon,

otherwise a beautiful day.

When the breeze drops, the midges were so bad

as to make it almost impossible to work.

One is actually breathing them into one's nostrils,

and the irritation is maddening.

I was born into what you might describe

as the lower upper-middle class.

People in this class owned no land,

but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God

and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook

by going into the professions and the fighting services

rather than into trade.

To belong to this class, when you were at the 400-pound-a-year level,

was a queer business

for it meant that your gentility was almost purely theoretical.

Small boys used to count the plum stones on their plates

and foretell their destiny by chanting,

"Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law."

Theoretically, you knew all about servants

and how to tip them,

although in practice, you had one, at most two resident servants.

Theoretically, you knew how to wear your clothes

and how to order a dinner,

although in practice you could never afford to go to a decent tailor

or a decent restaurant.

Theoretically, you knew how to shoot and ride,

although in practice you had no horses to ride

and not an inch of ground to shoot over.

It was this that explained the attraction of India,

more recently Kenya, Nigeria, etc.,

for the lower upper-middle class.

The people who went there as soldiers and officials

did not go there to make money,

for a soldier or an official does not want money.

They went there because in India,

with cheap horses, free shooting,

and hordes of black servants,

it was so easy to play at being a gentleman.

This is your cook. Name's Eza.

Eza.

And this is Juma, houseboy.

Juma.

Come. See your house.

Under the capitalist system,

in order that England may live in comparative comfort,

100 million Indians must live on the verge of starvation.

The alternative is to throw the empire overboard

and reduce England to a cold and unimportant, little island

where we should all have to work very hard

and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.

The fact that has got to be faced

is that to abolish class distinctions

means abolishing a part of yourself.

Here am I, a typical member of the middle class.

All my notions, notions of good and evil,

of pleasant and unpleasant,

of funny and serious,

of ugly and beautiful,

are essentially middle-class notions.

Ward 3, Hairmyres Hospital,

East Kilbridge near Glasgow,

first of January, 1948.

Dear Gwen, I believe Mr. Dick sent you a line about my case.

He said I had a fairly extensive cavity in the left lung

and also a small patch at the top of the other lung.

The treatment they are giving me is to put the left lung out of action,

which is supposed to give it a better chance to heal.

For the rest, I am still really very ill and weak.

It is a nice hospital and everyone is extremely kind to me,

but I have, of course, done no work for two or three months.

"Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes,

were to be hanged in the park that evening,"

Winston remembered.

This happened about once a month and was a popular spectacle.

Children always clamored to be taken to see it.

"Why can't we go and see the hanging?"

roared the boy in his huge voice.

"Want to see the hanging," chanted the little girl,

still capering 'round.

The warders had formed in a rough circle around the gallows,

and then, when the noose was fixed,

the prisoner began crying out on his god.

Minutes seemed to pass.

The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner

went on and on.

We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop

and listened to his cries,

each cry another second of life.

Oh, kill him quickly. Get it over.

Stop that abominable noise.

Most people approve of capital punishment,

but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

An example needs to be made!

-Let us in! -Get in there!

Are they trying to get rid of all of us?

These were peaceful people. These were great people.

The crowd was unbelievable,

and I mentioned the word "love," the love, the love in the air,

I've never seen anything like it.

Get in!

Go! Go! Go!

Come on, go!

Oh, this is about to get dirty, man. We gotta get back.

He's got a gun. Get down.

Hey!

Fuckin' A, man.

No! We're not putting up with that either.

1776!

America showed up!

FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol.

I don't believe

that Trump supporters did that.

I think that they were enticed by the FBI.

A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy

and its ruling caste,

in order to keep its position,

has to be thought of as infallible.

Congress has certified the results.

I don't want to say the election's over. I just want to say...

Congress has certified the results

without saying the election's over, OK?

My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote.

My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote.

Since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary

to rearrange past events

in order to show that this or that mistake was not made

or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.

The Dominion Voting Systems,

the Smartmatic technology software,

and the software that goes

in other computerized voting systems here as well,

not just Dominion,

were created in Venezuela.

You can tell he hasn't done anything wrong just by his demeanor.

I mean, he would be trying to hide things.

Already, there are countless people

who'd think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook,

but would see nothing wrong in falsifying a historical fact.

Trump is blocking witnesses.

I don't care.

I'm with him to the finish.

He could stand on the front steps of the White House

and commit murder, and I'm with him.

How do you explain all these charges?

Well, they're all made up.

- They're all made up? - Yup, they're all made up.

So, the election interference in Georgia.

Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who work for Donald Trump,

they just plead guilty...

- I don't believe that either. - You don't believe they plead guilty?

Nope.

The friends of totalitarianism in this country

usually tend to argue that, since absolute truth

is not attainable,

a big lie is no worse than a little lie.

The list of Trump lies filled an entire page

of The New York Times.

It includes only what the Times calls

"demonstrably false statements."

Second of January, 1948.

Dear Julian, thanks ever so for sending the pen,

which, as you see, I am using.

I think I'm getting a bit better.

I don't feel quite so death-like and I'm eating a lot more.

I can't show you the part-finished novel.

I never show them to anybody

because they're just a mess

and don't have much of a relationship to the final draft.

I always say a book doesn't exist

until it is finished.

Every major change in policy

demands a corresponding change of doctrine

and a revelation of prominent historical figures.

If the leader says of such-and-such an event,

"It never happened,"

well, it never happened.

If he says that two and two are five,

well, two and two are five.

This prospect frightens me much more than bombs

and that is not a frivolous statement.

My friends,

our descendants will smile on what we'll accomplish.

The age to come will be an age of fulfillment.

The Life of Rosa Parks,

this is apparently too woke by the Republican Party.

Song of Solomon

is unacceptable to Republican politics.

Forty percent of banned books

reported are significantly addressing

and specifically addressing LGBT issues.

When we talk about progressive values,

I can say what my progressive value is,

and that is freedom over fascism.

Let's say you take these books out of the library.

What are you gonna do with them? Are you gonna put them in the street?

Light them on fire? Where are they going?

I don't have a clue, but I would burn them.

From the totalitarian point of view,

history is something to be created

rather than learned.

This is what I will do to the grooming books

when I become Secretary of State.

Ward 3, Hairmyres Hospital, 20th of April, 1948.

Dear Julian, I am a lot better,

but I had a bad fortnight with the secondary effects

of the streptomycin.

I am still fearfully weak and thin,

but they seem pleased with my case,

and I think I may get out sometime during the summer.

I'm longing to get up to Jura at any rate

and see how the farmwork is going,

but I should have to be careful not to do much.

The goosestep is one of the most horrible sights in the world.

It is simply an affirmation of naked power.

In it is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face.

The goosestep is not used in England

because the people in the street would laugh.

First, I spent five years

in an unsuitable profession in Burma.

This increased my natural hatred of authority.

The Spanish war and other events

in 1936-7 turned the scale,

and thereafter I knew where I stood.

OK, who wants to take the floor?

Teresa.

We have to collectivize.

The men at the front

have no food

and the fascists have left next to nothing to the villagers.

The village hasn't got enough food.

We must collectivize as soon as possible.

We need food for ourselves

and those fighting for us at the front.

I'm all for collectivizing Don Julian's lands

and redistribution in every form,

but surely we can keep a little bit for ourselves, right?

Miguel, what is it you want to say?

I'd like to say to our friend here

that it's very good he wants to work his own land,

but how much better would it be if we all worked it together?

When the harvest is ready,

are you going to eat all the wheat

and all the potatoes?

You've got it all wrong.

We need everything we have

to be able... to keep the revolution going.

If we want revolution, this is what it looks like.

Don't wait for tomorrow.

Jose, there's more at stake than land.

We have to build a new society.

Not everyone all at once! Wait a moment!

Now's the time to make big changes. What's our lot?

Misery, hunger, hopelessness.

Franco might come back and kill us,

but I say it's worth it to continue collectivizing

to improve our quality of life.

Let's vote!

All those in favor of collectivization?

31st of July, 1937.

Dear Rayner, thanks so much for your letter.

I was glad to hear from you.

We had an interesting but thoroughly bloody time in Spain.

Of course, I would never have allowed Eileen to come

nor probably gone myself

if I had foreseen the political developments.

Especially the suppression of the POUM,

the party in whose militia

I was serving.

It was a queer business.

We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy

and ended by slipping over the border

with the police panting on our heels.

But though we ourselves got out all right,

nearly all our friends and acquaintances are in jail

and likely to be there indefinitely

not actually charged with anything,

but suspected of Trotskyism.

What I saw in Spain has given me a horror of politics.

But what impressed me then

and has impressed me ever since

is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in

solely on grounds of political predilection.

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy

and disbelieves in those of his own side

without ever bothering to examine the evidence.

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.

Revolution!

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.

- Read it to me. - Hm.

"All animals are equal

but some animals are more equal than others."

More equal than others?

♪ Praise to him The font of all our wisdom ♪

♪ Long to live the ruler of our farm ♪

♪ Napoleon, mighty leader ♪

♪ Mighty leader watching over us ♪

♪ Napoleon, mighty leader ♪

♪ Mighty leader watching over us ♪

- ♪ Mighty leader watching over us ♪ - ♪ Shout, shout, shout out loud ♪

♪ Snout, snout, pink and proud ♪

♪ Perfect pig You bless us with your beauty ♪

♪ Hallowed hod How wonderous is your glow ♪

♪ Napoleon, mighty leader ♪

♪ Mighty leader watching over us ♪

♪ Napoleon, mighty leader ♪

♪ Mighty leader watching over us ♪

♪ Snout, snout, pink and proud Shout, shout, shout out loud ♪

♪ Two legs better, four legs good ♪

I decree that this farm will now devote itself

to the making of weapons, to the building of walls

for the protection of ourselves and our way of life!

The revolution is over.

All animals are now free!

Take cover at once! Take cover at once!

Winston tried to squeeze out some childhood memory

that should tell him whether London had always been like this.

Were there always these vistas of rotting 19th-century houses?

Their sides shored up with baulks of timbers,

their windows pathed with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron,

their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions,

and the bombed sites

where the plaster dust swirled in the air

and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble

and the places

where the bombs had cleared a large patch,

and there sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings

like chicken houses.

But it was no use. He could not remember.

Nothing remained of his childhood

except a series of bright-lit tableaux

occurring against no background

and mostly unintelligible.

♪ Sing to the sailors On the floating fortress ♪

♪ Sing to the soldiers On the battlefields ♪

♪ Sing to the airmen In the burning azure ♪

♪ Sing to the farmers rising yields ♪

It is not easy for me to think of my school days

without seeming to breathe in a whiff of something cold

and evil-smelling,

a sort of compound of sweaty stockings,

dirty towels,

fecal smells blowing along corridors,

forks with old food between the prongs,

neck-of-mutton stew,

and the banging doors of the lavatories

and the echoing chamber pots in the dormitories.

By the social standards that prevailed about me,

I was no good and could not be any good,

but all the different kinds of virtue seemed to be mysteriously interconnected

and to belong to much the same people.

It was not only money that mattered.

There were also strength, beauty, charm,

athleticism, and something called "guts"

or character,

which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others.

I did not possess any of these qualities.

I lived in a world of boys, gregarious animals

questioning nothing, accepting the law of the stronger

and avenging their own humiliations

by passing them down to someone smaller.

Are you suggesting we negotiate with them?

- No, I, um... - Or recognize their sovereignty?

I... I would...

Speak! Say what you mean!

I would support the motion to recognize...

That's not what this is about.

The question is, are they independent,

yes or no?

Yes.

There are five fingers there.

Do you see five fingers?

Yes.

This is a political age.

War, fascism, concentration camps,

rubber truncheons, atomic bombs

are what we daily think about

and therefore to a great extent what we write about,

even when we do not name them openly.

We cannot help this.

When you are on a sinking ship,

your thoughts

will be about sinking ships.

Barnhill, Isle of Jura, Argyllshire.

22nd of October, 1948.

Dear Fred, I shall finish the book,

Deo Volente, early in November,

and I am rather flinching from the job of typing it

because it is a very awkward thing to do in bed

where I still have to spend half the time.

I can't send it away because it is an unbelievably bad manuscript

and no one could make head or tail of it without explanation.

I think it is a good idea, but the execution would have been better

if I had not written it under the influence of tuberculosis.

I haven't definitely fixed on the title,

but I am hesitating between 1984

and The Last Man in Europe.

When I was 14 or 15, I was an odious, little snob,

but no worse than other boys of my own age and class.

I was very young, not much more than six,

when I first became aware of class distinctions.

Ah, I think you look pretty smart.

You look like a gentleman.

I despised anyone who was not describable as a gentleman,

but I also hated the hoggishly rich,

especially those who had grown rich too recently.

I look down on him because I am upper class.

I look up to him because he is upper class,

but I look down on him because he is lower class.

I am middle class.

I know my place.

Hence, at the age of 17 or 18,

I was both a snob

and a revolutionary.

I was against all authority

and I loosely described myself as a socialist,

but I had not much grasp of what socialism meant

and no notion that the working class were human beings.

We'll have no pissing in the corners.

Not allowed. Frowned upon.

- It's not very hygienic, is it? -It's downright filthy.

-May I ask a question? -Fire away.

What's your views on the ozone layer?

I'll turn a blind eye to it

as long as it doesn't interfere with the job, anything else?

I knew nothing about working-class conditions.

I had read the unemployment figures,

but I had no notion of what they implied.

♪ I'm a four-loom weaver ♪

♪ As many a one knows ♪

♪ I've not to eat And I've worn out me clothes ♪

♪ Me clogs are both broken ♪

Above all, I did not know the essential fact

that respectable poverty is always the worst.

The frightful doom of a decent working man

suddenly thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work,

his agonized struggles against economic laws

which he does not understand,

the disintegration of families, the corroding sense of shame,

all this was outside the range of my experience.

When I thought of poverty, I thought of it in terms of brute starvation,

therefore my mind turned immediately to the extreme cases,

the social outcasts, tramps, beggars,

criminals, prostitutes.

These were the lowest of the low

and these were the people with whom I wanted to get in contact.

What I profoundly wanted at that time

was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether.

I meditated upon it a great deal.

I even planned parts of it in detail,

how one could sell everything, give everything away,

change one's name, and start out with no money

and nothing but the clothes one stood up in,

but in real life, nobody ever does that kind of thing.

As Syme had done earlier, Winston had taken up his spoon

and was dabbling in the pale-colored gravy

that dribbled across the table,

drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern.

He meditated resentfully

on the physical texture of life.

- Mister. - What is it, son?

Can you watch my seat and else if I got my spoon?

I'll give you my spoon, son. I'm finished.

You discover what it is like to be hungry

with bread and margarine in your belly.

You go out and look into the shop windows.

Everywhere, there is food insulting you

in huge, wasteful piles,

whole dead pigs,

baskets of hot loaves,

great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages...

...mountains of potatoes,

vast gruyere cheese like grindstones.

A sniveling self pity comes over you at the sight of so much food.

You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you

and you refrain from pure funk.

We're sorry,

but all our customer-service agents are busy at the moment.

Please hold and we will answer your call...

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty,

the times when you have nothing to do

and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing.

For half a day at a time, you lie on your bed,

feeling like the jeune squelette in Baudelaire's poem.

Only food could rouse you.

You discover that a man who's gone even a week on bread

and margarine is not a man any longer,

only a belly with a few accessory organs.

The top 1%

that controlled 90% of the wealth

had two major political parties doing their bidding for them,

and the other 99% had no political party!

Beggars do not work, it is said,

but then what is work?

A navvy works by swinging a pick.

An accountant works by adding up figures.

A beggar works by standing out of doors

in all weathers and getting varicose veins,

chronic bronchitis, etc.

It is a trade like any other,

quite useless, of course,

but then many reputable trades are quite useless,

and as a social type, a beggar compares well with scores of others.

He is honest compares with the sellers of most patent medicines,

high-minded

compared with a Sunday-newspaper proprietor.

A beggar, looked at realistically,

is simply a businessman

getting his living like other businessmen

in the way that comes to hand.

He has not, more than most modern people,

sold his honor.

He has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade

at which it is impossible to grow rich.

♪ Three ♪

♪ Two, one ♪

The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class

had long ceased to be justifiable.

The existence of these people

was by any standard unjustifiable.

They were simply parasites, less useful to society

than his fleas are to a dog.

The British ruling class could not admit to themselves

that their usefulness was at an end.

It was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits

like the American millionaires.

Clearly, there was only one escape for them:

into stupidity.

The Ministry of Peace is happy to report

that thanks to the vigilance of our gallant interceptors,

no Eurasian rocket bomb was able to reach targets

of any importance.

We continue now with our regular broadcast.

There are parts in southern China where smart cameras

placed around the intersection will recognize who you are.

You could have your face covered or you could be obscured.

These systems are very, very smart.

They can recognize you by gait,

by posture, by how you're walking,

and so if you've caused an infraction,

your face gets thrown up on a digital billboard at that intersection

along with your name and where you work,

and information is transmitted to your employers

and to your family members.

Peace and stability is the number-one priority

so that all can lead a good life.

After that, we can address issues of human rights.

Some people, before they commit murder,

show a proclivity

for doing so.

Should we wait for them to commit the act?

Or should we prevent it

from happening?

Much of the technology that threatens our freedom

and our dignity in the near-term future

is being developed by companies in the business of capturing

and selling our data and our attention

to advertisers and others.

Smith,

outer-party members

have to wear their identification badges in the evening.

Don't forget again!

If the people in power are using these algorithms

to quietly watch us,

to judge us and to nudge us,

to predict and identify the troublemakers and the rebels,

the authoritarianism will envelop us like a spider's web,

and we may not even know we're in it.

The surveillance capitalists have tried to get us to believe

that their practices are the inevitable outgrowth

of digital technologies.

So, that's why I believe that the future is private.

This is the next chapter for our services.

What do you prefer?

Being safer when you wake up in the morning and go to the street

or not being, you know, analyzed by AI systems?

I wanna be safer.

- ♪ What do you prefer? ♪ -What do you prefer?

- ♪ Safer when you stir? ♪ -What do you prefer?

♪ Or not be scared by AI? ♪

♪ Tell me no lies, I want to be safer ♪

I wanna be safer. Safer.

♪ I want to be safer ♪

Surveillance is OK if you don't mind.

I want to be... I want to surveil.

I want surveillance of these people that are coming in.

The Trojan horse, I wanna know who the hell they are.

You don't have to have done anything wrong.

You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody,

even by a wrong call,

and then they can use the system to go back in time

and scrutinize every decision you've ever made,

every friend you've ever discussed something with

and attack you on that basis

to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life

and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

It should be that when we make things more productive,

when we greatly increase productivity, it helps everybody,

but there's the worry that it might just help the rich.

The new, model-three generative android

from Funky is a fully autonomous humanoid robot

with features never before seen in the consumer market.

We are increasingly trapped in a world of no escape

and even if we want to make a choice, we can't.

It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity

to write books by machinery,

but a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work

in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda,

and in the lower reaches of journalism.

Even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material

to be chopped into shape by producers and censors.

Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats

and would pass through so many hands that when finished,

they would be no more an individual product

than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line.

It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish.

At present, we know only that the imagination,

like certain wild animals,

will not breed in captivity.

Every hour of the day, the voice of London goes around...

Second of December, 1942,

Dear George Woodcock,

As to the ethics of broadcasting and in general letting oneself be used

by the British governing class,

it's of little value to argue about it,

but for heaven's sake don't think that I don't see how they are using me.

I doubt whether I shall stay in this job very much longer,

but while here,

I consider I have kept our propaganda slightly less disgusting

than it might otherwise have been.

The Tribune, 222 London Western Central 2,

14th of July, 1944,

Dear John Murry, I am smothered under work,

and also I've been bombed out

and we have a very young baby we've adopted,

a three-week-old boy

who Eileen and I christened Richard Horatio Blair,

all of which adds to one's work.

Life is pretty full now.

What a wonderful thing to have a kid of one's own.

I've always wanted one so.

The Pacific service from London is sending you all greetings

and wishing the best of luck to those of you listening

who are serving in our armed forces on sea,

land or in the air and in the merchant navy...

BBC, 24th of September, 1943,

Dear Mr. Rushbrook-Williams,

In confirmation of what I said to you earlier in private,

I want to tender my resignation from the BBC.

I am not leaving because of any disagreement with BBC policy.

On the contrary, I feel that I have been treated with the greatest generosity

and allowed very great latitude.

I am tendering my resignation because for some time past

I have been conscious that I was wasting my own time

and the public money.

I feel that by going back to my normal work

of writing and journalism I could be more useful

than I am at present.

Hotel Scribe, Rue Scribe,

Paris 9th, 13th of April, 1945.

Dear Tony,

I don't know whether you will have heard from some other source

about what has happened.

Eileen is dead.

It was a most horrible thing to happen

because she had had five really miserable years

of bad health and overwork,

and things were just beginning to get better,

but it was terribly sad that she should die

when she had become so devoted to Richard

and was making such a good job of his upbringing.

Richard, I am glad to say, is very well

and for the moment is provided for.

Look at this.

It's a dream.

But for a moment, he did not look at her body.

His eyes were anchored by the freckled face

with its faint, bold smile.

He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.

Have you done this before?

Of course!

Hundreds of times.

-With party members? - Yes.

Inner-party members?

Not with those bastards, though there's plenty who would.

His heart leapt.

"In the old days, he thought,

"a man looked at a girl's body

and saw that it was desirable,

and that was the end of the story,

but you could not have pure love

or pure lust nowadays.

No emotion was pure

because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.

Their embrace had been a battle,

the climax a victory.

It was a blow struck against the party.

It was a political act."

In the past, at any rate, throughout the Protestant centuries,

the idea of rebellion

and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up.

A heretic, political, moral, religious,

or esthetic was one who refused

to outrage his own conscience.

His outlook was summed up in the words of the revivalist hymn,

"Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone

Dare to have a purpose firm

Dare to make it known."

To bring this hymn up to date, one would have to add a don't

at the beginning of each line.

I'm very averse

to didacticism in political literature,

so I'd long had a knee-jerk revulsion

against Orwell.

That was short-sighted of me

because later...

when I got to know Orwell through his essays,

I appreciated his extraordinary perceptiveness.

Ultimately, it was his horror of politics

that led him to hate these totalitarian regimes,

which politicize everything,

and because he hated politics, he combated those regimes

as directly and powerfully as possible, i.e. by writing a novel.

Daring to stand alone is ideologically criminal

as well as practically dangerous.

The idea of intellectual liberty

is under attack from two directions.

On the one side are its theoretical enemies,

the apologists of totalitarianism...

Many reporters were kidnapped.

OK, journalists have to go!

Sonia Dahmani has just been abducted!

She was taken away by an anonymous group.

Were they police?

Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi journalist

and an outspoken critic of his country's government.

CNN can now confirm Jamal Khashoggi's last words,

"I can't breathe. I can't breathe."

The transcript records many voices and noises,

then says, "Scream from Jamal."

Again, "Scream," then "Gasping."

Noises are identified as "saw"

and "cutting."

And on the other, its immediate, practical enemies

monopoly and bureaucracy,

which are actively interested in maintaining the status quo

and therefore in preventing the common man

from becoming too intelligent.

The independence of the writer and the artist

is eaten away by vague economic forces

and at the same time it is undermined

by those who should be its defenders.

We falsely think of our country

as a democracy

when it has evolved into a media-ocracy

where a media that is supposed to check political abuse

is part of political abuse.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely

of prefabricated phrases

bolted together like the pieces

of a child's mechano set.

This is extremely dangerous.

This is extremely dangerous.

- Dangerous. - Democracy.

We live in the greatest country.

The greatest nation in the history of mankind.

The strongest, freest, greatest country.

The greatest healthcare.

The greatest universities, the greatest schools.

The greatest rise of freedom and opportunity.

The single greatest nation in the history of all mankind.

The greatest country ever.

If we're gonna talk about the elite-medias debate,

then it is still controlled by the corporate owners

and the corporate sponsors, who after all provide the revenue

to keep those machines going, to keep those TV shows on the air

and those radio shows and those papers.

It's a machine

that no one can escape from.

TV hosts are in the celebrity news columns,

we know their love lives, they look the part,

they seem like upstanding people,

but they're puppets.

The broadcaster who chooses what to air

is a puppet.

What do I mean by puppets?

I mean people subject to forces

completely beyond their control.

The journalist is unfree and is conscious of unfreedom

when he forced to write lies

or suppress what seems to him important news.

What have you got there, Smith?

This photograph was between the pages of the gazette.

- What photograph? - Jones and Rutherford.

They confessed to aiding the underground and being in Eurasia during Hate Week.

- But here it says... - What are you talking about, Smith?

I don't see any photograph.

I think it's very difficult to avoid

going to that pre-prepared thing that's got a quote in it,

that's got a name in it, that's got background information in it.

It's fed to you to make easy for you to tell it that way.

So, what we really require is something countervailing,

something on the other side to dig out just that information

that that powerful entity, that might be the state

or might be a private corporation

that they don't want you to hear.

We start with that search, the race to save five people

who are onboard a submersible.

On board is believed to be the British billionaire, Hamish...

Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer

and every other kind of artist as well

into a minor official working on themes

handed down from above

and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.

What the media does is trivialize what goes on

sensationalizes it, makes it entertainment,

rather than saying, "Look, the function of the media is to educate you

to live in a democracy, which is pretty serious stuff."

There are 741 no-go zones throughout France and they're located

in the ghettos that are called les banlieues.

I've been Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kashmir, India,

and at times it felt like, like that.

They speak shamelessly on issues they know nothing about.

- François Macron... - Emmanuel.

Emmanuel, François, it seems like every French person

I think their name is François.

- Who knows? - Maybe he'll change his name. François.

To write in plain, vigorous language,

one has to think fearlessly,

and if one thinks fearlessly,

one cannot be politically orthodox.

- It was you! It was you... -Good lying.

That privatized a large chunk of the health service

and you're lying, and you're lying.

Please, Mr. Collard!

You're a vile scumbag!

Shut up, dumb ass! Shut up!

How dare you call me that?

What else can I do when she's so stupid?

I think your fake lashes are messing up what you're reading...

We have a situation in which

a significant percentage of the population doesn't vote,

doesn't care about the issues,

is tuned out entirely, is what we call depoliticized.

Uh, in fact we have a rate of depoliticization in the United States

that must make a tyrant like in, you know, Indonesia envious:

"How can I get one of these vegged-out populations?"

I say the fact is I've done more for the black community

than any president since Abraham Lincoln.

I say it, nobody can dispute it.

People listen when I speak, black people,

♪ Black ♪

Believe me, I've studied it and I've seen it and it's incredible.

♪ Black ♪

Black, your physical strength is unmatched.

♪ Black ♪

You have this charm, black people, believe me,

jazz, soul, Rosa Parks,

Cassius Clay, legends, winners, the best!

And you know what? Black women...

♪ I love black ♪

Black women, they make me so hungry.

People listen when I speak, hungry for gumbo and cornbread.

Nobody does it better.

The mugshot, we've all seen the mugshot, and...

And you know who embraced it more than anybody else?

The black population, it's incredible.

You see black people walking around with my mugshot.

This kind of thing is frightening to me

because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept

of objective truth is fading out of this world.

An atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem

because social media turned our world upside down

spreading lies faster than facts

while amplifying fear and anger,

fueling hatred by design

for profit.

Do you affirm the testimony you are about to give before the committee

will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,

so help you God?

We very much believe that this content is disgusting

and that, um...

Senator, that behavior is disgusting and reprehensible.

We provide in-app reporting tools so that people who are being harassed

or people who have shared inappropriate sexual content

can report it in the case of harassment or sexual content.

You announced recently that the official policy of Facebook

now allows politicians to pay to spread disinformation.

Well, could I pay to target predominantly black zip codes

and advertise them the incorrect election date?

No, congresswoman, you couldn't.

We have, even for these policies

the newsworthiness of content that politicians say

and the general principle that I believe that...

But you said that you're not going to fact check my ads.

We have, if anyone,

including a politician is saying things

that can cause, that is calling for violence,

or could risk imminent, physical harm,

or voter or census suppression

when we roll out the census suppression po...

policy, um, we will take that content down.

So, would I be able to run advertisements

on Facebook targeting Republicans in primaries

saying that they voted for the Green New Deal?

I mean, if you're not fact checking political advertisements,

I'm just trying to understand the bounds here.

- What's fair game. - Congresswoman, I, uh...

I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head.

I don't know if I'll be able to do that.

Can you explain why you've named the Daily Caller

a publication well documented with ties to white supremacists

as an official fact checker for Facebook?

Congresswoman, sure, we actually don't appoint the independent fact checkers.

They go through an independent organization

called the Independent Fact Checking Network

that has a rigorous standard

for who they allow to serve as a fact checker.

So...

you would say that white-supremacist-tied publications

meet a rigorous standard for fact checking?

Because of deep fakes,

you can't trust your eyes and ears.

Instead of the facts,

the enshitifacation, enshitifacation of the Internet,

is in full bloom.

More trash, more propaganda,

more information operations

that push our emotional buttons.

We will have to struggle harder

for agency, for independent thought,

and it's not just the tech companies that abdicated responsibility

for protecting us.

It's also democratic governments like the United States

Tech is the least-regulated industry around the world.

USA! USA!

Barnhill, Isle of Jura, Argyllshire, 28th of November, 1948.

Dear Gwen, all is well here

and Richard is bursting with energy.

He goes out fishing with the others now

and sometimes catches quite a lot of fish.

The weather just lately has been very nice,

beautiful, still, sunny days, and not at all cold,

but I hardly ever go out of doors because the smallest exertion upsets me.

The pig has grown to a stupendous size

and goes to the butcher next week.

We are all longing to get rid of him, as he is so destructive and greedy,

even gets into the kitchen sometimes.

I have finished my book,

which I'd been messing about with since some time in 1947.

Yours, George.

Death!

Brothers and sisters, one week from now

in this very square,

we shall, as a demonstration...

Eurasian prisoners will be passing through Victory Square!

These are the evil men

whose ruthless lust for power...

Let me have the fight!

This is no place for the undecided!

We grab the bull by the horns!

They say it's scandalous

to defend the natural family founded on marriage.

The mother is a woman, the father is a man...

I just want to see Western civilization thrive.

Who cares about discrimination when there's genocide

against Christians taking place

throughout the world?

April 4th, 1984.

Last night to the flicks, all war films.

One a very good one of a ship

full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean.

Audience much amused by shots of a great, huge, fat man

trying a swim away with a helicopter after him.

Then you saw a lifeboat full of children

with a helicopter hovering over it.

There was a middle-aged woman, might have been a Jewess,

sitting up in the bow with a little boy

above three years old in her arms.

Then the helicopter planted a 20-kilo bomb

in among them.

Terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood.

Then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm

going up, up, up,

right up into the air.

A helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up.

There was a lot of applause from the party seats.

Winston stops writing

partly because he was suffering from cramp.

Oh, what a piece of work is the pursuit of truth.

Don't be a writer, Richard, whatever you do.

Be a farmer.

And grow things.

Keep goats.

Our civilization is decadent

and our language, so the argument runs,

must inevitably share in the general collapse.

The words, democracy, socialism,

freedom, patriotic,

realistic, justice,

have each of them several different meanings

which cannot be reconciled with one another.

We can't accept injustice!

We love freedom!

And first of all...

But if thought corrupts language,

language can also corrupt thought.

And here's the truth,

Israel seeks peace.

Israel yearns for peace.

Israel has made peace and will make peace again.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful

and murder respectable.

Barnhill, Isle of Jura, 22nd of October, 1948.

Dear Fred,

I have just read Sartre's book on antisemitism,

which you published, to review.

I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I'm going to give him a good boot.

The less talk there is about "the" Jew or "the" antisemite

as a species of animal different from ourselves, the better.

At the start of 2024,

Google cut 1,000 jobs.

Pichai says it's about

"removing layers to simplify execution."

Tesla, we're told the company will lay off over ten percent of its workforce.

UPS announced it will lay off 12,000 employees.

The practice of staff ranking employees

might be making a comeback in Silicon Valley.

The lay-offs are already piling up this year.

The lay-offs in technology just keep coming.

The latest, Google just cutting hundreds of jobs.

OK, it's one thing to do that,

to, like, decide that at a high level.

How do you execute that as compassionately as possible?

And there's no good way, um...

There's no perfect way, for sure,

and it's gonna be tough no matter what,

but as a leadership team here,

we've certainly spent a lot of time just thinking,

"OK, what is the most compassionate way that we can do this?"

From where Winston stood, it was just possible to read,

picked out on its white face in elegant lettering,

the three slogans of the party,

Freedom is Slavery,

War is Peace,

Ignorance is Strength.

Again, how many fingers?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Four, five, six?

In all honesty, I don't know.

The Cotswold Sanatorium,

Cranham, Gloucestershire, the 2nd of February, 1949.

Dear Julian, I wonder how you and your family are getting on.

I have been in this place about a month.

I think I told you last time I wrote

that I had been feeling very bad again.

Richard is getting on for five now

and is enormous and very healthy,

though still not interested in learning his letters.

I suppose this coming winter

he will have to start going to school,

which he is certain to enjoy, as he is very gregarious.

Cranham, 8th of April, 1949.

Dear Richard,

Don't depress the others too much with this,

but the fact is I am in a bad way at present.

They are going to try streptomycin again.

If things go badly,

of course we'll hope they won't,

but one must be prepared for the worst,

I'll ask you to bring little Richard to see me

before I get too frightening in appearance.

Cranham, Gloucester, 22nd of August, 1949.

Dear Fred,

Could you please send one copy each

of Burmese Days and Coming up for Air

to Sonia Brownell care of Horizon?

As I warned you I might do,

I intend getting married again,

to Sonia.

When I am once again in the land of the living,

if I ever am,

I suppose everyone will be horrified,

but apart from other considerations,

I really think I should stay alive longer

if I were married.

One, two!

One, two!

One, two!

Smith?

6079 Smith, W.?

Yes, you. Bend lower.

Winston wrenched his body out of bed, naked.

The physical jerks would begin in three minutes.

The next moment, he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit,

which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up.

It emptied his lungs so completely

that he could only begin breathing again

by lying on his back

and taking a series of deep gasps.

Dear Francis A. Henson

of the United Automobile Workers.

My recent novel is not intended

as an attack on socialism

or on the British Labour Party,

of which I am a supporter,

but as a show-up of the perversions

to which a centralized economy is liable

and which have already been partly realized

in communism and fascism.

I do not believe that the kind of society I describe

necessarily will arrive,

but I believe that something resembling it

could arrive

and I have tried to draw these ideas out

to their logical consequences.

The scene of the book is laid in Britain

in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races

are not innately better than anyone else

and that totalitarianism,

if not fought against,

could triumph anywhere.

We are the dead.

We are the dead.

You are the dead.

Remain exactly where you are.

Make no move until you are ordered.

Don't resist.

Stand in the middle of the room!

Do not touch one another.

Take the woman!

No, don't let them take me!

No, no, no!

I warned you it wouldn't be as peaceful here as you would like.

Nothing is hidden from the Thought Police.

"How does one man assert his power

over another, Winston?"

Winston thought.

"By making him suffer," he said.

"Exactly, by making him suffer."

Obedience is not enough.

Unless he is suffering,

how can you be sure that he is obeying your will

and not his own?

Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces

and putting them together again in new shapes

of your own choosing.

If you want a vision of the future, Winston,

imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.

Please.

I don't care what you do to her, but do it to her.

Tear her face off, do it to Julia and not to me!

Do it to Julia!

Do it to Julia!

Not me!

Do you begin to see then what kind of world we are creating?

All we have done is to advance to a point

at which we could make a real improvement in human life,

but we shan't do it without the recognition

that common decency is necessary.

My chief hope for the future

is that the common people

have never parted company with their moral code.

I betrayed you.

I betrayed you.

I told them all about you.

Yes, I told them about you too.

I ask only...

for you to accept my love of our leader.

I love Big Brother.

Long live Big Brother.

Long live Big Brother! Long live Big Brother!

Long live Big Brother! Long live Big Brother!

Long live Big Brother!

Ladies and gentlemen,

please welcome the next president of the United States,

President Donald J. Trump.

The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome

for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.

People will see in the media, all of these disclosures.

They'll know the lengths the government is going to

to grant themselves powers unilaterally

um, to create greater control over American society

and global society,

but they won't be willing

to take the risks necessary to stand up

and fight to change things,

to force their representatives

to actually take a stand in their interests.

In four years, you won't have to vote again.

We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote.

How do we solve collective-action problems?

We solve them with democracy.

So, there is one thing that surveillance capitalists fear.

It may not be me as an individual

or you as an individual

or your son or daughter as an individual,

but what they fear is all of us mobilized together now.

"If there is hope,"

wrote Winston, "It lies in the proles,

If there was hope, it must lie in the proles

because only there in those swarming,

disregarded masses,

85% of the population of Oceania,

could the force to destroy the party

ever be generated.

The party could not be overthrown from within."

Daily routine

at University College Hospital.

"How did you sleep?"

7 to 7:30 a.m.

Temperature taken.

7:30 to 8.

Blanket bath.

"Back" rubbed.

10:30.

Ward maid comes to sweep room.

6:45, dinner.

10, temperature taken.

A drink of some sort.

10:30 about.

Bed "tipped"

and light put out

shortly after.