June 8, 1949: George Orwell Publishes "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

June 8, 1949, 75 years ago: Nineteen Eighty-Four is published by Secker & Warburg in London. It is the last novel written by Eric Blair to be published in his lifetime. It has become synonymous with his pen name: George Orwell.

The year was not chosen at random: It was simply the year in which the book was written, 1948, with the last 2 digits reversed, suggesting a "near future" to which the reader might be able to relate, even if Orwell himself might not live to see it. (He was born in 1903, but it was a foregone conclusion: He had been suffering from tuberculosis as early as 1938, when he was a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War. He died on January 21, 1950.)

In the novel, Britain, now known as Airstrip One, as well as America and the entire Western Hemisphere, and also the original Oceania, meaning Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, are part of a totalitarian superstate, named Oceania. This superstate is apparently led by Big Brother, who is pushed by the Party, the political organization that actually runs Oceania. Orwell leaves it vague as to whether Big Brother is a man who actually exists, or ever did, or is merely a convenient symbol.

The government tells the people, "Big Brother is watching you." As a result, they don't want to disappoint him by doing anything against the Party, and therefore against the nation. "Who controls the present controls the past" is a Party plank, and so there is a Ministry of Truth, which rewrites history to suit the Party's needs.

"Oceania had always been at war with with Eastasia," which includes Japan, China, and the Himalayas. "Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia," which includes what had been the Soviet Union and the rest of continental Europe. Both statements of perpetual war had been true, and neither, and could flip, depending on what the Party thought it needed at the time. "Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England, or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London."

"He" is the novel's protagonist, a Ministry of Truth worker named Winston Smith. Through his work of changing the truth, he has seen the truth, and begins to rebel. One thing leads to another, and his contact in a resistance group turns out to be a mole placed by the Party, and Winston is captured and tortured, and his loyalty is restored. The last line of the novel is, "He loved Big Brother."

In real life, the year 1984 turned out to be very little like the world of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, although a movie based on the book, starring William Hurt as Winston, was released that year. And yet, in the years to come, Britain, and, to a lesser extent, America, would become loaded with closed-circuit TV cameras used by law-enforcement agencies. This growth of government watching led to a British TV "reality show," exported to America, titled Big Brother.

In short, just as "Machiavellian" has come to represent the kind of tactics that Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was mocking in his book The Prince, "Orwellian" has come to mean the kind of governmental approach -- in total, or even in part, as with CCTV cameras -- that Orwell himself, a democratic socialist -- opposed.

In 1982, Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta premiered, showing a fascist, surveillance-obsessed Britain of 1997, led by a Big Brother-type figure, who was basically insecure and needed the love of the people. A film version was released in 2006, set in 2038, and it took a lot of liberties with the original story, including making the Chancellor a much meaner figure. He was played by William Hurt, who had come full circle from playing Winston Smith 22 years earlier.

But an insecure leader, who is not the man his supporters believe him to be, who tells you what the truth is, and calls the actual truth lies, and punishes those who act against his government? We have already had Donald Trump in the Presidency. We do not need that again. We don't need 2025 to be like Nineteen Eighty-Four.