How Orwell’s 1984 novel is very accurate for 2013

George Orwell published his dystopian novel 1984 in the year 1949 guessing a scary version of what the society might be in the future. His predictions have become so accurate to today’s world that we can almost say that if he was trying to predict the future, he only missed by some decades.

Big Brother is watching you

Telescreens have now taken the form of gadgets like the Xbox One and similar smart TVs that you can operate with gestures are always watching. Even smartphones and tablets can be switched on to be always listening and watching.

War is Peace

President Obama not only continued Bush’s wars on the middle east, but expanded them to more countries, and he’s been awarded with the nobel peace price. In his award acceptance speech, he said that more weapons are needed to preserve peace . The world has been in constant war that we no longer can pin-point on what war happend what. In the past we could say “oh, in Vietnam” or “during the Gulf War” or similar. Today is constant war against a faceless enemy…most times, ourselves.

Freedom is Slavery

Being free is an ideal that most people have forgotten what it means. People are now afraid of free. People prefer monopolies and government control privacy is almost forgotten in the name of safety.

Ignorance is Strength

The press is controlled by very few people, also involved in government and corporate interests. Free press and investigative journalism is very rarely found these days. Most news media only repeat the corporate statements given to them, most times not even checking facts. In the case of Snowden the government said that they revoked his passport and everyone assumed that he couldn’t travel anymore. Well the State Department’s official information says that the only way a passport can be revoked is by entering the United States, a thing Snowden hasn’t done, and that revoking a passport doesn’t affect the citizen to travel to other countries. This is just to name one of many examples of how bad the press is not checking any facts and just passing along the official statements produced by government and corporations PR agencies. In Mexico, ignorance became the president of the country. The proles votes got bought and cheated with $2 dollar gift cards and the most ignorant candidate became president. The old party manipulated the media and used people’s ignorance as their strength.

In case you haven’t read the book, you can buy it from Amazon here
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Here’s a movie adaptation of it from 1954. This adaptation is very accurate to the book.