1984 bonus content

Almost every detail in the novel is based on real events in history

"...there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner . . . BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own."

"...the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen."

The imagery of Big Brother is based on Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union.

"It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard — a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched."

Emmanuel Goldstein, the traitor, the "Enemy of the People," is based on Leon Trotsky.

"Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared."

Anti-Goldstein/anti-Brotherhood propaganda, like the Two Minutes Hate, is based on anti-Trotsky propaganda that was common throughout the Soviet Union. Trotsky started Pravda ("Truth") newspaper and was a founding member and leader of the communist Bolshevik Revolution. Trotsky (Goldstein) opposed Stalin's (Big Brother's) policies and was exiled from the Communist Party (The Party) in late 1927. Trotsky was assassinated by a KGB agent in Mexico City in 1940.

"Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies . . . With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother — it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals."

Mrs. Parsons' children are members of the Junior Spies, a youth organization very much patterned after the infamous Hitler Youth of Nazi Germany.

Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, a dark prediction based on the geopolitical trends he observed in the first half of the twentieth century: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."

Chairman Mao took control of communist China in 1949, the year Orwell died. Mao deployed many of the same techniques during his reign, leading to the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese.

North Korea today looks like they read 1984 and thought it sounded like a good idea; nearly every aspect of authoritarianism described in the novel is reality for those living today in North Korea.

The two images above of North Korea's various youth organizations, which look a lot like the Junior Spies/Hitler Youth. In order to even live in the capital city of Pyongyang, one must be a member in good standing of the ruling communist party. Notice, in the right image, that only some children are wearing the red neckerchiefs, which signify children who have attained party leadership roles within the organization.

(left) Like in Oceania, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China, images of the leaders are ubiquitous in North Korea.

Various forms of propaganda, both reinforcing the ruling ideology and attacking the party's opponents, are omnipresent in North Korea, another trait typical of authoritarian dictatorships.

VICE Guide to North Korea -- this is a fantastic and entertaining documentary of life in North Korea, produced by VICE back when they were still cool. North Korea is a fascinating place: terribly oppressive, eerily beautiful. Watch this and you will see a real life version of Oceania that actually exists in the world today. [Higher quality versions of this doc are pretty easy to find, for example here, but the first link is the only one I could find that put it all together in one video.]