Title: 60 years after Orwell wrote 1984 and was destroyed by the book, a chilling reminder that his sinister vision is almost reality | Daily Mail Online
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60 years after Orwell wrote 1984 and was destroyed by the book, a chilling reminder that his sinister vision is almost reality
Content: The planet is divided into three continuously (or apparently) warring super-states: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Given how Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had divided up the world between them at their wartime conferences only a few years previously, this vision did not seem entirely fantastic. Orwell also drew heavily on the writings of the American Trotskyist turned conservative, James Burnham, author of The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. His 1946 summary of Burnham's theories reads like an outline for Nineteen Eighty-Four: 'All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or "the classless society", or "the Kingdom of Heaven on earth", are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way to power ...
'The new "managerial" societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia and America. 'These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will be unable to conquer one another completely.' Such was the way the world seemed to be heading in the Forties; such is the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.