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
Headings: 
60 years after Orwell wrote 1984 and was destroyed by the book, a chilling reminder that his sinister vision is almost reality
Content: the stamping out of the capacity for individual thought and freedom, not merely by physical force but by a complete denial of privacy and by the control of all information, even to the extent of policing the language in which thoughts are expressed. In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, ideology is irrelevant. The story picks up where Animal Farm left off. Men and pigs have now become fully interchangeable. Power, administered by a cadre of technocrats, has become an end in itself. 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: