"Nineteen Eighty-Four" By George Orwell

Windson Chen

台灣時空隧道中的「溫紳觀點」
喬治‧歐威爾《一九八四》對台灣的啟示( 1984-01-01)

歐威爾是出生於印度的英裔「偉大之人道主義者」，早年飽受世態炎涼、人情冷暖，因此聲名大噪；隨後應聘採訪西班牙內戰，不久就因受傷而入院就醫。這段戰爭帶給他很大的影響，使他的人生觀有了轉變。事後，歐威爾曾經表示：「自一九三六年以來，我的每一字句都是為了反抗極權主義而寫」。因此，凡是戕害與摧殘人性的極權體制，他莫不口誅筆伐；以致《一九八四》一書問世後，連羅素都讚揚該書是「誠值吾人深自警惕之未來預言小說也」。

Everyman's Library

"And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested."
--from "Nineteen Eighty-Four" By George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed George Orwell as one of the twentieth century’s greatest mythmakers. While the totalitarian system that provoked him into writing it has since passed into oblivion, his harrowing cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate: its relevance and power to disturb our complacency seem to grow decade by decade. In Winston Smith’s desperate struggle to free himself from an all-encompassing, malevolent state, Orwell zeroed in on tendencies apparent in every modern society, and made vivid the universal predicament of the individual.

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