Sales of Orwell’s 1984 rocket in wake of US Prism surveillance scandal

June 12th, 2013

Peter Nolan

Senator Bernie Sanders asked in a televised
interview this week: “What does our constitution mean? What kind of
country do we want to be? Kids will grow up knowing that every damn thing
that they do is going to be recorded somewhere in a file, and I think that
will have a very Orwellian and inhibiting impact on our lives.”

1984 was published sixty-four years ago last Saturday, but these
extraordinary sales figures suggest that the novel remains just as salient
as ever, if not more so.

Orwell’s novel depicts a future dystopian London, run as a police state and
overseen by the sinister totalitarian figurehead, Big Brother. The state’s
ominous slogan is “Big Brother is watching you” and every aspect
of civilian life is monitored and controlled.

Michael Shelden, author of Orwell: The Authorized Biography, told NPR
in the US: “Throwing out such a broad net of surveillance is exactly
the kind of threat Orwell feared.”

The US press have also been quick to draw comparisons between the book and
NSA’s surveillance programme. In a recent blog
post, the New Yorker’s Ian Crouch asked: ‘So, are we living in
1984?’

Crouch added: “There has been a hint of something vaguely Big Brotherian in
Obama’s response to the public outcry about domestic surveillance, as
though, by his calm manner and clear intelligence, the President is asking
the people to merely trust his beneficence — which many of us might be
inclined to do. Even Winston, after all, learns to love Big Brother in the
end.”

1984
by George Orwell

368pp, Penguin Classics, t £7.99 (plus £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515

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