Nineteen Eighty-Four/Trivia

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Trivia about Nineteen Eighty-Four includes:

• Author Phobia: The Room 101 scene was inspired by Orwell's personal fear of rats, and the name "Room 101" itself was inspired by a conference room where Orwell had to sit though boring meetings.
• Banned in China: Banned in the Soviet Union for fairly obvious reasons.
• Blind Idiot Translation: The original Finnish translation, but it was later remedied by a much better and accurate one.
• Hey, It's That Guy!: One of Winston's colleagues is Rab C. Nesbitt.
• Meaningful Release Date: The Film of the Book came out in 1984.
  • And according to some sources, the location shooting was across the actual weeks the book was set in (at least according to Winston's diary).
• Reality Subtext: The 1984 film. Richard Burton was dying during filming, and it shows.
• Truth in Television: The Democratic People's Republic of Korea seems to have taken many, many cues from Orwell. In a bad way. Christopher Hitchens, after his visit to North Korea, described it by saying "it was as if someone had taken 1984 and said 'Can you make it as much like this as possible?'"
  • Even going so far as to build a giant pyramid building. And by law, North Korean libraries may not stock books older than fifteen years - the books must be re-edited and reprinted. Wonder where they got that idea...
  • During the Stalinist era in the USSR, children had to paste new pages into their history books as the official view changed. If any classmates were taken away and "vaporized", the kids had to scratch out their faces in all the yearbooks.
    • Big Brother is Stalin. Never say to a survivor of Stalin's regime, or even someone who had lived in the USSR when it was still Communist, that 1984 is an exaggeration of those times; children much like Winston's next door neighbors existed in droves, enjoyable sex was discouraged, and most importantly, thoughtcrime in its purest form existed -- it just wasn't called thoughtcrime.
  • The most terrifying part of all of this is that it is all plausible. There are no far-fetched sci-fi elements in it, and they had 30ish years in the book-- long enough to raise a generation who've never known anything else. Orwell lifted most of Big Brother's tactics from Stalin and Hitler and provided a reason (war) for otherwise rational men and women to accept the same tactics from their own government. Though this also provides some hope, as North Koreans flee to China all the time, and when the Soviet Union collapsed people lined up to leave, and they were a generation that knew nothing else.
  • Britain's mass surveillance and "safe beneath the watchful eye" posters attempting to justify it have drawn many comparisons to Airstrip One. They differ in crime rate however, with Britain having Europe's highest and Airstrip One having none.

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