Winston Smith of 1984 versus Edward Snowden

One real, Edward Snowden, and the other imaginary: Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
But similarities are indeed striking, as my friend Stewart Crowter had pointed out to me last night.
They are both men working for a Party that assured them a relative degree of safety and a limited amount of well-being if they toe the line. They were both set on spying and changing history on behalf of Big Brother, and both of them rebelled against him.
Some people had questioned Snowden integrity by saying that the US Government is not Big Brother. Still, it is democratically elected, and its motives for spying are, theoretically, virtuous ones, that is protecting the lives of its citizens. This point may be right, but then where to set the bar dividing the licit from the illicit? Where can we be sure that a secret organization spying on us will not start to have its motives, its own will, its plan, and a new concept of virtuosity?
This book in print under the title “1984” is a novel written by George Orwell, which was published in England in 1949.
This novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain, a province of the superstate of Oceania) in a world perpetually at war. The protagonist of this novel is Winston Smith, a member of the outer party who works at the Ministry of Truth. He is responsible for propaganda as well as for historical revisionism. His job duties consist of rewriting and editing old newspapers’ articles to demonstrate that the party in power had been right all the way. Smith does his job with diligence but, seeing another and different truth inevitably comes to hate the party and its chief called Big Brother.
The inhabitants of Oceania cannot afford the luxury of privacy. They live in apartments equipped with two-way TV screens, they see, and they can be seen. This creates a scary similitude with modern computers connected with the Internet.

 

 

2 Replies to “Winston Smith of 1984 versus Edward Snowden”

  • Stef

    By Stef

    Reply

    thought exactly the same just now

    searching the web for anyone who was thinking the same already

    regards from germany
    Stefan

  • Joe B

    By Joe B

    Reply

    Thanks for a great trip to 1984!

    I found this article by googling “Edward Snowden is Winston Smith”. I hit a home run by landing on this, thank you.

    Your take on it were exactly what I was thinking, and you expressed it so well.

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