DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

Big Brother : From Earthling writer George Orwell’s book ‘1984.’ “Big Brother is watching” refers to a society where the ever-vigilant eyes of the governing entity, commonly known as ‘Big Brother,’ are the Thought Police, who monitor everyone, everywhere on Earth through the use of telescreens. Designed to broadcast party propaganda, telescreens also have a videocamera which transmits the activities of all those within sight of the screen to the Thought Police. Orwell’s two best-known books reflect his lifelong distrust of autocratic government, whether of the left or right: Animal Farm (1945), a modern beast-fable attacking Stalinism, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a dystopian novel setting forth his fears of an intrusively bureaucratized state of the future. The pair of novels brought him his first fame and almost his only remuneration as a writer. His wartime work for the BBC (published in the collections “George Orwell: The Lost Writings,â€? and “The War Commentariesâ€?) gave him a solid taste of bureaucratic hypocrisy and may have provided the inspiration for his invention of “newspeak,” the truth-denying language of Big Brother’s rule in Nineteen Eighty-Four.