Bonnie, who runs a George Orwell website, has posted on YouTube the classic 1954 BBC TV production of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”– with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith– in 15 segments.
If you’re a fan of the novel, it’s worth setting aside a couple of hours to watch. André Morell’s portrayal of O’Brien– the chilling totalitarian intellectual– is a standout.
“Nineteen Eighty-four,” of course, is fiction. But I’m quite convinced it was used as a guide in building the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea. Think about the 23 million North Koreans whose lives are not so different from Orwell’s dystopia. Something like this might have been an outtake from the BBC production, but as far as I can tell it’s for real.
(Hat tip: Mick Hartley.)
Then you might want to think about what life was like for Iraqis who dared to think as subversively as Winston during the reign of Saddam Hussein.
