Newspeak didn't occur in a vacuum. I find it more likely Orwell was spoofing Wells and Basic English and all of the post-1918 utopian attempts at "simplifying language" or auxlangs, than that he would be pretending to any originality.

It's not newspeak that causes crimestop. It's that "quiet desperation is the english way", it's the middle class attitudes of the title of "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", etc. that cause crimestop. Orwell was aware of crimestop from his own experiences, and he was aware that he lived in a world with, admittedly, bureaucratese, but without newspeak.

What Orwell was doing with Newspeak was, I believe, less a direct spoof of existing schemes than an illustration of how common habits of language might be consciously harnessed and directed by a totalitarian regime to further its own intellectual and political designs. In his own words[1],

When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.

Along these lines, the basic idea behind Newspeak was to create a language where "the existing dialect" would "do the job for" the Party, by making the expression of desirable thoughts not merely the natural result of lazily-chosen expression, but the automatic result of any admissible expression, by simplifying, not only the language itself, but the underlying body of ideas it was capable of expressing.

[1] https://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

He wrote an entire essay on politics and the English language: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli... which he complains about incoherent metaphors as cover for bad politics. Newspeak is a language in which metaphor is banned, and therefore politics and opposing the state is impossible.

Thank you for this, this is a wonderful resource!

I found the link to download an ASCII version of 1984 by reading the readme.txt file, the anchor link seemed broken.

Hope this helps another seeker:

https://orwell.ru/Download/1984/e84_asc.zip

One of the cool things I think about 1984 that occurred to me while re-reading the appendix now as suggested by the article is that in order for Orwell to say something very new about our civilization, or at least to say something old but to many new people, he needed to invent his own language to do it. In a sense there's mirror between what Orwell is doing with his book, in telling our society about itself, and what Ingsoc was doing to Oceania, in limiting thought to goodthink. They both invented a new language in order to relate a new meaning. I like that, and there's something...peculiar about books that invent a lot of new terms. Like LOTR and Harry Potter. There's something "generationally transformative" about such books, maybe. In a sense sci-fi is all-in on this sort of word coining, Matrix, Terminator, Star Trek.

Nineteen Eighty-four is sort of sci-fi. It's set in the future. And then the appendix, is set even further in the future talking in staid and "encycolpaedia"-like tone about the time of the events of the book as if it is in the past. What if Orwell was a time traveler, who wrote 1984 after a visit to a possible future, and was told that by writing this book, that future would not persist. Then on his second trip back to the future he verified he'd changed that timeline by writing his book, and lifted the appendix to 1984 from an encyclopedia on "the rise and fall of English socialism" from the future after the collapse of the political system his book had helped undo. Closed time like curves.

The whole Smith story is just fast-forward for what Orwell wanted to say, which is all contained in Goldstein.

Examine the world of 1984 from Goldstein on out, and it's an excellent example of what might happen if one took Plato's Republic[0] and attempted to practically implement it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[0] I'm not sure if the Republic referents are direct, or indirect due to Orwell's second rate boarding school having stanned the greeks.

I like your take. My take, is that Orwell is actually a closet totalitarian, and was singing the praises of such, albeit covertly and in the guise which he knew the public could fawn about and accept. I imagine Orwell smoking his pipe and chuckling to himself, "...and they thought it was against totalitarianism, that's why they swallowed it whole!" After all, the Party is really the victor and hero of the novel. The hopeful appendix could itself be a historical revision of a future "more perfect" incarnation of the Party. I think the 2-minutes hate against Goldstein, is the same 2-minutes hate against "Totalitarian States" that Orwell cynically evokes from a public he knew was ready to go rabid on this thing, against which, I think he believed, resistance was futile. I think he saw himself as greasing the wheels of that. So he's mocking his audience's gullibility while proving his point that totalitarianism is the only thing that can rule them, and selling them such via the backchannel of this novel everyone believes to be against that. I think, in this lens, Orwell is as the biggest political-social thinker of last 200 years, and he carried it off without being recognized as what he was doing, the ultimate power play, which makes it all the more impressive. I really shouldn't write this here, people will probably go crazy. But it's nice to see a fellow differentthinker, so I braved it. A final thought is that there's this concept call dramatic catharsis, in comedy, where the mockery of something is commonly seen as a way to remove its power, but in actuality simply provides a useless outlet for people's frustrations and further acclimates them to it. So, Italian plays mocking the state were how the people coped with it, but the state rolled on, better them cope than revolt. In that lens, 1984 is sort of a pre-catharsis that greases the wheels for the entrance of totalitarianism, by convincing everyone, as another commenter adroitly noted, "of the inevitable demise of English socialism". So Orwell was faking the death of totalitarianism in the mass consciousness, to provide cover for the introduction of totalitarianism. Sort of like that scene in the Dark Knight, where somebody brings the "body of the Joker" to Gambol's hideout, where the Joker promptly comes back to life and takes over.

Having read other Orwell works, in which he appears pretty pinko, I'm not sure about your take, but am happy to discuss its motivations.

Certainly I believe that he could chuckle over Animal Farm being eagerly taken up and sold as an anti-communist, rather than an anti-dog-and-pig, book.

Well, I think if you take that to the extreme you end up with totalitarian.

And by writing the appendix, he re-enabled that time line since everyone was assured of the inevitable fall of English socialism...

Hahaha!