La Voz de Galicia – November 30, 2025 →
1984 is one of those novels I read when I was young, and that I have returned to in recent years, along with Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World. And although Orwell, Bradbury, and Huxley were visionaries and witnesses to a changing reality, today, ninety-three years after the publication of Brave New World and over seventy years after 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, it is chilling to think about these dystopias from the perspective of the dystopia we are living in.
I was thinking about this this week when Xan and I sat down to watch Raoul Peck’s new documentary called Orwell: 2+2=5, in which, using narration as a guiding thread, and a wealth of real images and countless current conflicts, it led us to reflect on “the roots of the vital and troubling concepts he revealed to the world in his dystopian masterpiece” (part of the documentary’s purpose), but also to ask ourselves what our responsibility is as a society, and especially as individuals, in this descent into the hell we are experiencing now in much of the world. His words were written in an incredibly complex historical moment, since part of the documentary’s narration comes from a text written in 1946, and 1984 was published in 1949. And today, nearing the end of 2025, looking at the news we are able to read (because somehow it reaches us), and imagining the others of which we only get a few lines (even though Africa is the closest continent); one becomes aware that sometimes the hope that the worst will pass quickly is a kind of cloud in which we tend to hide to avoid seeing the reality that overwhelms us, one in which, as Peck makes clear through Orwell, “two plus two equals five,” and “ignorance is strength.”
