..This Orwellian view of a possible future draws heavily on modern experience with totalitarian socialism: People in this world are slaves to the state. They live in fear and poverty. Art and media are used to control them. History is rewritten to create an appearance of progress. People are forced to make public confessions of crimes they never committed. Families are destroyed to insure complete loyalty only to the state. And the state is in constant war with neighbors to unify the people through an “us against them” mentality. It’s a distillation of all the horrors of National Socialism, Soviet and Chinese communism, and the various variants thereof.

The story was meant as a warning to the remaining free countries, whose academic eggheads in particular seemed curiously open to socialist ideas.

It opens with a propaganda broadcast in which Goldstein, an enemy of the state, is being denounced. A crowd watches the broadcast and begins shouting feverish anti-Goldstein condemnations. The propaganda has clearly had its effect. However, in that crowd is a man who sees through at least some of it. He meets a young woman who, in her own cynical way, also sees through the propaganda. The two arrange a series of trysts in which they gradually get to know, trust, and love each other. But in this world, love for anything but the state is forbidden, and despite the most minute precautions, one day they are caught. Such are the horrors of torture and mind control that in the end the state succeeds in destroying even their love.
In the background to all this is the full panorama of Orwell’s projected totalitarian world: the control of the individual through control of the language (“newspeak”); endless broadcasts of faked production statistics intended to give the impression of material progress despite obvious widespread poverty; purges and denunciations of supposed traitors; televised executions; 24-hour surveillance via in-home monitors; and so on.