I read Nineteen Eighty-Four this month for the first time. What struck me most about the book was not George Orwell’s impracticable vision of totalitarianism. (On the contrary, there are “less arduous and wasteful ways” of satisfying a government’s lust for power.) Rather, it’s how overwhelming the antagonist is. For example, consider this “you can’t stop us” speech given by Comrade O’brien, as he tortures our anti-hero Winston into submission:

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

And of course, spoken shortly thereafter,”If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Brutal. Seriously. This is the most villainous, evil, degenerate creature of darkness I have ever encountered in literature.

Bravo, Orwell. Bra-vo.