Forewords:-
I condemn totalitarianism, but at the same time I disagree that total democracy is always the right way to go. If we look at Iraq, the country was better off during Saddam era than it is right now. Saddam was cruel – by no means, I am suggesting it is the otherwise – but Iraq was more in control than it is right now. While the syiahs, sunnis, etc. cannot see eyes to eyes – what a shame – democracy does not help them to resolve their problems at all. During Saddam era, the equilibrium was there, albeit it was not really fair and based a lot on cruelty. The question is: Is Iraq better off under the current democracy system than it was under dictatorship? There is no clear cut answer of course.
In most cases, democracy is indeed the right way to go. However, democracy has its weaknesses and it should not be the sole system that we should follow. So much for democracy, the States are making marijuana legal. Majority supports the legalization of marijuana due to the fact that Marijuana is just as dangerous as alcohol. Instead of banning alcohol because its hazard is to the magnitude of a drug such as marijuana, the public is legalizing marijuana. What is wrong is still wrong, no matter what the majority say.
Critical Examination Of 1984 And Its Ramification In The Current World
“WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” (Orwell 6) are the three slogans of the ruling Party in Airstrip One – which is London – in the nation of Oceania. Working in the Record Department of the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, rewrites documents – the past – in accordance to the demand of the Party. However, he silently rebels against the totalitarian Party, which demands its citizen complete obedience and robs them of any right, freedom, and privacy. In his search to find the truth, Winston starts a secret, forbidden love affair with a fellow Party member, Julia. He soon finds out that in the nightmarish world he lives in, love means hate, war means peace, ignorance is a virtue, and freedom comes with betrayal. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a futuristic novel in which Orwell examines the critical shortcomings and dangers of totalitarian rule.
Nineteen Eighty-Four “belong to a particular genre which is usually described as anti-utopian or dystopian. As such it is a type of satire” (Calder 38). In order to understand what dystopian is, one must first know what is utopia. Utopia is “the imaginary of ideal or superior human society where people have the opportunity to live in peace and harmony” (Baldik 85) - a concept that was created by Plato. Nineteen Eighty-Four, the last book that Orwell wrote in his life, is about a disorganized and chaotic society which he imagines will occur if the world is ruled by a totalitarian government – or any other government that is given excessive power. This society is the opposite of Plato’s utopian concept, thus it is called dystopian.
The first characteristic of totalitarianism is “a single party committed to that ideology, usually led by one man” (Rush 71). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania is ruled by a single party, which is the Party, who is committed to the ideology “INGSOC” (Orwell 4) – or “English Socialism” (Orwell 42) – and it is led by Big Brother. The posters of Big Brother’s face gazing down over the caption “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” (Orwell 3) are omnipresent in London, a.k.a. Airstrip One. The Party members are told that Big Brother is the leader of the nation and the ruler of the Party. Every victory, every success, and even every scientific discovery “are held to issue directly from his dictatorship and inspiration” (Orwell 243). In fact, in the heresy book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, it is written that “Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and the Party is infallible” (Orwell 242). In spite of the supposed greatness of Big Brother, there is a palpable air of mystery and vagueness about him, as no Party members have ever met him. He is like a mystical powerful figure. Winston thinks he remembers that Big Brother emerged around 1960, but the Party’s official records says that Big Brother’s existence dates back to 1930, before Winston was even born. How can the people of a country trust somebody to lead their country when they are not even sure of his existence? The people of Oceania grant the Party excessive power, which is exploited by them to create the dystopic society in Oceania.
The second characteristic of totalitarianism is “police power based on terror” (Rush 71). The Thought Police in Nineteen Eighty-Four is an extreme version of this aspect of totalitarianism. Party members in Airstrip One are under total surveillance and monitoring by the Thought Police, especially through the use of high-tech gizmos like telescreen, hidden microphone, and patrol helicopter. What is extreme about the Thought Police is that they capture anyone who shows even a slightest sign of unorthodoxy - even like talking to oneself. This is evident when Winston says: “The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to oneself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality” (Orwell 71). Party members have lost their privacy and also their freedom. They live in terror as their movements are scrutinized all the time and it has become an instinct for them to behave in a robotic and extremely orthodox way. This is evident when Winston says: “You had to live –did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” (Orwell 5). Furthermore, those who are caught by the Thought Police are ‘vaporised’ without notice – not to mention about having a fair trial – and their existence in any registry will be deleted. Winston once points out that “purges and vaporisations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government” (Orwell, 53). In short, the Thought Police operates based on terror.
A totalitarian government also practices “a centralized economy and control of all organizations” (Rush 71). The Party has the Ninth Three-Year Plan, “which recall Stalin’s Five-Year Plans” (Calder 121). All Party members are forced to work hard, so that the goals set in the Three-Year Plan will be fulfilled. As a result, there is a depression and the Party members have to endure a low quality of life. The Party controls the supplies of products to an extend that necessities such as shoelaces and razor blades are “impossible to get hold on in any other way” (Orwell 8). The effect of depression set by the Party due to the economic constrain is seen in this passage: “The pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down together from motives of economy.” (Orwell 25). The economy of Oceania is ran solely by the Party and they are free to do anything they want – including oppressing economic plans – as they are being granted total power. The low quality of life endured by the Party members serves as a reminder of the danger of totalitarianism.
The Party is also in control of all organizations, which means only pro-Party organizations are allowed to be established. An example is the Junior Anti-Sex League which serves the purpose of promoting sex as “a duty to the Party” (Orwell 103). With total control of organizations by the Party, political will of the people – if there is any – cannot be translated into an organized act; as such organisations will be banded. This fact is underlined when even the underground heretic Brotherhood organization in Oceania is actually made up and controlled by the Party; in fact, it is an invention by the Thought Police. This is proven when O’Brien, an Inner Party member and a Thought Police, tells Winston that he himself writes the heretic book of the Brotherhood: “I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it” (Orwell 300). Considering this fact, the people of Oceania have no hope of defending their rights – through any organisation.
Another important aspect of a totalitarian government is “widespread Indoctrination, particularly through the education system” (Rush 71). The Party does this through many ways: The Two Minutes Hate, The Hate Week, Junior Anti-Sex League, and through the propaganda spreading device – telescreen. However, the most horrific indoctrination by the Party is that it has managed to brainwash the minds of the kids – at school – into thinking that it is heroic to denounce parents who are unfaithful to the Party: “Hardly a week passed on which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak – ‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used – had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents” (Orwell 29). The once impregnable bond between parents and their child, which usually will stand through any test, is now shattered by the Party’s indoctrination through the education system. Kids denouncing their parents is not something unheard of under the ruling of past totalitarian government like the U.S.S.R., but those cases were unintentional:- “The mask was taken off only at home, and then not always – even from your children you had to conceal how horror-struck you were; otherwise, God save you, they might let something slip in school” (McCaunley 85).
A totalitarian government also “monopolizes the means of communication” (Rush 71). The Party takes the meaning of monopolization of the means of communication and manipulation of information to a new height. The Party’s slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” (Orwell 40) speaks volume as to the Party’s policy on information and communication. The ministry of information and communication of Oceania is euphemistically named Ministry of Truth and its purpose is none other than to scrutinize every means of communication and alter them when their contents contradict with the Party’s ideology:-
This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs – to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance (Orwell 47).
Furthermore, statistics are unethically made up by the Party to cover the real truth and to show the performance of the Party in better light. For example:-
The Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boot for that quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in re-writing the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been over-fulfilled (Orwell 48) As a result, “history is continuously rewritten” (Orwell 243) by the Party, which bring the novel’s theme, the mutability of the past. No information can be verified to be truth anymore as the Party manipulates almost everything.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell also criticizes the totalitarian “Marxist-Leninist ideology” (McCaunley 124) of “rewriting the history” (McCaunley 124) and “the process of reality control to ensure orthodoxy” (McCaunley 124). Since Marxist-Leninist ideology is the basis of the totalitarian Soviet Union, it can be said that the ideology is pretty much the characteristic of a totalitarian government. The rewriting of history by the Party has already been discussed before, but the Party must also be able to make people trust the altered history, or at least make them accept it without any questioning.
Newspeak is introduced by the Party with the goal of ensuring orthodoxy by limiting people’s thought. Newspeak is an ‘evolution’ of the current modern English, but it is much shorter and its vocabulary is ironically much lesser. As Syme, a friend of Winston who is one of the ‘engineers’ of Newspeak puts it: “We’re destroying –words – scores of them, hundred of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone” (Orwell 59). In Newspeak, only the aspects of the language that contribute to the Party’s cause are preserved. Obviously words like freedom, democracy, and privacy are eliminated from the vocabulary. “Newspeak is the ultimate reduction of language. It was a reduction that, like the reduction of humanity, Orwell saw already happening around him” (Calder 105). Orwell wrote in his essay, Politics and the English Language: “Language should be an instant for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought” (Orwell, website). Ironically, Newspeak is specifically designed to prevent thought or “thoughtcrime” (Orwell 60). Syme understands this objective of Newspeak, as can be seen when he says to Winston: “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it” (Orwell 60). Orwell wrote in his essay, Politics and the English Language: “But if thoughts corrupt language, language can also corrupt thought” (Orwell 167). Newspeak not only deprives freedom of speech, it also deprives freedom of thought. It renders political will almost impossible and it is perhaps the Party’s single most powerful weapon in keeping itself in power. The invention of Newspeak ties into the novel’s theme: The importance of language to express thought.
Doublethink, a word in Newspeak, is the ability “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them” (Orwell 41). A blatant example of doublethink is the naming of the ministries in Oceania – the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth invents false news, the Ministry of Love tortures people. Another blatant example of the use of doublethink: During the Hate Week, the hatred towards Eurasia – Oceania’s enemy – is at its climax as the Party rally its members to hate the enemy in order to achieve collectivism. Suddenly, they announce that “Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally” (Orwell 209). Party members have to practice doublethink to accept this flagrant twist of truth – which most of them do as there was no revolt – or they will be caught by the Thought Police with the offense of committing “thoughtcrime” (Orwell 60), or worse, they can become insane. The Party members unquestioning nature in accepting whatever the Party says is an extreme example of the success of a totalitarian government in ensuring orthodoxy and it serves as a reminder to the reader that erroneous thought is the stuff of freedom – an important theme in the novel. O’Brien says to the rebellious Winston while they are in a torture room: “It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be” (Orwell 292).
The thrush is an important symbol in Nineteen Eighty-Four even though it appears only once in the novel. Winston and Julia hear the melodious song sing by a thrush while they are at the Golden Country – the countryside where they ‘date’ for the first time: “The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity” (Orwell 142). The thrush is a bird – an archaic symbol of freedom. To further associate it with freedom, Orwell wrote that it sings for no one and with no particular purpose. In other words, it sang because it has the freedom to do so. This is evident when Winston says, “For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?” (Orwell 142). Winston, whose each moves is dictated by the Party, cannot comprehend the purpose – or the lack of it – of the thrush as in his mind, freedom is nonexistence and something totally alien. The absence of the sense of freedom in Winston’s mind shows the novel’s important theme, the danger of totalitarianism. Another important thing to note is that Winston finds the song as very exquisite and melodious, unlike any other song that he had ever heard before. This is because he had only heard songs invented by the Party using machines: “the words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator” (Orwell 159). The thrush song is genuine, beautiful, and natural as it “never once repeating itself” (Orwell 142) and it is far superior to the fake, mechanical songs invented by the machine. The difference between these two songs symbolizes the mechanical and rigid life under the totalitarian government as oppose to the joyous life of those who have freedom.
The room above Mr. Charington’s antique shop is a hideout place for Winston and Julia. Winston likes the room since the first time he enters it:-
It seems to him he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like
this, in an armchair beside an open fire with your feet on the fender and
a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, and nobody watching
you, no sound except the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock. (111)
He likes the antique objects in the room like the kettle, the armchair, the “old-fashioned glass clock” (Orwell 111), and the wooden bed, which give Winston a sense of reliving the past; They awake his “ancestral memory” (Orwell 111). The memory theme is an important one in the novel. The biggest reason why Winston is so fond of the room is that “there’s no telescreen!” (Orwell 111). With no one watching him, he feels secure and alone – he likes the solitariness of the room. “The realities of 1984 force a longing to be beyond the all-seeing eye and intrusive voice” (Calder 61). In other words, he wants privacy the most, as all his life is under the constant surveillance and monitoring of the Party. The rare privacy that Winston gets from this room reminds the reader about the novel’s theme: The danger of totalitarianism.
The glass paperweight is a prominent symbol in the novel as it is often repeated. The glass paperweight is half-round and there is a pink sea anemone in it: “At the heart of it, magnifies by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone” (Orwell 109). Winston buys it at an antique shop which he frequently visits and the shop keeper tells him, “it wasn’t made a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it” (Orwell 109). He likes the paperweight because it is an antique, a rarity, something concrete from the past, not really because the thing is beautiful or purposeful:-
I don’t think it’s anything – I mean, I don’t think it was ever put to
any use. That’s what I like about it. It’s a little chunk of history
that they’ve forgotten to alter. It’s a message from a hundred years
ago, if one knew how to read it” says Wintson (168).
History has been extensively altered by the Party to suit its need and the antique paperweight symbolizes Winston’s “attempt to reconnect with the lost past” (Calder 69). Orwell also shows that Winston finds comfort and security in the paperweight. This can be seen when Orwell describes Winston’s fantasy about the paperweight: “The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal” (Orwell 169). The paperweight’s “curved surface” resembles a world, and Winston’s fantasy of living in it eternally with Julia suggests that Winston wants a world of his own where he can have privacy and he can do whatever he wants, which is something deprived by the totalitarian Party. However, the paperweight “remains a fragile object” (61) – a fragile glass – which reflects how fragile is his dream. “At the same time it reflects the vulnerability of both past and present” (Calder 61). The glass paperweight is “smashed to pieces on the hearth-stone” (Orwell 254) by the Thought Police when Winston and Julia are caught by them. The thought police action of smashing the glass into pieces represents the symbolical smashing of privacy and the real past by the totalitarian government.
The omnipresent telescreens are the ‘eyes’ of the Party in exercising total surveillance and monitoring of its members. The telescreen is a sophisticated television-shaped device, which is able to capture real-time video and audio and feeds them to the Thought Police: “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard” (Orwell 5). Not only that, the telescreen is also a propaganda tool for the Party as it shows programme that promotes nationalism and fake news about the Party’s achievements. The telescreen is a symbol of the abuse of technology by totalitarian government for its tyrannical needs instead for the good of the civilization.
Winston Smith, the hero of the novel, is far from being the typical hero. He is neither physically powerful nor high status. With his varicrose ulcer he ascends the stairs painfully: “Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicrose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times” (Orwell 1). He is a “smallish, frail figure” (Orwell 14) and he is frequently attacked by a coughing fit. Status wise, he is only a normal Party member, which can be considered as the middle-class. The only thing special about him is that he is “an individual who is perhaps more than ordinarily aware of his surroundings” (Calder 41). Winston’s ordinariness contributes to the reader’s understanding about the novel as he is the reader’s “vehicle of observation” (Calder 41).
Winston’s most prominent quality is his rebelliousness. He writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER!” in his diary, he breaks the Party’s rule by having an affair with a fellow Party member, Julia, and he willingly joins the Brotherhood – an anti Party organisation. At first, Winston’s rebellion seems to be only personal as his feeling is born out of discontent with his life. After Winston and Julia have their first sex, Orwell wrote, “Their embrace had been a battle, the climax is a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act” (Orwell 145). Even his ‘political act’ is actually personal, as sex is something definitely personal. However, his rebel has always been fueled by his intellectual awareness – he knows that the Party is defeating individuality, breeching privacy, and depriving people’s right. He writes in his diary: “From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!” (Orwell 32). As the story goes on, it becomes clear that Winston’s rebel is also political, as he willingly joins the underground heretic organization - the Brotherhood. He professes to O’Brien that he is willing to give his life for the cause of the Brotherhood: “You are prepared to give your lives? Yes. You are prepared to commit murder? Yes” (Orwell 199). The flaw in totalitarianism is that some of their citizens are actually discontent with them, even after all the indoctrination.
Winston also has a strong sense of fatalism – a strong belief that he is actually doomed. This can be seen when he writes in his diary: “Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death” (Orwell 33). When Winston rents the room above Mr. Charington shop as a hiding place for him and his lover Julia, this thought comes to his mind: “There it lay, fixed in future time, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100” (Orwell 161). Winston’s paranoia and fatalism are induced by the totalitarian Party’s ruling system based on terror.
Julia, Winston’s lover, is a sensuous character. Winston describes her as “young and lusty” (Orwell 116). She is the one who starts their relationship by slipping a paper saying “I love you” into Winston’s palm. She has a courage that Winston lacks, and this quality of hers attracts Winston. She is the only person who Winston can be sure hates the Party and wishes to rebel against it as he does. However, there is a fundamental difference between Julia’s rebelliousness and Winston’s. Her rebel towards the Party is more instinctive than intellectual. She likes to break the Party rules like having sex with Winston, but “She had not the faintest interest in the ramification of Party doctrine” (Orwell 179). Her lack of intellectual depth is seen when she questions Winston’s urge to keep an evidence of the Party’s alteration of history: “I’m quite ready to take risks but only for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper. What could you have down with it even if you had kept it?” (Orwell 179).
Julia is a striking contrast with Winston – apart from their sexual desire and hatred for the Party. She is an optimistic person – the opposite of the fatalistic and paranoid Winston. This can be seen when she scolds Winston for talking about their imminent death: “Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being alive?” (Orwell 156). Her lack of understanding of the real nature of the Party is perhaps the reason why she is an optimist. Then Winston begins to understand that many Party members are perhaps like Julia: They do rebel against the Party to a certain extend, but they do not see the big picture; they do not like the restriction imposed on them but they do not understand that they should have their own rights. Winston eloquently says, “They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird” (180). Julia’s lack of intellectual depth shows the novel’s theme: Erroneous thought is the stuff of freedom.
O’Brien is the third major character in Nineteen-Eighty Four and he serves the role to deliver the absolute power theme in the novel. Orwell does a good job in elaborating O’Brien’s characteristic and actions to show the definition of power, how dangerous absolute power can be, and how power can give positive impact to people. Winston’s loneliness and solidarity causes him to long for someone who can share his feeling of hatred towards the Party. Initially, he cannot find someone. However, after he meets O’Brien, an officer of Inner Party, for the first time, he feels that O’Brien is the perfect company to share his rebellious feeling. He can sense something “special” about O’Brien which gives him courage and support to continue his rebellion against the Party. This is shown when Orwell mentions that the diary which Winston writes to express his feeling – something that is considered as ‘thoughtcrime’- is “for O’Brien – to O’Brien” (Orwell 92). He dedicates his diary to O’Brien because he thinks that he is his protector – somebody who will support him and somebody who will always stand beside him when he faces troubles and this situation creates a unique bond between Winston and O’Brien. This special bond is shown when Orwell states Winston’s perception towards O’Brien: “He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend” (Orwell 280). As O’Brien embodies power, this passage shows what power can be: a friend, a protector, or a tormentor.
Winston’s misplaced trust on O’Brien leads to his own downfall. O’Brien uses his power to induct Winston into the underground Brotherhood, whose aim is to destroy the Party, by showing that he is on Winston’s side. Winston bares all his secrets to O’Brien when he professes to the Brotherhood. For example, he brings along his lover Julia with him and he clearly shows his love for her by saying “No!” (Orwell 200) when he is asked by O’Brien: “You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?” (Orwell 200). O’Brien is actually a Thought Police, so what Winston does is planting his seeds of destruction unknowingly. Orwell shows that it is dangerous to give anyone – especially a government – excessive trust and power, as they can easily manipulate back the naïve giver – just like the people of Oceania is being manipulated by the Party.
By the end of the book, Orwell starts to reveal the evil side of O’Brien. O’Brien pretends to be good but actually he has a hidden agenda: he wants to “save” Winston from the crime. Ironically enough, the Party also says that all the things that they do is for the good of the people, but they are actually the opposite – just like O’Brien. O’Brien can be considered as the most evil character in the novel. He oversees Winston’s entire time in the prisoner, taking almost a personal interest in him. By using his absolute power, he tortures and brainwashes Winston brutally in pursuit of his goal of “saving” Winston. “O’Brien absolute physical power enables him to force Winston to accept his essentially mad belief in a society based on the principle of power” (Meyers 137). In the end of the novel, Winston becomes a person who obeys the Party and “He loved Big Brother” (Orwell 342).
Through the character O’Brien, Orwell explains that his warning is not only towards totalitarian government, but also to any government that seeks for excessive power. O’Brien tells Winston that “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake” (Orwell 301) and – in fact – the German Nazis and the Russian Communists only “came very close to us” (Orwell 301). He says that the difference is they seek for “pure power” (Orwell 302) while the two totalitarian governments only “pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly” (Orwell 302). Therefore, the criteria of a government that can match the Party’s flawed characteristics is how much it longs for power, not whether it has any totalitarian trait.
Nineteen Eighty-Four examines the critical shortcomings and dangers of totalitarian rule. However, Orwell is not limiting his critics only to totalitarian government; his critics are towards any government that is being given excessive power or practicing any of the flawed characteristics of totalitarianism. Thus, the novel has an enduring relevance – a sign of great literature. For example, the perpetual, false war waged by the Party has a striking resemblance with the war on terrorism – a “different” kind of war – currently waged by the world’s biggest superpower, the United States of America. The invention of the ubiquitous internet, at first, seems to promise an end to the stifling monopoly of communication by totalitarian government and grants a total freedom of knowledge to everybody; again, it was a false hope. China has managed to build a ‘Cyber Record Department’ which filters scores of ‘unwanted’ websites and establishes a secret ‘Cyber Thought Police’ that can tract down cyber thoughtcrimes. O’Brien says to Winston while he is brainwashing him: “We are the priests of power… God is power” (Orwell 303).
I condemn totalitarianism, but at the same time I disagree that total democracy is always the right way to go. If we look at Iraq, the country was better off during Saddam era than it is right now. Saddam was cruel – by no means, I am suggesting it is the otherwise – but Iraq was more in control than it is right now. While the syiahs, sunnis, etc. cannot see eyes to eyes – what a shame – democracy does not help them to resolve their problems at all. During Saddam era, the equilibrium was there, albeit it was not really fair and based a lot on cruelty. The question is: Is Iraq better off under the current democracy system than it was under dictatorship? There is no clear cut answer of course.
In most cases, democracy is indeed the right way to go. However, democracy has its weaknesses and it should not be the sole system that we should follow. So much for democracy, the States are making marijuana legal. Majority supports the legalization of marijuana due to the fact that Marijuana is just as dangerous as alcohol. Instead of banning alcohol because its hazard is to the magnitude of a drug such as marijuana, the public is legalizing marijuana. What is wrong is still wrong, no matter what the majority say.
Critical Examination Of 1984 And Its Ramification In The Current World
“WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” (Orwell 6) are the three slogans of the ruling Party in Airstrip One – which is London – in the nation of Oceania. Working in the Record Department of the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, rewrites documents – the past – in accordance to the demand of the Party. However, he silently rebels against the totalitarian Party, which demands its citizen complete obedience and robs them of any right, freedom, and privacy. In his search to find the truth, Winston starts a secret, forbidden love affair with a fellow Party member, Julia. He soon finds out that in the nightmarish world he lives in, love means hate, war means peace, ignorance is a virtue, and freedom comes with betrayal. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a futuristic novel in which Orwell examines the critical shortcomings and dangers of totalitarian rule.
Nineteen Eighty-Four “belong to a particular genre which is usually described as anti-utopian or dystopian. As such it is a type of satire” (Calder 38). In order to understand what dystopian is, one must first know what is utopia. Utopia is “the imaginary of ideal or superior human society where people have the opportunity to live in peace and harmony” (Baldik 85) - a concept that was created by Plato. Nineteen Eighty-Four, the last book that Orwell wrote in his life, is about a disorganized and chaotic society which he imagines will occur if the world is ruled by a totalitarian government – or any other government that is given excessive power. This society is the opposite of Plato’s utopian concept, thus it is called dystopian.
The first characteristic of totalitarianism is “a single party committed to that ideology, usually led by one man” (Rush 71). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania is ruled by a single party, which is the Party, who is committed to the ideology “INGSOC” (Orwell 4) – or “English Socialism” (Orwell 42) – and it is led by Big Brother. The posters of Big Brother’s face gazing down over the caption “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” (Orwell 3) are omnipresent in London, a.k.a. Airstrip One. The Party members are told that Big Brother is the leader of the nation and the ruler of the Party. Every victory, every success, and even every scientific discovery “are held to issue directly from his dictatorship and inspiration” (Orwell 243). In fact, in the heresy book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, it is written that “Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and the Party is infallible” (Orwell 242). In spite of the supposed greatness of Big Brother, there is a palpable air of mystery and vagueness about him, as no Party members have ever met him. He is like a mystical powerful figure. Winston thinks he remembers that Big Brother emerged around 1960, but the Party’s official records says that Big Brother’s existence dates back to 1930, before Winston was even born. How can the people of a country trust somebody to lead their country when they are not even sure of his existence? The people of Oceania grant the Party excessive power, which is exploited by them to create the dystopic society in Oceania.
The second characteristic of totalitarianism is “police power based on terror” (Rush 71). The Thought Police in Nineteen Eighty-Four is an extreme version of this aspect of totalitarianism. Party members in Airstrip One are under total surveillance and monitoring by the Thought Police, especially through the use of high-tech gizmos like telescreen, hidden microphone, and patrol helicopter. What is extreme about the Thought Police is that they capture anyone who shows even a slightest sign of unorthodoxy - even like talking to oneself. This is evident when Winston says: “The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to oneself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality” (Orwell 71). Party members have lost their privacy and also their freedom. They live in terror as their movements are scrutinized all the time and it has become an instinct for them to behave in a robotic and extremely orthodox way. This is evident when Winston says: “You had to live –did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” (Orwell 5). Furthermore, those who are caught by the Thought Police are ‘vaporised’ without notice – not to mention about having a fair trial – and their existence in any registry will be deleted. Winston once points out that “purges and vaporisations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government” (Orwell, 53). In short, the Thought Police operates based on terror.
A totalitarian government also practices “a centralized economy and control of all organizations” (Rush 71). The Party has the Ninth Three-Year Plan, “which recall Stalin’s Five-Year Plans” (Calder 121). All Party members are forced to work hard, so that the goals set in the Three-Year Plan will be fulfilled. As a result, there is a depression and the Party members have to endure a low quality of life. The Party controls the supplies of products to an extend that necessities such as shoelaces and razor blades are “impossible to get hold on in any other way” (Orwell 8). The effect of depression set by the Party due to the economic constrain is seen in this passage: “The pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down together from motives of economy.” (Orwell 25). The economy of Oceania is ran solely by the Party and they are free to do anything they want – including oppressing economic plans – as they are being granted total power. The low quality of life endured by the Party members serves as a reminder of the danger of totalitarianism.
The Party is also in control of all organizations, which means only pro-Party organizations are allowed to be established. An example is the Junior Anti-Sex League which serves the purpose of promoting sex as “a duty to the Party” (Orwell 103). With total control of organizations by the Party, political will of the people – if there is any – cannot be translated into an organized act; as such organisations will be banded. This fact is underlined when even the underground heretic Brotherhood organization in Oceania is actually made up and controlled by the Party; in fact, it is an invention by the Thought Police. This is proven when O’Brien, an Inner Party member and a Thought Police, tells Winston that he himself writes the heretic book of the Brotherhood: “I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it” (Orwell 300). Considering this fact, the people of Oceania have no hope of defending their rights – through any organisation.
Another important aspect of a totalitarian government is “widespread Indoctrination, particularly through the education system” (Rush 71). The Party does this through many ways: The Two Minutes Hate, The Hate Week, Junior Anti-Sex League, and through the propaganda spreading device – telescreen. However, the most horrific indoctrination by the Party is that it has managed to brainwash the minds of the kids – at school – into thinking that it is heroic to denounce parents who are unfaithful to the Party: “Hardly a week passed on which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak – ‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used – had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents” (Orwell 29). The once impregnable bond between parents and their child, which usually will stand through any test, is now shattered by the Party’s indoctrination through the education system. Kids denouncing their parents is not something unheard of under the ruling of past totalitarian government like the U.S.S.R., but those cases were unintentional:- “The mask was taken off only at home, and then not always – even from your children you had to conceal how horror-struck you were; otherwise, God save you, they might let something slip in school” (McCaunley 85).
A totalitarian government also “monopolizes the means of communication” (Rush 71). The Party takes the meaning of monopolization of the means of communication and manipulation of information to a new height. The Party’s slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” (Orwell 40) speaks volume as to the Party’s policy on information and communication. The ministry of information and communication of Oceania is euphemistically named Ministry of Truth and its purpose is none other than to scrutinize every means of communication and alter them when their contents contradict with the Party’s ideology:-
This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs – to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance (Orwell 47).
Furthermore, statistics are unethically made up by the Party to cover the real truth and to show the performance of the Party in better light. For example:-
The Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boot for that quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in re-writing the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been over-fulfilled (Orwell 48) As a result, “history is continuously rewritten” (Orwell 243) by the Party, which bring the novel’s theme, the mutability of the past. No information can be verified to be truth anymore as the Party manipulates almost everything.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell also criticizes the totalitarian “Marxist-Leninist ideology” (McCaunley 124) of “rewriting the history” (McCaunley 124) and “the process of reality control to ensure orthodoxy” (McCaunley 124). Since Marxist-Leninist ideology is the basis of the totalitarian Soviet Union, it can be said that the ideology is pretty much the characteristic of a totalitarian government. The rewriting of history by the Party has already been discussed before, but the Party must also be able to make people trust the altered history, or at least make them accept it without any questioning.
Newspeak is introduced by the Party with the goal of ensuring orthodoxy by limiting people’s thought. Newspeak is an ‘evolution’ of the current modern English, but it is much shorter and its vocabulary is ironically much lesser. As Syme, a friend of Winston who is one of the ‘engineers’ of Newspeak puts it: “We’re destroying –words – scores of them, hundred of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone” (Orwell 59). In Newspeak, only the aspects of the language that contribute to the Party’s cause are preserved. Obviously words like freedom, democracy, and privacy are eliminated from the vocabulary. “Newspeak is the ultimate reduction of language. It was a reduction that, like the reduction of humanity, Orwell saw already happening around him” (Calder 105). Orwell wrote in his essay, Politics and the English Language: “Language should be an instant for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought” (Orwell, website). Ironically, Newspeak is specifically designed to prevent thought or “thoughtcrime” (Orwell 60). Syme understands this objective of Newspeak, as can be seen when he says to Winston: “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it” (Orwell 60). Orwell wrote in his essay, Politics and the English Language: “But if thoughts corrupt language, language can also corrupt thought” (Orwell 167). Newspeak not only deprives freedom of speech, it also deprives freedom of thought. It renders political will almost impossible and it is perhaps the Party’s single most powerful weapon in keeping itself in power. The invention of Newspeak ties into the novel’s theme: The importance of language to express thought.
Doublethink, a word in Newspeak, is the ability “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them” (Orwell 41). A blatant example of doublethink is the naming of the ministries in Oceania – the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth invents false news, the Ministry of Love tortures people. Another blatant example of the use of doublethink: During the Hate Week, the hatred towards Eurasia – Oceania’s enemy – is at its climax as the Party rally its members to hate the enemy in order to achieve collectivism. Suddenly, they announce that “Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally” (Orwell 209). Party members have to practice doublethink to accept this flagrant twist of truth – which most of them do as there was no revolt – or they will be caught by the Thought Police with the offense of committing “thoughtcrime” (Orwell 60), or worse, they can become insane. The Party members unquestioning nature in accepting whatever the Party says is an extreme example of the success of a totalitarian government in ensuring orthodoxy and it serves as a reminder to the reader that erroneous thought is the stuff of freedom – an important theme in the novel. O’Brien says to the rebellious Winston while they are in a torture room: “It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be” (Orwell 292).
The thrush is an important symbol in Nineteen Eighty-Four even though it appears only once in the novel. Winston and Julia hear the melodious song sing by a thrush while they are at the Golden Country – the countryside where they ‘date’ for the first time: “The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity” (Orwell 142). The thrush is a bird – an archaic symbol of freedom. To further associate it with freedom, Orwell wrote that it sings for no one and with no particular purpose. In other words, it sang because it has the freedom to do so. This is evident when Winston says, “For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?” (Orwell 142). Winston, whose each moves is dictated by the Party, cannot comprehend the purpose – or the lack of it – of the thrush as in his mind, freedom is nonexistence and something totally alien. The absence of the sense of freedom in Winston’s mind shows the novel’s important theme, the danger of totalitarianism. Another important thing to note is that Winston finds the song as very exquisite and melodious, unlike any other song that he had ever heard before. This is because he had only heard songs invented by the Party using machines: “the words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator” (Orwell 159). The thrush song is genuine, beautiful, and natural as it “never once repeating itself” (Orwell 142) and it is far superior to the fake, mechanical songs invented by the machine. The difference between these two songs symbolizes the mechanical and rigid life under the totalitarian government as oppose to the joyous life of those who have freedom.
The room above Mr. Charington’s antique shop is a hideout place for Winston and Julia. Winston likes the room since the first time he enters it:-
It seems to him he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like
this, in an armchair beside an open fire with your feet on the fender and
a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, and nobody watching
you, no sound except the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock. (111)
He likes the antique objects in the room like the kettle, the armchair, the “old-fashioned glass clock” (Orwell 111), and the wooden bed, which give Winston a sense of reliving the past; They awake his “ancestral memory” (Orwell 111). The memory theme is an important one in the novel. The biggest reason why Winston is so fond of the room is that “there’s no telescreen!” (Orwell 111). With no one watching him, he feels secure and alone – he likes the solitariness of the room. “The realities of 1984 force a longing to be beyond the all-seeing eye and intrusive voice” (Calder 61). In other words, he wants privacy the most, as all his life is under the constant surveillance and monitoring of the Party. The rare privacy that Winston gets from this room reminds the reader about the novel’s theme: The danger of totalitarianism.
The glass paperweight is a prominent symbol in the novel as it is often repeated. The glass paperweight is half-round and there is a pink sea anemone in it: “At the heart of it, magnifies by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone” (Orwell 109). Winston buys it at an antique shop which he frequently visits and the shop keeper tells him, “it wasn’t made a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it” (Orwell 109). He likes the paperweight because it is an antique, a rarity, something concrete from the past, not really because the thing is beautiful or purposeful:-
I don’t think it’s anything – I mean, I don’t think it was ever put to
any use. That’s what I like about it. It’s a little chunk of history
that they’ve forgotten to alter. It’s a message from a hundred years
ago, if one knew how to read it” says Wintson (168).
History has been extensively altered by the Party to suit its need and the antique paperweight symbolizes Winston’s “attempt to reconnect with the lost past” (Calder 69). Orwell also shows that Winston finds comfort and security in the paperweight. This can be seen when Orwell describes Winston’s fantasy about the paperweight: “The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal” (Orwell 169). The paperweight’s “curved surface” resembles a world, and Winston’s fantasy of living in it eternally with Julia suggests that Winston wants a world of his own where he can have privacy and he can do whatever he wants, which is something deprived by the totalitarian Party. However, the paperweight “remains a fragile object” (61) – a fragile glass – which reflects how fragile is his dream. “At the same time it reflects the vulnerability of both past and present” (Calder 61). The glass paperweight is “smashed to pieces on the hearth-stone” (Orwell 254) by the Thought Police when Winston and Julia are caught by them. The thought police action of smashing the glass into pieces represents the symbolical smashing of privacy and the real past by the totalitarian government.
The omnipresent telescreens are the ‘eyes’ of the Party in exercising total surveillance and monitoring of its members. The telescreen is a sophisticated television-shaped device, which is able to capture real-time video and audio and feeds them to the Thought Police: “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard” (Orwell 5). Not only that, the telescreen is also a propaganda tool for the Party as it shows programme that promotes nationalism and fake news about the Party’s achievements. The telescreen is a symbol of the abuse of technology by totalitarian government for its tyrannical needs instead for the good of the civilization.
Winston Smith, the hero of the novel, is far from being the typical hero. He is neither physically powerful nor high status. With his varicrose ulcer he ascends the stairs painfully: “Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicrose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times” (Orwell 1). He is a “smallish, frail figure” (Orwell 14) and he is frequently attacked by a coughing fit. Status wise, he is only a normal Party member, which can be considered as the middle-class. The only thing special about him is that he is “an individual who is perhaps more than ordinarily aware of his surroundings” (Calder 41). Winston’s ordinariness contributes to the reader’s understanding about the novel as he is the reader’s “vehicle of observation” (Calder 41).
Winston’s most prominent quality is his rebelliousness. He writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER!” in his diary, he breaks the Party’s rule by having an affair with a fellow Party member, Julia, and he willingly joins the Brotherhood – an anti Party organisation. At first, Winston’s rebellion seems to be only personal as his feeling is born out of discontent with his life. After Winston and Julia have their first sex, Orwell wrote, “Their embrace had been a battle, the climax is a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act” (Orwell 145). Even his ‘political act’ is actually personal, as sex is something definitely personal. However, his rebel has always been fueled by his intellectual awareness – he knows that the Party is defeating individuality, breeching privacy, and depriving people’s right. He writes in his diary: “From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!” (Orwell 32). As the story goes on, it becomes clear that Winston’s rebel is also political, as he willingly joins the underground heretic organization - the Brotherhood. He professes to O’Brien that he is willing to give his life for the cause of the Brotherhood: “You are prepared to give your lives? Yes. You are prepared to commit murder? Yes” (Orwell 199). The flaw in totalitarianism is that some of their citizens are actually discontent with them, even after all the indoctrination.
Winston also has a strong sense of fatalism – a strong belief that he is actually doomed. This can be seen when he writes in his diary: “Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death” (Orwell 33). When Winston rents the room above Mr. Charington shop as a hiding place for him and his lover Julia, this thought comes to his mind: “There it lay, fixed in future time, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100” (Orwell 161). Winston’s paranoia and fatalism are induced by the totalitarian Party’s ruling system based on terror.
Julia, Winston’s lover, is a sensuous character. Winston describes her as “young and lusty” (Orwell 116). She is the one who starts their relationship by slipping a paper saying “I love you” into Winston’s palm. She has a courage that Winston lacks, and this quality of hers attracts Winston. She is the only person who Winston can be sure hates the Party and wishes to rebel against it as he does. However, there is a fundamental difference between Julia’s rebelliousness and Winston’s. Her rebel towards the Party is more instinctive than intellectual. She likes to break the Party rules like having sex with Winston, but “She had not the faintest interest in the ramification of Party doctrine” (Orwell 179). Her lack of intellectual depth is seen when she questions Winston’s urge to keep an evidence of the Party’s alteration of history: “I’m quite ready to take risks but only for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper. What could you have down with it even if you had kept it?” (Orwell 179).
Julia is a striking contrast with Winston – apart from their sexual desire and hatred for the Party. She is an optimistic person – the opposite of the fatalistic and paranoid Winston. This can be seen when she scolds Winston for talking about their imminent death: “Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being alive?” (Orwell 156). Her lack of understanding of the real nature of the Party is perhaps the reason why she is an optimist. Then Winston begins to understand that many Party members are perhaps like Julia: They do rebel against the Party to a certain extend, but they do not see the big picture; they do not like the restriction imposed on them but they do not understand that they should have their own rights. Winston eloquently says, “They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird” (180). Julia’s lack of intellectual depth shows the novel’s theme: Erroneous thought is the stuff of freedom.
O’Brien is the third major character in Nineteen-Eighty Four and he serves the role to deliver the absolute power theme in the novel. Orwell does a good job in elaborating O’Brien’s characteristic and actions to show the definition of power, how dangerous absolute power can be, and how power can give positive impact to people. Winston’s loneliness and solidarity causes him to long for someone who can share his feeling of hatred towards the Party. Initially, he cannot find someone. However, after he meets O’Brien, an officer of Inner Party, for the first time, he feels that O’Brien is the perfect company to share his rebellious feeling. He can sense something “special” about O’Brien which gives him courage and support to continue his rebellion against the Party. This is shown when Orwell mentions that the diary which Winston writes to express his feeling – something that is considered as ‘thoughtcrime’- is “for O’Brien – to O’Brien” (Orwell 92). He dedicates his diary to O’Brien because he thinks that he is his protector – somebody who will support him and somebody who will always stand beside him when he faces troubles and this situation creates a unique bond between Winston and O’Brien. This special bond is shown when Orwell states Winston’s perception towards O’Brien: “He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend” (Orwell 280). As O’Brien embodies power, this passage shows what power can be: a friend, a protector, or a tormentor.
Winston’s misplaced trust on O’Brien leads to his own downfall. O’Brien uses his power to induct Winston into the underground Brotherhood, whose aim is to destroy the Party, by showing that he is on Winston’s side. Winston bares all his secrets to O’Brien when he professes to the Brotherhood. For example, he brings along his lover Julia with him and he clearly shows his love for her by saying “No!” (Orwell 200) when he is asked by O’Brien: “You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?” (Orwell 200). O’Brien is actually a Thought Police, so what Winston does is planting his seeds of destruction unknowingly. Orwell shows that it is dangerous to give anyone – especially a government – excessive trust and power, as they can easily manipulate back the naïve giver – just like the people of Oceania is being manipulated by the Party.
By the end of the book, Orwell starts to reveal the evil side of O’Brien. O’Brien pretends to be good but actually he has a hidden agenda: he wants to “save” Winston from the crime. Ironically enough, the Party also says that all the things that they do is for the good of the people, but they are actually the opposite – just like O’Brien. O’Brien can be considered as the most evil character in the novel. He oversees Winston’s entire time in the prisoner, taking almost a personal interest in him. By using his absolute power, he tortures and brainwashes Winston brutally in pursuit of his goal of “saving” Winston. “O’Brien absolute physical power enables him to force Winston to accept his essentially mad belief in a society based on the principle of power” (Meyers 137). In the end of the novel, Winston becomes a person who obeys the Party and “He loved Big Brother” (Orwell 342).
Through the character O’Brien, Orwell explains that his warning is not only towards totalitarian government, but also to any government that seeks for excessive power. O’Brien tells Winston that “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake” (Orwell 301) and – in fact – the German Nazis and the Russian Communists only “came very close to us” (Orwell 301). He says that the difference is they seek for “pure power” (Orwell 302) while the two totalitarian governments only “pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly” (Orwell 302). Therefore, the criteria of a government that can match the Party’s flawed characteristics is how much it longs for power, not whether it has any totalitarian trait.
Nineteen Eighty-Four examines the critical shortcomings and dangers of totalitarian rule. However, Orwell is not limiting his critics only to totalitarian government; his critics are towards any government that is being given excessive power or practicing any of the flawed characteristics of totalitarianism. Thus, the novel has an enduring relevance – a sign of great literature. For example, the perpetual, false war waged by the Party has a striking resemblance with the war on terrorism – a “different” kind of war – currently waged by the world’s biggest superpower, the United States of America. The invention of the ubiquitous internet, at first, seems to promise an end to the stifling monopoly of communication by totalitarian government and grants a total freedom of knowledge to everybody; again, it was a false hope. China has managed to build a ‘Cyber Record Department’ which filters scores of ‘unwanted’ websites and establishes a secret ‘Cyber Thought Police’ that can tract down cyber thoughtcrimes. O’Brien says to Winston while he is brainwashing him: “We are the priests of power… God is power” (Orwell 303).
No comments:
Post a Comment