1984

The Power Of Technology

‘For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position’ (pg2)

Never able to switch it off (constant control, blind spot in the flat- encourage rebellion

‘And suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen’. (pg 16-17)

Literature vs technology-  women throws dictionary at screen pg 16, links to Nazis burning Jewish literature.

(control- new vs old) Censorship during the Two minute Hate 

The diary that he writes in is ‘peculiarly beautiful’ (pg8)

Ministry of Truth (pg6)

Technology has taken over their freedom, Party’s complete control of the newspapers, education etc

Novel writing machine pg11

No space for creativity 

Technology is used to alter people’s ideologies, including Winston’s (pg17)

• Lots of new technology, radio, TV in wider politics, war, nuclear weapons and rockets
• Orwell creates a technological advanced world in which fear is used as a tool for manipulating and controlling individuals who do not conform to the prevailing political orthodoxy. This is to educate the reader about the consequences of certain political philosophies and defects of human nature.

‘Yes’, said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have that privilege’. 

Privacy away from the telescreens is a privilege afforded only to inner Party members. 

‘He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under dazzling lights. A man in white coat was reading the dials’

The Control Of Individuals

‘Sooner or later they always get you’ 

Diary= first piece of evidence that exists outside himself (rebellion)

‘It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children’ (chapter 2)

‘The self-satisfied sheeplike face’ (pg15)

Link to animal farm

Constant visits to the community center (pg24), no control or choice

‘Spies’- radicalisation but it’s now the norm, ‘systematically turned into ungovernable little savages’ (pg26)

The Junior Spies are an organization in which children have become the police and denouncers of their parents in the name of Big Brother. By this means, the Party has managed to wedge itself between one of the most powerful instinctual bonds to turn parental devotion into fear and children into faithful machines of the Party as an extension of the Thought Police.

‘He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear’

‘Never show dismay’, ‘Never show resentment’ (pg39)

Human virtue is slowly being suborned and extinguished 

‘He was alone’ (pg28)

‘Merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another’ (pg43)

‘Orthodoxy is unconsciousness’ (pg56)

‘Proles and animal are free’ (pg75) 

(parallel to animal farm)

‘If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable- what then?’ (pg84)

‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows’ (pg84)

‘The heresy of heresies was common sense’ (pg84)

‘And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years’ (‘our duty to the Party’) (pg139)

‘The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately’ (pg 140)

Foreshadow the deceit at the end by Julia and Winston

‘Rats!’, murmured Winston. ‘In this room’ (pg151)

‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘We can turn it off. We have that privilege.’ (pg176)

‘You will receive orders and you will obey them, without knowing why’ (pg181)

‘When you are finally caught, you will confess’ (pg182)

‘He therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality, but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated’ (pg 223)

‘If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality’ (pg224)

‘For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes’ (pg224)

‘It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty’ (pg225)

‘If I could save Julia by doubling my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would’ (pg250)

‘He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded of him’ (pg254)

‘How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’ (pg261)

‘A minority of one’ (pg261) The last man in Europe

‘There are three stages in your reintegration.. There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance’ (pg273)

‘We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman’ (pg280)

‘No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer’ (pg280)

‘I have not betrayed Julia’ (pg286)

‘It was a common punishment in imperial China’ (pg299)

‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!’ (pg300)

‘’2+2=5’ (pg303)

‘I betrayed you,’ she said baldly.’ (pg305)

‘Laughing because the others were laughing’ (pg309)

‘Victory, victory, victory!’ (pg310)

‘The long hoped for bullet was entering his brain’ (pg311)

‘He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’ (pg311)

Violence=brutal, sadistic quality of the guards and troops, ‘the long, rolling clang’ of the washtub thrown across the yard, the sound of ‘trampling boots’– onomatopoeia showing how ordinary life has been disturbed, the soldier looks at the naked Winston, balancing his truncheon ‘meditatively’

The betrayal of the family bond is a common theme in 1984. Orwell illustrates how weak that loyalty has become with the skull-faced man’s desperate begging to watch his wife and children’s throats be slit as an alternative to the Ministry of Love’s room 101 with a complete lack of “private loyalties”.

Parsons’ remark “In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway”(193) in response to his daughter’s betrayal, clearly portrays the Party’s influence in the family institution. Not only does the daughter value the Party’s approval more than her father’s life, but also Parsons’ appropriate response is to be grateful for the betrayal and to those who enforce it.

‘A desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current’

• Asyndetic listing, mechanical, unnatural, systematic oppression, influx of emotion

‘The Hate rose to a frenzy’

• Capitalisation, defamiliarisation 
•  No individuality, have become a part of the submissive, unthinking agent- a byproduct of the regime

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words’ reminiscent of F451 ‘It was a pleasure to burn’

Propaganda And The Manipulation Of Language

• Double Think (slogan) and Newspeak (GRAPHOLOGY)

Act of holding simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions, believing in both simultaneously and absolutely

Requires logic against logic or suspending disbelief in the contradiction

• ‘Big Brother is watching you’

Note how Orwell uses the present participle ‘watching’ in the slogan to imply how the regime is continuously carrying out surveillance on the population, rather than it happening on a single occasion.

• Newspeak- designed to diminish the range of thought 
• INGSOC (unnatural)- newspeak, double think, the mutability of the past
• ‘For the future, for the past- for an age that might be imaginary’ (pg29)
• ‘The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible’ 
• ‘Who controls the past’, ‘controls the future, who controls the present controls the past’ (pg37)
• ‘You could prove nothing’ (pg39)

Orwell believed that ‘ugly’ and inaccurate English enabled oppressive ideology and that vague or meaningless language was meant to hide the truth- 1946 Politics and the English Language 

• ‘If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’ BBC ARTICLE 

The party’s control is Ubiquitous (everywhere)

• ‘Asleep or awake’ (pg29)- syntactical parallelism 
• ‘Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’ (pg55)
• ‘Until they become conscious they will never rebel. And until they have rebelled they cannot become conscious’ (pg74) CHIASMUS– Doublethink
• ‘Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different person?’
• ‘The party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism’ (pg225)
• ‘He understood HOW; he did not understand WHY’ (pg28)
• ‘It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane’ [O’Brien] (pg271)
• ‘Men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves’ (pg275) 
• ‘That the Party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others’ (pg275) 

• ‘No science’– illustrates how the Party is eradicating the truth and how a new future will be funded on lies and manipulation- links to a religious aspect (the crusades) of how they funded their reign on blood and evil and that eventually the natural order will be restored which is what Winston is trying to get at what he believes that they can’t rule forever.

Totalitarianism 

• ‘WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’

First introduction of doublethink. Weakening the independence and strength of individual’s minds and forcing them to live in a constant state of propaganda induced fear.

According to the party- ’Freedom is slavery’ the man who is independent is doomed to fail, and vice versa ‘slavery is freedom’– man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want.

‘Ignorance is strength’– the inability of people to recognise these contradictions cements the power of the authoritarian regime 

Doublethink (belief in contradictory ideas simultaneously)

• Winston is the symbol of the values of civilised life and his defeat is a poignant reminder of the vulnerability of such values in the midst of all powerful states
• ‘Why I write’ 1947- ‘desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the land of society that they should strive after’
• Oceania- reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, complete repression of human spirit, absolute government control of daily life, constant hunger and ‘systematic vaporisation’ of individuals who do not, or will not comply with the government’s values
• Orwell shows he is staunchly against any form of government totalitarianism
• ‘There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment’ (Chapter 1)
• ‘The process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters… to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance’
• ‘It was at night that they came for you, always at night’ (pg106)
• ‘Our only true life is in the future’ (pg183)
• ‘To the past,’ said Winston. ‘The past is more important’ agreed O’Brien’ (pg184)
• ‘In the place where there is no darkness?’ (pg185)
• ‘The hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed’ (pg 189)
• ‘It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened’ (pg191)
• ‘In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area’
• ‘In a long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance’ (pg198)
• ‘The empirical method of thought…is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc (pg201)
• ‘He is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages (pg204)
• ‘If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies’ (pg204)
• ‘But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous’ (pg206)

Arms Race-1947

• ‘A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war’ (pg208)
• ‘Conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and unequality’ (pg211)
• ‘In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for the slave populations of the equatorial lands, who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure’ (pg 217)
• ‘The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same’ (pg218)
• ‘Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought’ (pg220)
• ‘Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you made. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you cling to the truth even against the whole world, you were not made’ (pg226) The Last Man in Europe
• ‘There is only one offence, is there not? (pg241) Ampleforth
• ‘There is no difference between night and day in this place. I do not see how one can calculate the time’ (pg243)
• ‘You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you? [..] even took a slightly sanctimonious expression.’ [Parson] (pg243)
• ‘Never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all’ [Parsons] ‘It was my little daughter’ (pg245)
• ‘Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want’ [prisoner] (pg248)
• ‘He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far back in 1968’ (pg254)
• [O’Brien] ‘I shall save you, I shall make you perfect’ (pg256)

Auxiliary VERB 

• ‘Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane!’ (pg265)
• ‘You are a flaw in the pattern’ (pg267)
• ‘By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men’. (pg268)
• ‘We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves’ (ppg269)
• ‘Power is not a means, it is an end’ (pg276)
• ‘We are the priests of power,’he said.’God is power’ (pg276)
• ‘The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual’ (pg277)
• ‘Collective solipsism’ (pg279)
• ‘A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself’ (pg279)
• ‘The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again’ (pg280)
• ‘It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide’. (pg281)
• ‘The Party is immortal’ (pg282)
• ‘The Party is infallible’
• ‘Men are infinitely malleable’ (pg282)
• ‘What is it, this principle that will defeat us? The spirit of man’ (pg282)
• ‘You are the last man’ (pg283)
• ‘This is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity’ (pg285)
• [O’Brien] ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face- forever’
• ‘Symptoms of unorthodoxy’ 

Loyalty and Rebellion

• ‘Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the telescreen’ (pg28)
• ‘Comrade Ogilvy’ (pg49) ‘Who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten’ (pg50)
• ‘I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY’ (pg83)
• ‘The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote: thought crime does not entail death: thought crime is death’
• ‘Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty’
• ‘For a moment, he was violently angry’
• ‘All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the state, against foreigners..’
• ‘The children… were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations’ (pg140)
• ‘They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question’ (pg172)
• ‘We are enemies of the Party’ (pg177)
• ‘You are prepared to commit murder’ (pg179)
• ‘Weaken the power of the Party?’
• ‘There have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low.’ (pg209)
• ‘A noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck’

Free indirect speech blurs the lines between the narrator and Winston, suggesting that he is observing and criticising this regurgitated propaganda, albeit silently. ‘Quacking’= simile. Animal Farm sheep baaing ‘Two legs bad, four legs good!’

With colleagues- ‘You did not have friends nowadays’, ‘you had comrades’- complete removal and hostility towards such a common human bond of friendship

Ampleforth is arrested for his inability to remove the word ‘God’ from a line of poetry. No one is safe…There is no security in Oceania within the Party

History and Memory

Systematically distorting the truth and continuously rewriting history to suit its own purposes

• ‘All history was a palimpsest’ (pg42)
• ‘It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones’

Etymology ‘history’

• ‘Elimination of unreliable elements..’ Politics and the English language 
• ‘If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles’ (pg72)
• ‘Jus primae noctis’ (pg76)
• ‘Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready-made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence’. 
• ‘There was a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to be Oliver Cromwell’

The scene in Victory Square gain foregrounds the regime’s manipulation of British history.

Olver Cromwell- head of the forces of Parliament who disposed King Charles I

• ‘And in her practised way she scraped together a small square of dust and with a hug from a pigeons nest began drawing a map on the floor’ (pg143)
• [Julia] ‘Examining the absurd twelve hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement’ (pg152)
• ‘I wonder what a lemon was…’ ‘I’ve seen oranges. They’re a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin’.
• ‘Syme had vanished’ (pg154)
• ‘Do you realise that the past, starting from  yesterday, has been actually abolished?’ (pg162)
• ‘History has stopped’ (pg162)
• ‘The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already’ (pg208)
• ‘Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago’ (pg210)
• ‘Oceania was at war with Eastasia, Eurasia was an ally’ (pg188)
• ‘It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened’ (pg191)
• ‘The cyclical movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so, and if it was intelligible, then it was alterable’ (pg212)
• ‘Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be  averted’ (pg212)
• ‘At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother’ (pg216)
• ‘History is continuously rewritten’ (pg222)
• ‘At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now’ (pg222)
• ‘He was relating the entire history of his life to an audience who knew it already’ (pg255)
• ‘You are unable to remember real events, and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened’ (pg258)
• ‘The past was alterable. The past never had been altered’ (pg290)
• ‘The Party says the earth is flat’, ‘the Party says that ice is heavier than water’ (pg291)
• ‘Oranges and lemons’ say the balloons on St.Clements’[..]’Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!’

It’s a very old rhyme about all the different churches in London. They all had bells, which were designed to welcome/remind the people about going to church. Living in London, say 200 years ago, one would have heard lots of these bells ringing . The rhyme  imagines that the churches are talking to each other. It imagines that they are competitive and even fighting with each other – a strange idea for churches. It’s quite a violent end to the rhyme, which could foreshadow what happens to Winston later on.

• The idea that history is an official, public record, set against personal, subjective memories. Yet history is a narrative that can be moulded to suit the writer and their agenda 
• The old man has only scattered, fragmentary memories- is Orwell suggesting that as individuals we have a responsibility to remember?
• The Party-science and external reality are not things to believe in- it’s all in our head. Our relationship with historians is based on trust and truth telling
• ‘Paperweight’– breaks, memories  are in control by the Party
• ‘Ninth Three-Year Plan’ 

Love and Sexuality 

• Winston’s antipathy for women results from him blaming them for letting the Party turn them into sexless beings who are expected to have sex only to procreate but to never enjoy the act.
• ‘Sexless’- take away characteristics of a woman 

Take aspects of plato’s republic into Orwell’s totalitarian state

• ‘Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism’ 
• ‘It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible’
• The goal of the Party is to wipe out the individual; “There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.”(220) In 1984 Orwell warns about the future of man who is doomed to lose his individualism without love and loyalty
• Sex is an act of outright rebellion, as all enjoyable sex must be in a society where the act is supposed to be free of pleasure. In this sense, Winston’s affair with Julia is a political act against the Party, which is part of the attraction. Perhaps the greatest crime they commit is declaring love for someone as an individual, someone who is separate from the Party.
• ‘Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him’
• ‘Tactility, the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed’
• ‘To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image’ (pg70)
• ‘He disliked nearly all women’ (pg12)
• ‘The women of the party were all alike’ (pg71)
• ‘All the workers in Pornosec, except the head of the department were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled’ (pg137)
• ‘By bottling down  some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force’ (pg40)
• ‘You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards ,’ he told her’ (pg163)
• ‘They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another’ (pg172)
• ‘She did everything that was needed- cooked, washed’

The typical gender roles are reinforced where the woman is the housewife. Verb ‘needed’ highlights the party’s ideology of maintaining control through traditional values. Highlights the level of control of Winston’s mother as not being able to do anything else but what is expected of her.

• ‘Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was one thing that they could never do’ (pg228)
• ‘You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades’ (pg51)
• ‘He loved her and would not betray her, but that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic’ (pg240)
• ‘We shall abolish the orgasm’ (pg280)
• ‘There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party’ (pg280)
• ‘Good sex-that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children; and without physical pleasure on the part of the women: all else was sex crime’ (pg319)
• ‘Perhaps one didn’t want to be loved as much as to be understood’

Winston loves Julia but she does not understand him as much suggested by the way she falls asleep when Winston used to take about the Party-  was betrayal inevitable?

• ‘He told her about the frigid little ceremony that katherine had forced him to go through on the same night every week’ ‘she hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it’
• ‘But after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him’
• ‘She had become a physical necessity’
• By removing pleasure, becomes clear that ‘sexual privation induced hysteria is desirable because it can be transformed into war-fever and leadership’

Allows them to harvest these heightened emotions into acts like the ‘two minutes hate’, satirising how many dictatorial regimes of the 20th century , such as Nazism, commonly employed similar emotional manipulation, with Hitler channeling the anger off the German people at minorities , like the Jews who became scapegoats for all the countries issues

• Emotional deprivation of the pleasure instinct allows the ruling power greater control
• ‘Their embrace has been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.’
• “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

Thus, to be an individual oneself is to ultimately be able to fully acknowledge the individuality of another while recognising a shared humanity that would be antithetical to the false collectivity propounded by the Party. Winston and Julia represent the real world, the world that O’Brien and the Party will destroy. The Party can only recognise and therefore tolerate itself, which explains why it can inflict pain so readily and remorselessly. It cannot recognise the actual otherness that constitutes the humanity of the specific individual.

• Winston’s memories of his mother’s love “in a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason”(pg28) confront his suspicions that to “remain human”, one was “not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another”(pg136)

Context

Orwell’s ideas: 

• ‘In a world where it is not possible to be good’– George Orwell
• ‘Thought can corrupt language, language can corrupt thought’ (reflection of thought police)
• ‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it’ (why I write 1946)
• ‘Though can corrupt language, language can corrupt thought’– Thought police
• ‘I think from the very start my literary ambition were mixed up with the feelings of being isolated and undervalued’ – mirrors Winston
• Homage to Catalona– seeking the truth 

‘[it] is necessary  to try and establish the truth, as far as it is possible’

Politics and the English Language:

‘Political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible’

‘Political language has to consist largely of euphemism question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness’

Background:

• Orwell’s first job was an imperial police officer in Burma- a democratic socialist 
• Ashamed of his role- Burmese oppressed by British. 1984= emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment 
• Against imperialism led not only to his personal reflection of the bourgeoisie lifestyle but to a political reorientation
• Karl Marx- ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’
• Orwell was a socialist, but he didn’t believe it was a perfect system, particularly in that it could be taken advantage of by power-hungry people and turn into totalitarianism as in 1984

British posters and slogans from the First World War

• Lord Kitchener- 1984 Big Brother similarity 
• Government controlled many parts of the economy and people’s lives. Orwell saw how this potentially could be turned into a British form of totalitarianism 

The London Blitz (1940)

‘One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin’

-George Orwell, in his war-time diary, 3rd July 1941

‘You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: it is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror..’

-Winston Churchill, speech to parliament 1940

Victory mansions, victory square- allusions to the British focus on ‘victory’ during the war

Attlee defeats Churchill in 1945

• Expanded welfare state, NHS, comprehensive schools and improved benefits for the unemployed
• Orwell was supportive of these changes, still wary of how ‘socialism’ could be manipulated by the powerful into the totalitarian regimes seen in fascist Germany and Stalin Russia.

Animal Farm

• 1944: Animal Farm performed by children
• Men exploit animals just as the rich exploit the proletariat
• If animals became aware of their strength, we would have no power over them
• ‘Two legs bad, four legs good’
• ‘Man is the only real enemy we have’

Reflection of 1984= ‘what is it, this principle that will defeat us? spirit of man’

• ‘All men are enemies. All animals are comrades’
• ‘Hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life’
• ‘The Republic of the Animals’
• Eradication of history- 7 commandments, now only 1
• New generation cannot understand the past
• Hitler’s Germany: Mein kampf studied in every school- compulsory
• ‘4 legs good, 2 legs better’

History:

Joseph Stalin 1920s-1953

• The Great Terror 1937
• Enforced by the NKVD (secret police)

Public show trials

Part of the Great Purges. 

The removal of opposition or potential opponents to the Communist Party and to Stalin went through three phases: chistki, show trials, or Yezhovshchina. The third phase was known as the Great Terror, which involved executions and imprisonment. Terror under Lenin was directed more at external opposition, such as kulaks or mensheviks. Stalin attacked the party itself. It began in earnest in 1936 and was at its height in 1937-38.

Cult of Personality

The growth of a cult of personality began in the 1920s through to the 1940s where Stalin was presented as an ‘omnipotent’ leader that people should love and revere.

• Positively, people saw him as a Godlike figure. It seemed as if all the achievements made by the public only happened as a result of him. it shows how Stalin had replaced God in Russian society and the full extent of the indoctrination. they essentially worshipped him and he had great power as well as control over the population. The cult of personality allowed him to become an extremely popular leader, even surpassing historical and infamous figures, like ‘Caesar Augustus’.

Newspeak- derived from the syllable abbreviations of Russia which identify the government and social institutions of the Soviet Union such as Politburo (Politburo of the Central)

In 1931, Stalin shortened the country’s production targets, aiming to complete the work for the 5-Year Plan in just 4 years.

Reflection- 2+2=5

Propaganda everywhere; history textbooks and photographs were changed to make him the hero of the Revolution and obliterate the names of purged people (Trotsky and Lenin)

Russia

Order of Parental Glory 2008- present

• Awarded to parents who are married in a civil union/single-parent families, 

who raises seven or more children as citizens of the Russian Federation

A05: FEMINIST CRITICISM

• On the thematic level, the feminist reader should identify with female characters and their concerns

Nazi Germany

‘The process of Nazification by which Nazi Germany established a system of total control over all aspects of Society’

Cross of Honour of the German Mother 1939-45

• Increase birth rate, none stop propaganda campaign that glorified starting a family and having children
• Financial privileges connected with honour
• Hitler= Godfather for 10th child in a family
• 1st Class= Gold cross, 8^
• 2nd Class= Silver cross, 6^
• 3rs Class= Bronze cross, 4^

Gestapo, secret police

Mein Kampf (my struggles), Hitler’s book studied at school

Youth groups in Nazi Germany (1930s)

• The Band of German Maidens

The only legal female youth organisation in Nazi Germany

• Hitler Youth (‘the Spies’ of 1984)

For teenage boys aged 14-18, said to be more effective than the ‘Gestapo’, secret police in finding unorthodox family members. Taught hate and antisemitism.

Shocking to a modern British audience as children’s institution remains largely politically neutral.

MARRIAGE AND RELATIONSHIPS IN NAZI GERMANY (1930S-40s)

• Hitler = increase the birth rate of the Aryan race
• Newlyweds given money to marry
• The Motherhood Cross and other benefits given to mothers with more children
• Easier to divorce
• Legalising sterilisation and abortions for people who the Nazi deemed ‘disabled’ or ‘undesirable’ (no disabled people mentioned in 1984)
• Marriage between Germans and Jews, people of colour and Roma were made illegal
• The policy of Lebensborn (‘Fountain of Life’), encouraging unmarried women to have children with men in the SS (the most fanatical Nazi members) 

The one-child policy in modern China

• The rules were relaxed in 2013 so that couples may now have two children, as long as one of the parents is an only child.

Links to O’Brien

The Spanish Inquisition- enforcing Catholic Orthodoxy in Medieval Europe

NKVD

• Files state that there had never been an acquittal of a defendant and no defendant before 1945 pleaded ‘not guilty’

Brainwashing- a term coined in 1950 by Edward Hunter in Miami News 

• Mao Zedong’s Red Army, Former Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, used terrifying ancient techniques to turn the Chinese people into mindless Communist automation 

PROJECT MK ULTRA AND CIA MIND CONTROL 1950S AND 60S

Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through mind control.

Techniques & Ideas

• 1984 was going to be called ‘The Last Man in Europe’ (a pivotal motif in the novel)
• The discrepancy between language and reality – Orwellian 
• Winston- fatalist protagonist 
• World of constant duplicity, manipulation and surveillance
• Dionysus= disorder, chaos, pleasure, blurred lines
• Apollo= rational thinking, order, strength, clarity
• Slogan= ‘watching’ implies how the regime is continuously carrying out surveillance on the population, rather than it happening on a single occasion. 
• Utopia- an imagined place or future where everything is perfect. Based on the book Utopia by Sir Thomas Moore. Derived from the Greek ‘No place’
• Winston speaks of standard English, which is associated with prestige and currency (spoken by the ruling class), education, and power.
• Claustrophobic fable of totalitarianism 
• Hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness 
• Social media collects every gesture, purchase, and comment we make online and feeds an omniscient presence in our lives that can predict our every preference. Modelled on consumer choices, where the user is the commodity that is being marketed, the harvesting of those preferences for politics is now distorting democracy. (e.g Cambridge Analytica scandal 2018)

Goldstein’s arguments

• New technologies mean people don’t have to work so much in order to achieve something
• We should become more equal in society. Poor people have more access to technology and more time to think and reflect so they become more similar to the rich 
• Start a war, to use lots of resources and technology that could otherwise be used to make a society more equal

SIGNIFICANCE: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM 

• As a reminder of both the origins of the Party’s philosophy 
• The intention undermines the way the Party operates ‘Oligarchical Collectivism’
• Without spelling out exactly how authoritarians had exerted their power and influenced societies by the means established in ‘The Theory and the Practice’
• Orwell would not be able to make concrete statements about how authoritarian governments are 

1. Self-defeating
2. Have weaknesses

‘Oligarchical collectivism’- Goldstein’s book

• Didactic 
• Parallels Trotsky’s work dealing with the nature of Stalinism in 1924- ‘The Revolution Betrayed’ by Leon Trotsky (published 1936)
• Marginalised, wrote the book before the Moscow trials. Criticised USSR, rulers, advocates a new political revolution to overthrow the Stanilist dictatorship  and bring about a Socialist democracy
• Big Brother= Stalin, Goldstein== Trotsky

Didactic– wants to educate the audience, on how power can be abused if put in the wrong hands.

• He wants the reader to know from a source outside of Winston’s incomplete, subjective consciousness what the aims of the state of Oceania truly are.
• The misery and endless warfare which the people in 1984 are not accidental or necessary, but deliberately manufactured 

1945- the Allies defeat Nazi Germany

• Europe divided into an Eastern area control by the Soviet (the ‘iron curtain’) and a Western area controlled by democratic governments, with American military and economic support
• In the ‘Managerial Revolution’ (1941) by James Burnham- argued that the three now superstates would emerge in America, Asia and Europe. These would be run by a new elite group of managers 
• Orwell believed the book underestimated the strength of democracies 
• ‘The age of the nation-state is over…economically it is the continent that counts’– Labour supporter Harold Lask

• Nuclear warfare- 2 atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 to end the conflict -upto 226,000 deaths
• Arms Race– Soviet Union develops this capability; 1st successful- August 1949
• A constant state of war allows for continuous production and a common enemy
• Uses up the surplus of goods to keep the majority of the public in poverty

Language:

• NEWSPEAK– systematic stripping of meaning out of language. The fictional language of Oceania. Its vocabulary and grammar are deliberately simplified with the intention of limiting of individual’s thought.

• Free indirect speech- a style of third-person narration where the narrator can both observe a character from the outside and seamlessly access their thoughts
• Zoomorphism– Changing something into an animal
• Anthropomorphism-changing something into a person
• Litotes– you’re explaining something by describing what it is not

• Turn important adjectives and verbs into nouns= NOMINALISATION
• Asyndeton/asyndetic list– a list with no conjunctions (like ‘and’ or ‘but’), which emphasises the seemingly straightforwardness of the message. SENSE OF URGENCY.
• Vladimir lenin, early communist leader ‘Peace, Land, Bread’
• Abstract vs Concrete nouns: a manipulation tactic to establish control

Abstract noun: a name for something intangible (can’t be touched), idea: truth, hope, love

Concrete noun: a name for something tangible (can be touched) table, pen, computer

• It helps O’Brien paint an ideal world that none of the party members necessarily know but is intrigued to work hard to try and achieve 
• They often focus on an individual confronting some difficulty in their life and world, they are usually read by an individual, rather than a group
• Big Brother- abstract noun- vague presence- intimidating

• Dichotomy-where one divides things into opposing categories: good vs evil
• Brotherhood vs Party
• False Dichotomy– sometimes this idea of dividing things into opposing categories is false and simplistic. Perhaps everyone has some good and evil in them; perhaps there are more similarities than differences between the Brotherhood and the Party

Notes of POV:

• When it is first person, it suggests that Winston has a sort of control, when he doesn’t. Hence, free indirect speech third-person narration
• Orwell’s style lends itself to the mundane. Gloomy detail- showing Winston’s feelings
• Third person rather than first. In order to show the distance between an individual’s behaviour in the totalitarian world and how they truly think and feel
• Limited third person: the narrator focuses on Winston and we are not privy to the thoughts of other characters 
• Increase tensions
• Past tense used to describe a futuristic regime- paradox– has the regime been defeated? Is the narrator some kind of survivor?
• Everything is filtered through his perspective, yet other perspectives are sidelined
• We hear Winston’s thoughts.. Are we not like Big Brother?

THE MINISTRIES:

‘It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air’(pg5)

‘At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother’ (pg216)

• All ministries are pyramids- hierarchy 
• Pyramids were built in the exact central coordinates of the earth, making them seem powerful, the shaped buildings of the Party are also pyramids enforcing their power and control over the people
• (Built on slaves) ‘If there is hope it lies in the proles’– Winston knows those indoctrinated masses are the only way to defeat the regime.
• Hierarchy emerges (sometimes subtly) even in a society that seems to value equality over everything else
• In Stanilist Russia, they had inner Party members (Politburo) and then other members, even though they argued to be a socialist society fighting for equality.

Orwell’s Intentions:

• By using a dystopian setting for 1984, Orwell suggests the possibility of a utopia and then makes clear, with each horror that takes place, the price humankind pays for ‘perfect’ societies.
• Many people in Britain sympathised with the Soviet Union (England’s ally) because it was an enemy of Hitler and the Nazis. But the underestimated the depths of Stalin’s own totalitarian regime.
• In 1984, Orwell utilises various terms of propaganda, such as repeated slogans, posters and endless radio broadcasts, to indoctrinate the people with the Party’s ideology 
• Therefore, Orwell highlights how we should look after our children who remain vulnerable at the hands of an authoritarian state.
• By writing 1984 as a novel (rather than an article or a poem, say) Orwell encourages us to see the full horror of what it is like to live as an individual in a totalitarian world
• In a totalitarian state, the life of an individual has no value in and of itself. Its only value is in accomplishing the goals of the regime

Critical perspective of the regime

The ends justify the means: ‘we shall not enter the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor,’ Leon Trotsky (early communist leader)

• Language is wrenched and distorted as society tries to keep up the idea of equality while also in reality allowing the control of a new ruling class.
• Orwell shows us the unconscious conformity of others and a protagonist who can only say nothing; this underlines Orwell’s warning about how it can be to escape totalitarian control
• Orwell is showing that the potential for physical violence underlies the fear and psychological control of totalitarian regimes.
• It outlines some elements of how the state could use its power to dominate or influence the lives of people primarily through the aspect of cultural conditioning as the Party can manipulate and control the people through totalitarian policies.
• This can be seen clearly by how Winston Smith’s personality is manipulated to the extent that he is not only integrated into the Party’s image but also comes to adore Big Brother though involuntarily. According to the author, the novel is intended to enlighten society on the kind of society they should desire.
• Winston fails to maintain any solid relationships with work colleagues or anyone but Julia. Orwell cautions readers about the neglect of relationships as a result of devoting your life to work and a hectic existence, an essential message of humanity that the 21st century has ignored, with our lifestyles accelerating with work and technological advancements that have caused us to drown out the essence of close relationships more than ever.