Propaganda In George Orwell's Totalitarianism, By George Orwell

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power” (263). Through removing all power from the people, the Party gains the ability to prevent a revolt, or even the idea of a revolt, from happening. Orwell creates a comprehensive and vivid vision of a successful totalitarian government – an eerily effective warning to the future. Propaganda, as defined by Sheryl Tuttle Ross, is an epistemically defective message used with the intention to persuade a socially significant group of people on behalf of a political institution, organization, or cause, and this is the type of propaganda used by the

Citizens of Oceania are led to believe that every thought or action is under constant scrutiny by the Party, and that, if a crime is committed, the Party will become aware immediately. “You had to live – did live, from the habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” (3). The party is able to survey its citizens through the use of a device called a telescreen, and these telescreens are what makes the Party a nearly omniscient entity, and its citizens are aware of the Party’s omniscience. Consequently, the citizens will censor their thoughts and body language in an attempt to avoid allowing the Party to be aware of these things if they are unorthodoxy (Yeo 53). This type of surveillance is known as panoptical surveillance. However, it is not the only type that is employed by the party. If the party were to make its citizens believe that it is totally omniscient, it would never be able to find a citizen who is in a natural state of being. Therefore, the party allows for some instances in which the citizens believe that they are in complete, unobserved, privacy, and this allows the party to catch citizens who engage in unorthodoxy actions or thoughts (Yeo

Throughout humanity’s existence, arguments and beliefs have been validated with evidence of recorded past events and with memories. History can only exist because humanity can record it and remember it, so this allows for an opportunity to become very powerful if this truth is exploited correctly, and, eerily, the Party knows exactly how to exploit it. “If the party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened – that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture or death” (34). The Party has absolute, unwavering control of the present, and therefore, it has the ability to alter the recorded past. Because human memory is elusive and often inaccurate, the only way to know, without doubt, of the happening of an event in the past, is through recorded history (Mohomed 74). Thus, the citizens of Oceania, being deprived of true historical recordings, must believe and accept that all Party propaganda is true, and this allows the party to justify any action that it