George Orwell: The Fight Against Totalitarianism

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Winston Smith, the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four and one of the last free men in Oceania wants nothing more than to remember history before Big Brother. Big Brother tries to control the public and how they view the truth with numerous surveillance techniques. Big Brother maximized the control the political ruling class had over the residents of Airstrip One by utilizing the creation of Newspeak, a variety of propaganda, and constant surveillance of citizens by the use of telescreens and the thought police. Many believe that Orwell came up with the political ideas surrounding his book Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was written in a time were politics were influenced by World War One and the decade after. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell wrote, “The horrors of the Russian Revolution were still fresh in everyone’s minds.” I don’t think Orwell was necessarily giving us a detailed picture of how the future will look, or how political communication will be conducted. In D. J. Taylor’s 2004 biography of George Orwell he observed that, “the appeal – and the resonance – of Nineteen Eighty-Four to many of its original readers stemmed from the fact that it depicted a world that, by and large, they already knew.” This quote reinforces my idea that Orwell did not prophesize the future but forces us to think about how our past actions control our future. O’Briens statement "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Is Orwell stating about what he and many others experienced as a teenager living through the horrors of the First World War. In my mind this only reinforces the notion that Nineteen Eighty-Four was written around the structure of the Russian Revolution feeding the predictions Orwell... ... middle of paper ... ...ery step we make is on a tape somewhere. The same goes for smart phones, with the new tracking technology and apps like “Find My Friends” or the Facebook Check in feature our every more is traced. The only thing left for us to do is trust that the government will not put our information to ill use. Even though Orwell got the surveillance part right he was definitely in the wrong about big brothers ability to control us. Yes, the mass media may have some sort of control on us majority of people do not tune into the shows that are allowing them to frame and prime the information given to us. We can look to other sources of information to find the truth instead of only having one trusted source “The Trinity of Truth”, as they did in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Resistance can now be easily organized and people can be united through social media or forum websites like Reddit.

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