1984 George Orwell Totalitarianism

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Bombs blasting, fear around every corner, and the loss of loved ones, of course these factors would affect an entire era of people and literature. One of the people who had experienced the immense hardships of the modern era was named Eric Blair. Eric Blair, otherwise known as George Orwell, was born in 1903 and faced much difficulty through his draft in the army (Magill). The First World War, Spanish civil war, and Second World War played major roles in the time period, but more importantly Orwell himself. All the obstacles that came with these wars permanently changed the life of Orwell thus what he wrote about (George Orwell). The novel, 1984, by George Orwell, uses aspects of a fictional totalitarianist world such as politics, propaganda,…show more content…
The government within 1984 is a reflection of how Orwell believed that the Central Powers behaved and abused their power to terminate any opposition in their way. These abusive actions are depicted when Orwell writes, "This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound - tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance" (Orwell 46). The changing of undesirable information against the party shows how the government will undergo whatever they must to implement their own policies and methods, which is exactly what Blair had witnessed in the modern era. The novel underlays messages from the author to show how he believed the governments of the era were going to extremes in order to manipulate the way that the government was perceived and what was written about them. There were always conspiracies when it came to theses governments. It was…show more content…
The use of propaganda and psychological manipulation was one of the greatest threats of the entire era and is a proponent figure within the novel. It was not uncommon for governments turning on their own people in order to obtain control. It was even believed that the governments would kill the people during war times so that they would believe the propaganda being spread (Orwell 159). The novel illustrates how the INGSOC is exploding bombs on their own people just for the illusions that there is an ongoing war so they may not only maintain total rule, but so they may control the lives of their people. This way of controlling the nation was used throughout the modern era during the Second World War. The people of the nation, both Oceania and real countries, were subject to false teachings of the government in order for them to agree and believe whatever they were told: “2+2=5” (Orwell 297). When Orwell writes, "For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or the past is unchangeable? ‘If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?’" (Orwell 86), he is expressing how the people in the modern era are just puppets in the control of a higher power. With this propaganda mind control, governments in the modernist era were able to make
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