George Orwell Dehumanization In 1984

Dehumanization is a process that the Cambridge Dictionary defines as the deprivation of a person from their independent thought, the ability to be sympathetic, and the ability to exercise their natural rights (Cambridge English Dictionary). Within 1984, George Orwell uses the state of the country Oceania as a juxtaposition to reveal the devastating effects of authoritarian rules of government such as the totarialistic state of the Soviet Union in the 1900s under the reign of Stalin. Under the rule of Stalin, all people were required to glorify Stalin as a god figure and show absolute loyalty to him and his cause or else they would be subject to death or exile, usually carried out by the secret police. This kind of rule through terror is represented …show more content…
This phenomenon can undoubtedly be seen in the events within the Soviet Union, but also within Nazi Germany and, in more modern times, North Korea, China, and Iraq. Seeing as all totalitarian regimes are alike in nature, the slogan of the Party that states “who controls the past controls the future” and “who controls the present controls the past” is a fitting description of the rule within these countries. This saying essentially means that the one in power has the ability to alter the past and the way that it can be interpreted to affect the future. On the one hand, if the past is made to be seen as an intensely negative time, people can be manipulated to accredit the government for saving the people from this terror. On the other hand, if the past is viewed by the people as a wonderful time, they will want to emulate it in the future and will often follow any proposed path to do so. Additionally, the one with power over the present also has the ability to alter the past through documents, records, and photographs amongst other things for “if all records [tell] the same tale, then the lie passed into history [will become the] truth” (34). These patterns of manipulation can be seen in all totalitarianism regimes that have happened in the past, yet Orwell distinguishes that the one thing that can truly ruin a society is the total dehumanization of its people. In Oceania, this dehumanization is represented through a blind faith in the words of the Party, the elimination of individuality, and the limitation of ways to express feelings which to many seems too extreme to be a prediction of the way the world will end up. However, with the continuous improvement on technology and our relied dependence on it, as a society, we are becoming more