Assess The Role Of The Government In The Novel 1984 By George Orwell

In the novel 1984 George Orwell creates a dystopian future. He imagined a system of public surveillance where people do not have privacy in public or in their own homes. Orwell predicts that people will give up their personal freedoms, and right to privacy out of fear. The system created in 1984 seems clumsy and avoidable but the surveillance system imagined by Orwell pales in comparison to what our government is capable of doing.What Orwell presented in his novel has not only come to pass, but has superseded his expectations and in reality what the government is able to do is far more sophisticated. This is due to the invention of cell phones, GPS, the internet, and social networks. Through the advancement in technology, our society is being …show more content…
The Language Police is a formal pervasive system of censorship that warps the content of schoolbooks, state-sponsored tests, and other educational products until they have little connection to the real world. In the novel 1984 The primary function of the Ministry of Truth is to construct lies that fit with the government 's current interpretation of reality. Winston 's job is to rewrite historical news so that anyone who chooses to check will see that. By rewriting history to fit with their current claims, the Ministry helps to construct the notion that Big Brother is an infallible, godlike leader. They also attempt to squash dissent by making it difficult for anyone to talk about the past. As said by winston “ All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary”(winston 40). Just as in the novel 1984, the language police are creating a grossly fictitious world of there own and are implementing that upon students in today 's society. In Anne Westwaters article “ Censorship from the Left and Right Distorts Textbooks ” she says “ But not until I read The Language Police did I recognize the extent, the complexity, and the rigor of the censorship system that degrades and impoverishes both the literary characteristics and the conceptual features of books that students read in our schools”(westwater 2). Westwater also says that “ The language police have …show more content…
Newspeak was created to institute thought control and exert political control through restrictive changes to the language.By modifying the language, Big Brother hoped to eliminate thoughtcrime and the drive for freedom. In the novel “1984”, Syme, winston 's friend says, “ It 's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well ”(syme 51). It is very difficult to escape the impression that Orwell’s future is closer to the reality that we are facing than most people would like to believe. In today 's society we see connections made from the way our society speaks and to Orwell 's newspeak language. Newspeak is being used for achieving various purposes, and it has permeated very deeply into our daily lives. For example the way individuals speak on twitter, facebook, instagram, or even the way they write a text sounds as if we are speaking the newspeak language. The range of vocabulary and word class has been narrowed, and structure has become simpler. Art silverblatt in her article, “Parallels between Twitter and Orwell 's Newspeak” says, “ One way to understand the impact of Twitter is to consider another language that is predicated on the elimination and abbreviation of words - the language of Newspeak, found in