Governmental control is a necessity for mass control and order of a state. This idea is openly questioned over on George Orwell’s novel 1984. While fictitious, the novel illustrates a society that has gone too far in its distribution of powers. The totalitarian aspect of the novel and complete omniscience of the government seemingly hold a haunting message to any future society. However, was the Orwellian account of Oceania simply a message or was it a reminder? The extreme intervention and interference of a government in all human affairs and activities leads to undesirable supremacy. Specifically, Oceania’s government hardly ever used brute force in public as a main purpose of dissuading people from doing criminal activity according to their
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According to Lubonja, a famous Albanian dissident and writer, a totalitarian regime has the existence of a single party that controls the majority of all government and political activity, an ideology that is invested into the truth of the nation with authority, a distribution method of said ideology through mass media, propaganda, etc., a nationalized and ideologized economy, and a known terror or fear of authority such as the police against opposed thought or misconduct (Lubonja 240). In terms of 1984’s Oceania, every characteristic listed can be attributed to its own. The single party that controls Oceania is encompassed by omnipotence and controlling the citizens of Oceania (Orwell 267). The all-powerful governance is controlled through the ministries and the Thought Police (7). The fear of being taken by the Thought Police is the fear of being acted on for rebelling against authority’s demands. All things considered, Orwell utilizes these characteristics to shape the society in a way where surveillance renders the citizens unobtrusive and …show more content…
Henry A. Giroux, an American and Canadian scholar and critic, notes a present-day example, “In a similar manner, in his recorded Christmas message, Edward Snowden (qtd. in Pitas 2013) made reference to Orwell’s warning of ‘the dangers of microphones, video cameras and TVs that watch us’ in order to suggest how these older modes of surveillance are surprisingly limited when compared with the varied means now available for spying on people.” (Giroux 109). While not totalitarian or restricted to freedom of thought, the United States of America’s citizens had been and still are being spied on by the NSA (109). This reference made by Snowden consolidates the possibility of the idea of gradual totalitarian rule being implemented into an unknowing nation. Historically, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union had the underlying basis of social control (Tyner 136). According to the previously stated characteristics, each regime matched up in their own ways, which both ended in the manifestation of control of thought and events (Tyner 136). Once these organizations have been set in place, intrusion of privacy and thought are the main aspects of controlling the nation indefinitely through this type of rule without
According to Lubonja, a famous Albanian dissident and writer, a totalitarian regime has the existence of a single party that controls the majority of all government and political activity, an ideology that is invested into the truth of the nation with authority, a distribution method of said ideology through mass media, propaganda, etc., a nationalized and ideologized economy, and a known terror or fear of authority such as the police against opposed thought or misconduct (Lubonja 240). In terms of 1984’s Oceania, every characteristic listed can be attributed to its own. The single party that controls Oceania is encompassed by omnipotence and controlling the citizens of Oceania (Orwell 267). The all-powerful governance is controlled through the ministries and the Thought Police (7). The fear of being taken by the Thought Police is the fear of being acted on for rebelling against authority’s demands. All things considered, Orwell utilizes these characteristics to shape the society in a way where surveillance renders the citizens unobtrusive and …show more content…
Henry A. Giroux, an American and Canadian scholar and critic, notes a present-day example, “In a similar manner, in his recorded Christmas message, Edward Snowden (qtd. in Pitas 2013) made reference to Orwell’s warning of ‘the dangers of microphones, video cameras and TVs that watch us’ in order to suggest how these older modes of surveillance are surprisingly limited when compared with the varied means now available for spying on people.” (Giroux 109). While not totalitarian or restricted to freedom of thought, the United States of America’s citizens had been and still are being spied on by the NSA (109). This reference made by Snowden consolidates the possibility of the idea of gradual totalitarian rule being implemented into an unknowing nation. Historically, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union had the underlying basis of social control (Tyner 136). According to the previously stated characteristics, each regime matched up in their own ways, which both ended in the manifestation of control of thought and events (Tyner 136). Once these organizations have been set in place, intrusion of privacy and thought are the main aspects of controlling the nation indefinitely through this type of rule without