Nineteen-Eighty Four . . The novel?

My question is, what are some common ideas presented in this novel?





Thank you for any answers : )
Nineteen-Eighty Four . . The novel?
The deterioration of language. In the novel it mostly has to do with mind control, how the Party manipulates it%26#039;s people into forcing them to not be able to think. That ones fairly important to the novel I think. I%26#039;m sure it%26#039;s something you can find happening somewhere in the world as well.





I guess today you could compare it to shorthand typing (ex. txt, ur, lol), like a lot of people tend to do nowadays. But that has more to do with lazy people rather than brainwashing (although it%26#039;s probably not too far off).
Nineteen-Eighty Four . . The novel?
Nineteen Eighty-four (also called 1984) by George Orwell


An English novel about life in authoritarian government


Winston Smith is main character who works for ministry of truth


Winston is arrested by the thought police and is degraded and tortured psychologically under the instructions of the totalitarian government called Oceania in the year of 1984.


Common ideas; %26quot;Big Brother is watching You%26quot; and Orwellian


originated from theis novel.


Constant surveillance and propganda controlling their citizens witrh re-education to the %26quot;The Party%26quot; truth ?
Reply:1. How easy it is to brainwash people.





2. How it%26#039;s human nature to betray other people when you are in danger. The quote below confirms this.





%26quot;Sometimes, they threaten you with something -- something you can%26#039;t stand up to, can%26#039;t even think about. And then you say, %26#039;Don%26#039;t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.%26#039; And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, tat it was only a trick that you just said to make them stop and you didn%26#039;t really mean it. But that isn%26#039;t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there%26#039;s no other way of saving yourself and you%26#039;re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don%26#039;t give a damn if they suffer, all you care about is yourself. And after that, you don%26#039;t feel the same toward the other person any longer.%26quot;


~~Julie, page 292
Reply:Themes





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Nationalism





Nineteen Eighty-Four expands upon the subjects summarised in the essay Notes on Nationalism (1945),[18] about the lack of vocabulary needed to explain the unrecognised phenomenon behind certain political forces; in Nineteen Eighty-Four Newspeak, the Party%26#039;s artificial, minimalist language, addresses the matter.





Positive nationalism: Oceanians’ perpetual love for Big Brother (who might not exist); Celtic Nationalism, Neo-Toryism, and British Zionism are defined by love.





Negative nationalism: Oceanians’ perpetual hatred for Emmanuel Goldstein (who might not exist); Stalinism, Anti-Semitism, and Anglophobia are defined by hatred.





Transferred nationalism: in mid-sentence, an orator changes the enemy of Oceania; the crowd instantly transfers their hatred to the new enemy. Transferred nationalism swiftly redirects emotions from one power unit to another, e.g. Communism, Pacifism, Color Feeling, and Class Feeling.





Thus, O%26#039;Brien conclusively describes: “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”





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Sexual repression





The Party imposes antisexualism upon its members (e.g. the Junior Anti-Sex-League), because sexual attachments diminish loyalty to the Party. Julia describes Party fanaticism as %26quot;sex gone sour%26quot;; except during the liaison with Julia, Winston suffers an inflamed ankle (an allusion to Oedipus the King, symbolic of unhealthy sexual repression).[citation needed] In Part III, O%26#039;Brien tells Winston that neurologists are working to extinguish the orgasm; sufficient mental energy for prolonged worship requires repressing the libido, a vital instinct, e.g. externally-imposed sexual restriction by the authorities (civil, political, et cetera).





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Futurology





If Orwell meant the novel as prophecy is unknown, yet, O%26#039;Brien describes the future:





There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face … for ever.


—Part III, Chapter III





This starkly contrasts with his forecast essay England Your England, in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941):





The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianised or Germanised will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children%26#039;s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.





Yet, Nineteen Eighty-Four%26#039;s geopolitical climate is like his précis of James Burnham%26#039;s ideas in the essay %26#039;James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution%26#039; [1] (1946).





These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new %26#039;managerial%26#039; societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.





[edit]


Jews





The book was written in the immediate post-WWII period, when the horrors of the Holocaust had just been revealed to the world; it has several references to Jews, in widely differing contexts.





The name of Emmanuel Goldstein leaves little doubt that he is Jewish - as was Leon Trotsky on whom he is widely considered to be modeled. Aaronson, one of the three earlier leaders of the party who were ousted and destroyed by Big Brother, also has a clearly Jewish name.





However, there is no hint that the persecution of Goldstein and Aaronson is in any way motivated by antisemitism, and in fact %26quot;The Book%26quot; (which, whoever actually wrote it, seems to describe accurately the society of Oceania) states that %26quot;there is no racial discrimination... Jews, Negroes and South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party.%26quot;





Jews in a very different situation are shown in the newsreel from the Middle East which Smith watches in the cinema, where a boat full of Jewish refugees is being sunk by an Oceanian helicopter. Smith is deeply inspired by the Jewish mother%26#039;s brave - however futile - attempt to shield her child from the coming bullets. However, this scene, too, gives no hint that the people in the boat were targeted specifically because of being Jews.





The theme of Jewish refugees, suffering brutal treatment while on frail boats in the Mediterranean, was very familiar at the time of writing. The book was written scarcely a year after the saga of the ship %26quot;Exodus%26quot; drew world-wide attention and sympathy for the Jewish refugees on board and anger against the British treatment of them.





As known from his non-fiction writings, Orwell did not approve of Zionism and did not regard it a true solution for the Jews%26#039; problems. At the very time the book was being written, the state of Israel arose out of a year of bloody war. But in the world which Orwell envisioned, all nation-states would be consumed and trampled by the three competing superpowers, and a small newly-born one could hardly escape the same fate.





Moreover, the Middle East would become a battleground constantly passing from hand to hand, its inhabitants being used as a reservoir of forced labor by whichever power happened to rule them at the moment; Jews living there would evidently share this fate with their Arab neighbors.





The combination of all references to Jews scattered through the book leads to the conclusion that the world depicted by Orwell would be extremely harsh and oppressive to all human beings - but that unlike the time of the Second World War, Jews as such would not be specifically targeted or treated differently than other people.





[edit]


Censorship





A major theme of %26quot;Nineteen Eighty-Four%26quot; is censorship, which is displayed especially well in the ministry of truth, where photographs are doctored and public archives rewritten to rid them of %26quot;unpersons%26quot;. In the telescreens, figures for all types of production are doctored to indicate an ever-rising economy, where there is actually loss.





An excellent example of this is when Winston is charged with the task of eliminating reference to an unperson in a newspaper article. He proceeded to write an article about Comrade Ogilvy, an imaginary party member, who displayed great heroism by giving his life so that the important dispatches he was carrying would not fall into enemy hands.