Totalitarianism and Nationalism

Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four exemplifies the dangers of a totalitarian society. Written shortly after the end of WWII, the novel’s composition benefitted from post-war insight into the regimes of Hitler in Germany and Stalin in the Soviet Union where absolute control was seized from the citizens. With the Cold War only in its beginnings and communism having gained some initial support in America, diplomatic relationships between communist and Western countries were uneasy. Having encountered first-hand the cruelty and opposition of Communist forces in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wanted to demonstrate the reality that totalitarianism could exist anywhere if it was left unchecked.

The novel paints a terrifying, picture-perfect totalitarian state with a complete absence of any democratic ideals such as personal freedoms and individual rights. Absolute power rests in the hands of only a few people, the oligarchical 2% Inner Party, who have no checks and balances other than themselves, and who use technological means to wield total control over their citizens. Nothing is off limits to the Party, even the independent thoughts of its members may be psychologically manipulated. Orwell shows a regime that has almost reached its zenith, with all external and internal realities gradually having been controlled, and where little or no opposition exists to bring the Party down since nothing powerful outside itself exists.

A primary means by which the Party achieves its supreme power over Oceania’s citizens is through the ideology of nationalism, which Orwell argued made people disregard common sense and become ignorant of facts. In practice, the Party achieved this by maintaining the propaganda that Oceania was perpetually at war and expanding its sovereignty into other territories, and by conditioning its citizens into variously loving Big Brother, hating Emmanuel Goldstein and changing objects of communal hatred at the Party’s will, either from Eurasia to Eastasia or to another enemy. In doing this, the Party assimilated Oceania’s individuals into a collective identity, with shared social characteristics including culture (common dress, Victory gin, Victory coffee and Victory cigarettes), language (Newspeak), and history (altered or rewritten), so that national unity could be promoted.

Orwell holds out a glimmer of hope that a revolution could come from the proles, the working class population who, while viewed by the Party as unintelligent and like the animals, live their lives relatively free from surveillance and able to exercise intellectual liberty. Most importantly, they have retained the personal qualities and loyalties that make one human. Their only deficit appears to be a lack of awareness of their plight, which could otherwise see them combine in mass solidarity to protest and resist their oppression.

This speaks to the importance of education and being able to determine fact from fiction, truth from propaganda. It might be said that totalitarianism premises itself not on manipulating people to believe in a particular conviction but rather on destroying one’s capacity to form a conviction at all; where people are unthinking, they can be sold any idea, even ideas which are at complete odds with what they would have accepted previously. Education makes people less susceptible to lies and propaganda, and more open to questioning, critiquing, debating, and discerning, all countermeasures to a totalitarian domination of the mind.

Totalitarianism and Nationalism Quotes

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH Part 1 Chapter 1

Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. Part 1 Chapter 2

If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. Part 1 Chapter 7

But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. Part 1 Chapter 7

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. (Goldstein’s book) Part 2 Chapter 9

Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. (Goldstein’s Book) Part 2 Chapter 9

DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. (Goldstein’s Book) Part 2 Chapter 9

‘…The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred…’ (O’Brien) Part 3 Chapter 3

Control

Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four portrays an all-encompassing control by the Party over internal realities, physically and psychologically, and over external reality, namely through its ownership of history.

Physically, the bodies of Party members are controlled through conformance to a prescriptive daily regime and punishment for defiance. Each morning, members are forced to participate via telescreen in a mass exercise known as Physical Jerks, then dress in drab Party uniform to work long arduous days sustained on a tasteless diet of rationed food. They are required to suppress their sexual desires; sex is solely for the means of producing new Party members, while sexual frustration is repurposed into zealous displays of hatred aimed at invented enemies. Chillingly, a person may be betrayed by their own nervous system were they to exhibit an uncontrollable twitch, considered grounds for arrest. Defiance of the Party’s aims is punishable through a re-education process of systematic physical torture and psychological manipulation until new behaviours have been conditioned. Winston’s ultimate experience is that physical pain is so powerful it can crush personal loyalties and moral convictions.

Psychologically, Party members are overwhelmed with stimuli designed to eradicate independent thought. Giant telescreens stream constant propaganda into homes and workplaces, reframing the Party’s failings as successes, while constantly monitoring behaviour for any signs of thoughtcrime and warning members, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. With the family structure undermined and surveillance embedded at the individual level, a person can be reported on by others, even their own children, as in the case of Parsons. Perhaps most terrifying is the Party’s motivation for imposing the Newspeak language, designed as a mechanism to prevent inadvertent thoughtcrime by citizens through narrowing thought, speech and expression but which in reality removes all individualism so that in the end, people communicate not from higher-order processing but almost automatically and unconsciously, like the quacking of a duck.

In terms of history, the Party exerts its stronghold by controlling all sources of information, and overseeing and rewriting all newspaper content and historical records so that they are in agreement with Party aims. Individuals have no records of their past, including photographs or personal documents, thus their memories become ambiguous and unreliable, and with any contradictory historical records eliminated or altered, and no dissenting voices, people are primed to believe whatever the Party tells them. In this way, Orwell’s theme of control extends to the realms of both objective and subjective reality.

Winston struggles with the concept of internal reality and whether it can exist if history has stopped and there is an absence of external verification. His recollection of childhood memories and how they provide an evidentiary link to the past initially supports his view that knowledge can exist outside of one’s consciousness, even where the Party alters or negates historical records, allowing lies to enter history and become truth. However, under physical and psychological torture, Winston ultimately revises his position, and comes to view his memories as false, effectively accepting O’Brien’s position that internal reality is made up of whatever the Party tells him, and external reality is redundant.

Overall, the treatment of control within the text raises existential questions as to the relationship between subjective and objective realities, between memories and history, and to the permanence of one in the absence of the other.

Control Quotes

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. Part 1 Chapter 3

All history was a palimpsest [rewritable record with traces of the former text], scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. Part 1 Chapter 4

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. (Party slogan) Part 1 Chapter 3

All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’. Part 1 Chapter 3

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. Part 1 Chapter 4

Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar. Part 1 Chapter 4

‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’ (Syme) Part 1 Chapter 5

The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see. Part 1 Chapter 6

It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer HAD ONCE existed. (about the photograph of Jones, Aaronson & Rutherford) Part 1 Chapter 7

‘History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’ (Winston) Part 2 Chapter 5

A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. (Goldstein’s book) Part 2 Chapter 9

‘Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.’ (O’Brien) Part 3 Chapter 4

Loyalty

The notion of loyalty, Party and private, features strongly throughout the text. The Party commands loyalty from members, who are expected to provide this unquestioningly, while Winston is made to pledge loyalty to the Brotherhood, even to the point of agreeing to undertake horrendous acts. The linear narrative of Winston and Julia’s relationship, from development to destruction, exemplifies a sad trajectory of loyalty, while Winston’s mother is positioned as a classic maternal figure who represents a devotion to private loyalties and family.

The Party is jealously competitive for the loyalty of its members, abolishing private emotions and expression which it views as contrary to its agenda. Marriage and sex are considered Party acts whose sole purpose is the procurement of future party members. Winston’s wife Katherine was so indoctrinated to this that their relationship ended when their relationship had not conceived children. Family loyalty is contrary to the Party’s goals since it prevents family members from monitoring and reporting on each other for thoughtcrime. The closed, independent environment of a family, with its unique dynamics where exclusive forms of communication and expression flourish, is threatening to the Party aim of applying a collective identity to the population; conformity and sameness is the goal. The Party’s antithetical use of the familial term brother, in Big Brother, is ironic and shows the lengths the Party will go to, to insert itself into the family and steal its devotions.

As with the loyalty demanded by the party, Winston’s initiation into the Brotherhood by O’Brien, where he is made to agree to perform anti-social acts such as murder and rape, demonstrates how loyalty can be grossly misappropriated from a relatively positive quality to one which is deadly.

Winston’s mother and the private standards she possessed speaks to a time where there was freedom to have personal ideals and moral convictions, where freedom was inextricably linked to the ability to choose one’s loyalties, and compares to the tragic story of Winston and Julia, whose loyalty for one another is destroyed through psychological and physical torture. Despite the pair believing the Party could never get inside their hearts and heads, Winston and Julia come to realise they lose they very thing they defined as making them human, whereas the proles, despite their seemingly mundane and animalistic tendencies, had managed to stay human, possessing the freedom to choose and form their own loyalties.

The novel demonstrates how strongly freedom and loyalty are connected to the human condition and that when these qualities are misdirected, the consequences can be devastating and irreconcilable.

Loyalty Quotes

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. Part 1 Chapter 2

… his mother’s death …had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy … belonged to the ancient time, … when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and …members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. Part 1 Chapter 3

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties … Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. … Part 1 Chapter 6

Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act. Part 2 Chapter 2

‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour…’ (Julia) Part 2 Chapter 3

The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. Part 2 Chapter 3

…yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. (Winston’s mother) Part 2 Chapter 7

What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. Part 2 Chapter 7

The proles had stayed human. Part 2 Chapter 7

‘We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.’ (O’Brien) Part 3 Chapter 4

But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just ONE person to whom he could transfer his punishment – ONE body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. (Winston, about Julia) Part 3 Chapter 5

Technology

Technology in the form of the telescreen was an integral tool in the Party’s mission to seize and maintain total control over its people. The two-way television allowed Thought Police a 24/7 window of surveillance into the lives of Party members at home and at work, both visually and audibly, and effectively made them prisoners within their own homes and workplaces. Winston frequently refers to the care he exerts over his appearance and expression, especially when he engages in tasks that preoccupy his mind, such as writing in his diary, so as to not to inadvertently present behaviours which could be misinterpreted through the telescreens as thoughtcrime.

Ironically, other than the telescreen, advances in other areas of technology within the novel’s world were sluggish. For a superstate that claims to be continuously at war, the bombs that are used are decades old, while the versificators in the Ministry of Truth that produce newspapers, films and songs by mechanical means are rudimentary. Scientific progress is considered of little value unless it progresses the Party’s aims; artificial insemination is only for the production of more members, who are then brought up by institutions, while psychological warfare through constant propaganda messaging and language deterioration exists only to saturate conscious and unconscious human processing into submission. The redundancy of scientific and technical terms is demonstrated by their location in the supplementary section of the Newspeak dictionary, and by the altogether elimination of a vocabulary able to articulate the function of science.

Antithetically, Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four presents an advancing society which is at the same time declining technologically, and contrasts the historical trajectory of documented societies from the ancient world to the present. While it may be argued that not all past inventions and technologies have been beneficial to humankind and the environment, there is a common understanding that progress tends forward rather than backward, including where that progress involves applying new knowledge and technologies to correcting or refining less than perfect approaches in the past.

The idea that technology serves no purpose other than for the exclusive benefit of an anti-social minority and that the vast body of knowledge and research, on which the global community has come to rely and derive benefit from, could so effortlessly be done away with in some downward spiral to the dark ages paints a particularly disturbing scenario.

Technology Quotes

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. Part 1 Chapter 1

Here were produced rubbishy newspapers, … sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. Part 1 Chapter 4

Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. Part 1 Chapter 4

‘In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words.’ (Syme) Part 1 Chapter 5

But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. (Goldstein’s book) Part 2 Chapter 9

… there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for ‘science’ … Appendix