1984 - Themes & Task

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 5

Task

In groups of 3-4, pick one theme and find  examples in today's global society (countries/politics) of 1984 themes by reading current English newspaper articles.

Use for example: BBC News, The Guardian, New York Times, Fox News, Daily Mail etc. & compare the news items in different media sources

Make a PPT (one/two slides) on your theme and your articles 

(mention the sources you have used) & give your opinion. 

Present the PPT next class in  3-5 minutes

Psychological Manipulation

Spark Notes:

"The Party barrages its subjects with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind’s capacity for independent thought. The giant telescreen in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes......

The Party then channels people’s pent-up frustration and emotion into intense, ferocious displays of hatred against the Party’s political enemies. Many of these enemies have been invented by the Party expressly for this purpose."

Physical Control

In addition to manipulating their minds, the Party also controls the bodies of its subjects. The Party constantly watches for any sign of disloyalty ........Anyone who does manage to defy the Party is punished and “reeducated” through systematic and brutal torture.........By conditioning the minds of their victims with physical torture, the Party is able to control reality, convincing its subjects that 2 + 2 = 5.

Control of Information and History

The Party controls every source of information, managing and rewriting the content of all newspapers and histories for its own ends. The Party does not allow individuals to keep records of their past, such as photographs or documents, resulting in fuzzy and  unreliable memories and gullible citizens, willing to believe what the Party feeds them.

 By controlling the present, the Party is able to manipulate the past. And in controlling the past, the Party can justify all of its actions in the present.

Language as Mind Control

One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing.

During colonial times, foreign powers took political and military control of distant regions and, as a part of their occupation, instituted their own language as the language of government and business. 

Technology

By means of telescreens and hidden microphones across the city, the Party is able to monitor its members almost all of the time. Additionally, the Party employs complicated mechanisms (1984 was written in the era before computers) to exert large-scale control on economic production and sources of information, and fearsome machinery to inflict torture upon those it deems enemies.

  1984 reveals that technology, which is generally perceived as working toward moral good, can also facilitate the most diabolical evil.

Resistance & Revolution

Winston’s most concrete hope for actual revolution against the Party lies with the social underclass of the city, called the proles. He observes that the proles already have far greater numbers than the Party and that the proles have the strength to carry out a revolution if they could ever organize themselves. The problem is that due to their poverty they can only think of survival: building a better world is a notion they cannot contemplate

The Party’s itself is the the product of revolution. According to Winston, the Party was created during the mid-1960s during a revolution that overthrew the existing British social order. The Party claims that the Revolution has not yet ended and that it will be fulfilled once they have complete control.

Loyalty

In 1984, the Party seeks to ensure that the only kind of loyalty possible is loyalty to the Party. 

The reader sees examples of virtually every kind of loyalty, from the most fundamental to the most trivial, being destroyed by the Party. Neighbors and coworkers inform on one another....

Ingsoc philosophy

There are three “sacred principles” of INGSOC: Newspeak, doublethink,  the mutability (or changeability) of the past. 

The Party attempts to control what its citizens' thoughts through all three of these means. 

Doublethink = “to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies” and “to hold simultaneously two opinions which” one knows to be contradictory but believing them both.