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Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell

George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satire of totalitarianism based on his observations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Orwell intended to draw attention to the oppression and cruelty he saw in these regimes. The novel's dystopian society of Oceania is modeled after Stalinist Russia but includes many details from Nazi Germany such as constant surveillance, propaganda, and the Hitler Youth-inspired Junior Anti-Sex League. Newspeak aims to limit independent thought by reducing and controlling vocabulary.

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111 views32 pages

Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell

George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satire of totalitarianism based on his observations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Orwell intended to draw attention to the oppression and cruelty he saw in these regimes. The novel's dystopian society of Oceania is modeled after Stalinist Russia but includes many details from Nazi Germany such as constant surveillance, propaganda, and the Hitler Youth-inspired Junior Anti-Sex League. Newspeak aims to limit independent thought by reducing and controlling vocabulary.

Uploaded by

Jyoti Singh
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Nineteen Eighty Four by

George Orwell
The author:
• Born Eric Blair 1903, died George Orwell 1949.
• Classical education at Eton - won scholarship
• Worked as a Colonial Officer in Burma – resigned
1927
– he hated authority
– he hated injustice

‘I knew I had a facility with words and a power of facing


unpleasant facts.’ The Hanging.
Nineteen Eighty Four is a satire (the use of humor,
irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize
people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of
contemporary politics and other topical issues) on trends
in international politics at the end of WW2.

Orwell’s intention is to draw attention to the


oppression and cruelty as he saw in Nazi Germany,
Soviet Russia, and even the behaviour of some
Western countries.
George Orwell
- considered himself a truth writer

- was a social reformer

- was involved in the Spanish civil war and found it far more
complicated than he first imagined.

- said, “History is written by the winners.”


Slogans of “The Party”
Context of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
 based on Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

 Most details are from Nazi Germany.

 Once a goal is reached in a totalitarian society it is


replaced immediately by another.
Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political
system that strives to regulate nearly every aspect of
public and private life. Totalitarian regimes or
movements maintain themselves in political power
by means of an official all-embracing ideology and
propaganda disseminated through the state-
controlled mass media, a single party that controls
the state, control over the economy, regulation and
restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of
mass surveillance, and widespread use of state
terrorism.
As its name suggests, Totalitarianism is a
political system that strives to regulate
nearly every aspect of public and private
life. Orwell’s Totalitarian society (Ingsoc)
was aimless – “we are interested solely in
power...if you want a picture of the
future...imagine a boot stamping on a
human face – for ever.” (O’Brien pg 280)
Joseph Stalin

(born Iosef Besarionis dze


Jughashvili )

18 December 1878 – 5
March 1953)
Stalin was the General Secretary
of the Communist
.
Party of the Soviet Union's
Central Committee from 1922
until his death in 1953. In the
years following Lenin's death in
1924, he rose to become the
leader of the Soviet Union.
 Stalin launched a command economy, replacing
the New Economic Policy of the 1920s with
Five-Year Plans and launching a period of rapid
industrialization and economic collectivization.
The upheaval in the agricultural sector
disrupted food production, resulting in
widespread famine, such as the Soviet famine
of 1932-1933, known in Ukraine as the
Holodomor.
During the late 1930s, Stalin launched the
Great Purge (also known as the "Great
Terror"), a campaign to purge the
Communist Party of people accused of
corruption or treachery; he extended it to
the military and other sectors of Soviet
society. Targets were often executed,
imprisoned in Gulag labour camps or
exiled. In the years following, millions of
ethnic minorities were also deported.
Big Brother is Watching YOU

The face of a man...with a heavy black moustache and


ruggedly handsome features Pg 3, 1984
Background to Nineteen Eighty-Four

 The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is based upon


two totalitarian dictatorships, Soviet Russia and
Nazi Germany.
 The world of Ingsoc (English socialism) bears
strong resemblances to the Soviet Union, but
much of the details are based on Nazi Germany.
Nazi Germany
EVER since I have been scrutinizing
political events, I have taken a
tremendous interest in propagandist
activity. I saw that the Socialist-
Marxist organizations mastered and
applied this instrument with
astounding skill. And I soon realized
that the correct use of propaganda is
a true art which has remained
practically unknown to the bourgeois
parties.
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Volume One - A Reckoning
•We do not intend to use the radio only for our
partisan purposes. We want room for entertainment,
popular arts, games, jokes and music. But
everything should have a relationship to our day.
Everything should include the theme of our great
reconstructive work, or at least not stand in its way.
Above all it is necessary to clearly centralize all
radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of
technical ones, to introduce the leadership
principle, to provide a clear worldview, and to
present this worldview in flexible ways.

- Goebbels
• Like Stalin, Adolph Hitler denied his
subjects access to the truth. His Third
Reich “can be read as a war against
memory – an Orwellian falsification of
reality...” (Primo Levi) Oceania conducts
an unceasing war on memory-evidence
that conflicts with the latest official line is
systematically destroyed & a false trail is
laid in its place.
• Surveillance and control
The people of this society are constantly
being watched by telescreens (monitors
that have an ability to project images and
take in images)
They are also watching each other. Any
small facial gesture or sigh can give you
away.
It doesn’t matter if you are innocent
Big Brother is Watching

YOU
!
Children of the revolution

In the Soviet Union, young people were


encouraged to join the political group. They
were called Young Pioneers (aged between 7-
13).
If you were a Young Pioneer member you got
into university automatically, so there was
great pressure to join.
Hitler Youth
• "My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be
knocked out of them. In my Ordensburgen a
youth will grow up before which the world will
shrink back. A violently active dominating,
intrepid, brutal youth - that is what I am
after". Youth must be all those things. It must
be indifferent to pain. There must be no
weakness or tenderness in it. I want to see
once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and
independence of the beast of prey. "I will
have no intellectual training. Knowledge is
ruin to my young men.
What does this remind you
of?
“How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look
about you, to believe that the physical type set up by
the Party as an ideal, - tall muscular youths and deep
bosomed maidens, blond haired, vital, sunburnt,
carefree –existed and even predominated”

Nineteen Eighty-Four (p63).


Some themes…
The lack of privacy

The dangers of totalitarianism

The destruction of history.

The essential nature of memory.

An appreciation of the past.

The ultimate unreliability of the human mind/memory

Technology and Modernization

The use of language

Rebellion
Oceania –
One of the 3 Superstates. (Political
System: Ingsoc) Winston Smith's home.
Comprised of North and South America,
Britain, Australia, and southern portions
of Africa. Newspeak is the official
language of Oceania, but standard
English is still spoken by many.
Newspeak
Newspeak, the "official language" of
Oceania, is extraordinary in that its
vocabulary decreases every year; the
state of Oceania sees no purpose in
maintaining a complex language, and so
Newspeak is a language dedicated to the
"destruction of words." As the character
Syme puts it:
"Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and
adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be
got rid of as well... If you have a word like 'good', what
need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just
as well... Or again, if you want a stronger version of
'good', what sense is there in having a whole string of
vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all
the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or
'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still....
In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will
be covered by only six words; in reality, only one word."
(Part One, Chapter Five)
Newspeak

 Refer to this page for the definitions to many of the terms


found in 1984:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Newspeak_words

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