Dangers Of Torture In 1984

Life in Oceania is dull, lifeless and described as ‘swimming against the current’. Orwell creates a dire feeling of hopelessness through his destruction of friendship, family, love and individual thoughts. Love and sex are no longer accepted under the totalitarian regime and Winston is therein forced to suppress all his sexual desires treating sex as merely a procreative duty. His marriage to Katherine was purely ‘[their] duty to the Party’ whose end was the creation of new party members. This shows that in a totalitarian world it is wholly necessary to adhere to the constraints enforced by a government not only for personal salvation but also for the survival of the entirety of the human race.

George Orwell’s 1984 follows the journey of 39 year old Winston Smith living in a dystopian future society called Oceania. The people of Oceania are controlled and oppressed by the Party and omnipresent Big Brother. Cameras controlled by the infamous thought police watch the residents every move, and free thought and speech are forbidden. Winston, who has a mundane job rewriting history, meets Julia and the two begin a forbidden affair. Eventually the pair are caught by the thought police and tortured for weeks. The torture is designed to destroy reason instilling individuals with a newfound love for the party and Big Brother. Eventually Winston cracks, when faced with the option of having rats eat his face or betraying Julia he chooses the latter; this act of submission concludes his rehabilitation, Winston is released back into society and now loves Big Brother.

The pursuit of freedom and the longing for a better life and “knowledge give people power, and truth will set people free” are the common understanding of the human nature. In novel, the Oceania’s Party controlled life in a constant state of propaganda-induced fear through the four ministries of Peace, Love, Plenty, and Truth. Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth involves revisions of historical documents and rewrites of news stories to reflect the Party’s infallibility. Because the Party was afraid of historical knowledge will form power that justify or encourage the present and the future. If history was idyllic, then people will act to re-create it; if the present was nightmarish, then people will be to subvert the present in order to create a good future. The fact of the matter, the Party, which carries out government policies in Oceania, rations food, issues clothing, and selects social activities. Both chocolate and tobacco are in short supply during this latest war. Public facilities were in shreds and patches, and most of people live in poverty. The

In a world where manipulation is required, thought is crime, and love is forbidden, it is questioned how much of a person is left once his or her life is stripped of such basic freedoms. This is the question a reader asks as he or she is immersed into the world George Orwell created in his classic novel, 1984. As Winston Smith, the main character in Orwell’s novel, navigates through the cruel and oppressive society of Oceania, readers are allowed to see how the oppressiveness of the world in which he lives affects the lives of not only Winston but also the society as a whole. However, as time passes, Winston becomes a character that starts to inwardly question the world around him while being forced to outwardly conform for his own safety. Throughout the novel, a reader can begin to compare the feelings and thoughts of Winston to the mass majority of the population that continues to blindly conform to the government of Oceania. In this contrast, one can begin to understand how the relationship between outward conformity and inward inquisition contributes to the theme of oppression and the meaning of the work as a whole by showing the oppression that Winston feels through his inner thoughts.

We must also consider the fact that Winston does not believe it to be possible for the Party to be “overthrown from within.” This is due to several reasons as well. Just as The Ministry of Truth has its hands in media, romanticizing the persecution of those who have committed thoughtcrimes, they also manipulate education; raising Oceania’s children as perfect party members. At an early age they are indoctrinated into an organization called “The Spies” in which they are taught to keep an eye out on not only their neighbors, but their parents as well. That, in addition to the presence of telescreens and Thoughtpolice make it extremely difficult for dissidents to pass their revolutionary ideas to the future generation, “[the Party’s] enemies had no way of coming together or even identifying one another.”

In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston embarks on a journey to gain knowledge on the interworking and purpose of his oppressors, The Party. The journey follows Campbell’s Hero’s Journey model rather closely and elements of this journey are often key to the progression of 1984’s plot as a whole. Winston knows that he is different from the “mindless drones” he calls his fellow Oceania citizens. He knows that he feels bound by some external force and he has a confident feeling that he knows this is the party. What he does not quite understand is how and why this external force controls him and his way of thinking the way that it does. He becomes obsessed with this question of truth and he involuntarily begins to devote his entire thinking to his metal dilemma. This is the psychological journey that Winston thrusts

First of all, the Party in Oceania strives to control every aspect of its subject’s lives and thoughts. It is very apparent by the use of doublethink and the perpetual forced viewpoints and ideology of the Party into its members. The Party has absolute control over the people for they “... control matter because we control the mind” (Orwell, 265). This gives way to causing Winston a great deal of problems for he believes he can rise against the Party, but in fact it only

Nevertheless, the reader finds himself rooting for Winston because he is the “right” in a “wrong” society. The intended audience of this book does not see Oceania as a free society because, in Western culture, people need individualism to be free. This book depicts a society in which individualism is in every way prohibited. Therefore, Winston seems to stand out as a hero

Torture: The Tool of Mind Control “By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as a paradise” (Adolf Hitler Quotes). Being the leader of one of the greatest superpowers in the world, this gave Adolf Hitler the upper hand in creating his own utopia where the average civilian would live under his rule, and anyone that did not fit the category of his preference or rebelled the government would be murdered or tortured until they shared the same mindset as their leader. Hitler persuaded many German’s to hate the Jewish population because - in his opinion - they didn’t qualify as “the perfect race”.

In George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the subject of individuality stands as an ideal challenged under totalitarianism. The government, Big Brother, insists upon brainwashing its citizens, making them incapable of formulating their own thoughts, and therefore making them more susceptible to manipulation. This story occurs in Oceania, a superstate, where life is not only uniform, but is also orderly; it is a place where no one can be unique from the rest. Through propaganda, fear, and torture, individuals cannot help but lose their sense of self at the hands of Big Brother.

Winston’s life is replete with misery and pain, but has been give brief moments of happiness and love by Orwell to create a sense of hope for Winston, and subsequently, hope for a future free of the imprisonment of totalitarianism, although Orwell makes clear throughout the novel that there is no happy ending. Totalitarianism does not allow the possibility of such an ending to thrive in the minds of people; If Winston were to escape this fate, Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism and everything that encompasses it would have been lost. Orwell has written the book in a way that the readers become so attached with Winstons character that he gains a form of individuality that can only be given by the reader. Winston is a symbol of the values democracy, love, peace, freedom, and decency which are found within a civilized society. When the character of Winston is destroyed, these values and connection to the reader are also destroyed with him as Winston Smith is a representation of the struggle faced between bad and good in every aspect of

Imagine a world where you are never safe. Your every move is monitored, and there is no one whom you can truly trust. A world where one group of all-powerful people can control the past through manipulation of facts and minds. This is the definition of Oceania, the home of Winston Smith in 1984. The book 1984 by George Orwell is a classic piece of literature read in schools around the world, and accidentally read by me over the summer. 1984 is a dystopian mix of science and realistic fiction, in which the year is, wait for it, 1984, and our main character Winston has to deal with both internal and external conflicts in the form of the Party, the ruling class of Oceania, and deciding whom he can love and trust, and who is spying for the Thought

Bleak, blanched city. Grey buildings, colourless people. Perpetual solemnity. A world where the mere utterance of a word—or the thinking of a single thought—can result in death. London, Oceania. 1984. In the eponymous novel by George Orwell, Winston Smith, a citizen of this dystopia, struggles to find a way out of the mental prison imposed upon the country by the Party. From being directly under its thumb to an anti-government revolutionary, he explores the nature of the Party’s control and what makes it so effective—and how he can escape it. Aware that the very words he speaks could give away his intentions, he explores the idea that language, and how the Party controls it, is what gives them their power. Fighting to expand his understanding of the Party’s reasons, Winston entangles himself in its deepest secrets and as a result, is discovered and subsequently tortured and “corrected”. Monitoring and scrutinizing every thought in the minds of Oceanians, trying to reduce the possibility of thought-crime by changing the language they speak, and ultimately attempting to change the course of history, the Party gives a warning to anyone who may meddle where they don’t belong—“Ignorance is Strength”—but Winston did poor to heed their advice.

Throughout the course of history torture has been practiced; Romans, Jews, Egyptians and several addition civilizations in history incorporated torture as a part of their justice system. Romans had crucifixion, Jews had stoning and Egyptians had desert sun death. All these acts of torture were thought as being necessary, or just. The first signs of torture can be found in 530AD, when the great Roman jurists adopted the virtues of torture as ‘the highest form of truth’. A Greek legal orator named, Demosthenes believed that “no statements made as a result of torture have ever been proved untrue” (Green). Centuries later, Italian and French officials rekindled Roman Law, to be solidated as a source of jurisdiction in civil law systems. During

only a supporting role to the Police and Metropolitan Guards in the counterinsurgency, was ordered into action. They relied on mass arrests, torture to allegedly gain info on Tupamaros, and large cordon-and-search operations, where warrants weren’t needed. This was done to those allegedly accused of politically motivated crimes. The tortures consisted of: deprivation of water and food, prohibition to take care of psychological needs in the usual places, wrenching of limbs, use of handcuff and even having their heads submerged under water until they began to suffocate. The use of electrical needles, burning genital organs and anus, with cigarettes, were other accounts of torture. These brutalities had been practiced on innocent people who had yet to be tried in court.