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Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

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Nineteen Eighty-Four written by George Orwell is a dystopian novel set in a fictional totalitarian state of Oceania, where the brainwashed citizens are under constant surveillance, and public mind control dictated by Big Brother, the Party leader. Thus, any independent thought by any individual or group would severely be punished by the state as a “Thought Crime”. Punishments could be severe ranging from reeducation and torture to vaporization meaning death. Around the same year of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, coincidently, a Soviet-trained guerrilla fighter named Kim Il Sung became the founder of a new country — the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea. Following the Korean War, Kim Il Sung successfully created the world’s most impenetrable cult of personality, which succeeds on to his grandson, Kim Jon Un’s generation and continues its dictatorial regime today. There is no way of avoiding the incalculable numbers of billboards and posters with military slogans and propaganda. Throughout the nation, television sets are hardwired to receive a single signal, broadcast by the state. Thus, each households and public places are installed with cameras and wiretaps surveilling any individuals against the leader and its’ Party’s policies will be terminated along with the future family members. Even the actual building the “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung has created. All of these are frightening reminiscences of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four.

“An alleged North Korean

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