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Totalitarian Government In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Here, the final pieces of Orwell’s theme amass, creating a picture of the inherent dangers that the absolute power of a totalitarian government creates for a society. However, many of the ideas presented by Orwell throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four had been presented much earlier. Benjamin Franklin once stated in a letter, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” (Franklin). Orwell’s warning harbingers back to this same idea. Throughout the novel, the proles, also known as the masses, are contempt with the conditions that surround them. They have no problem blindly accepting what The Party tells them is right, and they will never see past the false freedom that has …show more content…

He wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in the 1940s, during the onset of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Just five years before publishing, the Tehran Conference had set out to create distinct zones of influence in the world. Orwell used these zones as inspiration for the novel’s three perpetually warring totalitarian states: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. He viewed the world as heading into a totalitarian state should the war escalate, and paralleled the events that unfolded in his novel. Six years earlier, in his 1943 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Orwell says, “Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. ... The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs” (Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War”). Looking at the horrors that came out of the Nazi Party, as well as the crimes against humanity, Orwell was able to see the harsh realities of near-totalitarianism being carried out. Hitler was grasping at absolute power, and the results were devastating. Orwell saw this, as well as the reaction of society …show more content…

The plan, which involved stimulating industry and the workforce to achieve new production levels throughout the country, was originally set to be carried out over a five-year period. However, it was later discussed by The Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission, a Russian Organizational Bureau, that “The Party's confidence in the feasibility of the five-year plan and its faith in the forces of the working class were so strong that the Party found it possible to undertake the fulfilment of this difficult task not in five years, as was provided for in the five-year plan, but in four years” (Marxist Internet

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