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1984 - Themes - Coggle Diagram
1984 - Themes
Totalitarianism and communism
1984 was written not as a prediction of actual future events, but to warn the world against what he feared would be the fate of humanity if totalitarian regimes took control as they did in Germany under Hitler and in the Soviet Union under Stalin
INGSOC represents the worst features of both the Nazi and Communist regimes
Key quotes
'There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.'
'This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws),
but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death
, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp'.
'WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH'
'It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children'
“Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date
Don’t you see that
the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought
? In the end
we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible
, [...]
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
”
All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
the Party encouraged prostitution 'as an
outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed
'
what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
the animal instinct [...] was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.
The Individual vs Collective Identity
Reality Control
Sex, Love and Loyalty
Class Struggle