Did anyone in history understand autocracy and dictatorships better than Orwell? I'm yet to read anything that would convince me otherwise. Reading and discussing 1984 should be complusory at school, it would make falling for people like Trump, Maduro, Duterte et al much more difficult. It's the one book I will insist my daughter reads when she is old enough.
They kept watch for seven years to see if Winston drew in others they could get. According o O'Brien, they still weren't powerful enough yet, or as Syme described the goal of word destruction and newspeak - speech from here (throat) not here (head). So they looked for genuinely dangerous rebels. Parsons was a greater threat than thought. He was terrified of the party, and tried to appear to do the approved things, all the sex gone sour stuff, but thereby missed hangings and boilings and other rage fests. The inner party didn't care about the approved outings or committees. They genuinely wanted bloodthirsty hatred of outer party members and proles and prisoners, the true isolation of each individual watching for heresy in their comrades. Remember when Winston gets praise in room 101, when he first says he hates Big Brother? That is step one toward utterly loving him. Parsons and Syme were nowhere near that step.
I think that the Party deliberately set Winston up to become a Thought Criminal. An ideology based on hate needs enemies, so what does the Party do when it runs out of enemies? They create new ones!
My 2 cents: Ingsoc totalitarism is quite perfect, so there are no serious threats but... Minluv have to keep trained. O'Brien search for potential criminals, tempt them (so, this character act as the devil) till to a complete guilty (by the time they got caught, Winston and Julia have already committed all the possible thought crimes). Just another interesting biblical similarity: Winston and Julia got caught fully naked, just like Adam and Eve after the original sin. So, Orwell was an atheist... perhaps he liked these metaphors anyway. (Sorry for my english, i'm an Eurasia citizen)
I think this is one of the things that makes Orwell's novel such a masterpiece. It shows how Nazism and Soviet communism in particular betrayed everything socialism stands for, e.g. by keeping the masses uneducated, suppressing all workers' rights, and cementing inequality.
I believe it is more simple and boils down to two facts: 1. Until Winston was in love with Julia, he had nothing in his live. There was nothing that could have broken him emotionally. 2. Being a single thought criminal is not nearly as offensive as forming a group. The moment they came together spelled doom for both. But the TP still needed to give them time to form a bond that can be crushed and used against them both.
Everybody is monitored but left alone until they do something too high-profile to go unanswered. Every character in the book was only arrested when they did something that couldn't be theoretically hidden or explained away. Something that was publicly noticed or eventually would have been. The one thing the Party can't afford to do is lose face.
I reeeeeeally like the game analogy. I like your means to a means to a means interpretation & O’Brien certainly described that. But it made me think of it as an ongoing training & development program for the Thought Police and IngSoc as a whole. Let the ones who have more complex heresies than the Ampleworths & the Parsons run their course so that you can study the evolution of their unorthodoxy & then perfect your “rehabilitation” techniques on those more resilient thoughtcriminals than you ever could on the everyday wayward glance.
My assumption is that Winston was some kind of long term project of O'Brien's. He was fascinated by Winston's character on some level; recognized that he was not an average thought criminal.
It’s perhaps important for the party to check the pulse of rebellion. Winston has intellect, they suspect this. What might outer party members do if they thought they could get away with it? What unknown dangers to they present? Well, let them go their own way for a bit, let them show their colours, and then, when we know what it is we have to curtail, we will be richer in information, and the population will be poorer in intellectual privacy. Advertising culture plays the same game with us.
Answer might be Simple: if they arrested everyone immediately - then they would have to imprison the whole Oceania at the same time. However, I like your video game analogy. It is very fitting to sadistic pedantry of the party. But it also creates a key weakness in ingsoc. What if thought police underestimates challenge posed by someone, and delays arrest until they actually manage to harm the party?
Perhaps not relevant, but like Batman needs the supervillains and why they are never destroyed. They justify his existence. Without them, Batman has no reason to exist.
Can we have a video about life after the party took over during Winston’s childhood? I know there isn’t much in the book, but it is possible to use real world examples to fill in the gaps. I wonder what happened to the royalty and other members of the British elite. How the party took over other countries. Did it start in Britain and then spread to the US? Or was it the other way around? We can’t trust the party’s history. Maybe the Americans occupied Britain and later the party claimed to have started in the island in order to make the conquest more palatable to the local population.
Maybe they were all thought criminals but had to pretend otherwise because nobody knew whether the other comrade is going to snitch. I mean it seems that you have to have some intellectual capacity to be in the Party, so it would be logical for them to see through the bs.
5:39 Kinda reminds me of Davros from Doctor Who's 'Genesis of the Daleks'. "Rebellion is an idea of the mind. Suppress it, and it hides away, and festers."
I agree with you. It is sadism with all its essential dysfunction, and that alone with eventually contribute to Ingsoc's collapse. This is not a sustainable system. IMHO
Yeah and the book describes them as the only bastions of freedom in the world. My head cannon is that African warlords never fully lost power and basically provide what resources they have (coffee? Ivory? Idk.) in exchange for the tools of war. Actually might explain why chocolate rations increased to 4 grams from 7 or whatever the specific numbers are, because African territories were exchanged during the war
There is no proof that such zones even exist, at least in a state of war. The whole point is that you don't know if there really is a war going on or whether it's all just a story the party uses to control the populace. Personally, I've always been of the belief that there is no war and that the bombs falling on Airstrip One are false flag attacks. If you don't question everything you are told about or by the party, you haven't understood the point of the novel.
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In counterintelligence it is quite common to let the 'guilty' go on about their business as long it is serves--or may serve--your purpose; they may lead you to other suspects, and even when they do not you can learn from them in ways that sharpen your skills...In a sense it is a game, but it is more a calculated exercise in extracting additional benefit from a target that has already been neutralized by virtue of having been proven guilty.
I've often wondered if the Thought Police were just toying with Winston. They knew he had no power, and wasn't a threat, so they could play with him and make him believe that he's free so that his eventual realisation that he isn't will destroy him.
I had a similar thought but more so that the thought police knew but simply didn't think it was worth the time or effort so long as Winston kept it to himself and relatively unnoticeable. Hence why they decided to arrest him when they did, he made his thought crime noticeable by not sticking to the curfew.
INGSOC had a policy of using constant war to keep its people in line and afraid, I'd wager they count internal struggle as war so keep up the facade. They use the thought criminals as sacrifices in a way. Walter wasn't much of a threat in the book (never saw the movie but you're tempting me with this channel), so they did use him as a public display. And I'm in the camp that thinks Oceania are the just British Isles and the other "enemies" are countries trying to provide without a full-on invasion.
Could this be the reason that Ingsoc fell eventually? That it took them 7 years, pretty expensive monitoring equipment and even an undercover operative (ailing to the ruling 3% of the population and thus extremely skilled) just to track down one single loser? And all of that just so that said member of the inner party could satisfy what accounts to fetishistic lust for power? Let's be real here Winston was a loser as losers was exactly what Ingsoc was designed to produce
When the government really wants to take you down, and you haven't done something to get arrested and convicted immediately, an extensive case will be built against you over the course of several years. This has happened in cases ranging from the Las Vegas Mafia to Internet "lolcow" Daniel Larson. They waited to pinch Winston because O' Brien was still in the process of gathering information on him
That doesn’t stand up. It was obvious from the first time he met O’Brien that he knew nothing and no one. At most, he could offer a sound criticism of Ingsoc - albeit one which was tortured out of him fairly swiftly.
Not in a society like the one envisaged by Orwell in 1984. You start with the sentencing and then create the evidence you need for the case, if you can even be bothered to wait in the first place.
Who first claimed the appendix was a historical retrospective about newspeak as opposed to the omniscient narrator simply describing the world of the book? Insinuating that the Party was overthrown thoroughly undermines the primary theme of the novel.
This is a great video. You bring up many thoughts and questions I had during my first reading of the story. Things that to me seemed like bad writing at first, but then make sense if Julia is actually a spy.
