In 1948, when George Orwell sat down to write a novel, it was to no one’s surprise that he looked to politics for his muse. The world had just seen two of the largest scale wars ever fought, a genocide, and the creation of a new political regime— totalitarianism. In the midst of this environment he created the novel Nineteen Eighty
Four. As World War Two was wrapping up Orwell was focused on the future. The war finished the totalitarian nation of Hitler’s Germany and similar fascist movements in
Europe; however another power was just beginning to emerge. Russia, or the Soviet
Union, had an extremely complex century in politics. What began with a revolution to overthrow the Tsar turned into a tug-of-war within the revolutionist and
…show more content…
Despite never having achieved this aim, most states aspired to it, or something similar. This distribution of power allowed the most flexibility to the Inner-Party, the brains behind the operation. It is this control that is the fundamental tenet of the Totalitarian doctrine. In brief, George Orwell mimics the most famous totalitarian states of the 20th century in his satire, Nineteen Eight-Four, in order to communicate how a government goes about manipulating its people. This fictional tale presents a seemingly absurd situation, but upon further analysis we come to understand it is a dystopia only by literary classification. The world presented here is, in fact, so real that many of the events are taken straight from the history books. In conclusion, through the tale of Winston Smith, an ordinary middle-class citizen in Oceania, we recognize that not only is this future
NOT an absurd notion, it could be closer than we think. Based on the political atmosphere in 1948, George Orwell wouldn’t have been surprised if this world mirrored the one in his novel by, say,