Although
George Orwell was a Socialist, 1984 and the concepts
it includes have been used to frighten people away from
Socialist ideas.
In fact, 1984
contains a number of parodies based on experience of
life in Great Britain.
Here are
three of them. There are many more.
1) The
Ministry of Truth is a parody of the BBC World
Service. During the war the BBC projected a
consistently positive attitude summed up as "my
country right or wrong". The slogan is an
unacknowledged borrowing from the British Union of
Fascists.
If the past
was inconvenient it was "reinterpreted". Of course the
outright falsification of the Ministry of Truth would
be above and beyond BBC practice. That is the point of
parody.
b) The Junior
Anti-Sex League was a parody of the Scouts and Guides.
Julia was an example of the ineffectiveness of their
message of clean living. She was employed for a while
in the production of the vilest pornography for the
more degenerate elements of the working class, "the
proles".
c) Newspeak
was based on a trend in language. The Communist
International became the "Comintern" while the
"Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" was
regularly shortened to "Nazi". In the process, Orwell
believed, ideas were excluded from the labels.
Syme, in
1984, believed that dissent would eventually be made
impossible by "Newspeak" because the language for
different opinions would no longer exist.
It is an
interesting idea but as I said above, it is a parody.
You can find
many other parodies in 1984.
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