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Background
- Utopia and dystopia
- Totalitarian government
- use of force, torture, surveillance, control over media, propaganda
- Why the need for such control? (according to whom?)
- Extreme poverty, inequality
- War (we think …)—a fearful society is a compliant society
- Society make-up
- Globally: Oceania, Eastasia, Eurasia (and the non-aligned states)
- Domestically: Social classes: The Ingsoc party (inner--the ruling class; outer--civil servants; proles)
- Reality—who’s in control of it?
Some important concepts:
- Doublespeak
- 'war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength'
- ' the'memory hole' (actually an incinerator)
- 'Victory mansions' (really slums), 'Victory cigarettes' and gin
- Ronald Reagan and 'peacekeeper (nuclear) missiles'
- Bush/Cheney White House's 'Clear Skies' program (undercut 1970 'Clean Air Act')
- Obama and the 'Troubled Asset Relief Program' ('toxic assets' become 'legacy securities')
- Spying vs terrorist surveillance; weapons of mass destruction vs smart bombs; How about the 'Active Denial System?'
- Big Brother
- Information control
- 'who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past'
- techniques: Censorship, alteration of history, propaganda
- Perpetual war ('the long war', 'war on terror')
- demons/villains (Goldstein; al Qaida, Zarqaawi, bin Laden . . . . Islam??)
- profiteers (who benefits?)
- fear
Sociological concepts
- Dismantling of social institutions (family, marriage, parent/child bonds, etc.--anything that creates potentially divided loyalties with the state)
- Random punishment (do people know when they're being watched, or do they have to assume they're always being watched?)
- Construction of reality—based on what? How do we know what’s real in 1984?
- How do we know what’s real in 2008??
- Newspeak—eliminating words from the language? Or concepts? What's the point?
- Max Weber and legitimate authority —force is expensive, coercion is expensive—why are people so poor? Inequality? The expense of total social control?
- Dehumanization, desensitization—to violence, sex, emotion, etc.
- Torture, ‘re-education’ (classical conditioning) O’Brien was ‘tormentor, protector, inquisitor and friend’ (torture of Afghan detainees in Guantanamo Bay—US government 'renders' them to other countries if ' needed', in other words, 'outsources' torture)
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