Totalitarian Government In George Orwell's 1984
The 20th century has shocked the world with its atrocities and the truth is that most of these disasters have been related to the two major totalitarian regimes the world knew: fascism and communism. George Orwell is definitely one of the foreseers of this entire century of horror and both his novel 1984 and Animal Farm show just how far the totalitarian madness can go.
George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 and he gave his book this title precisely because this is what he believed the world would have been until 1984. In this novel, he describes a world in which totalitarianism has taken over completely and in which freedom seems to be just a myth that has been long forgotten.
Everything in the world portrayed by Orwell is completely controlled by an almost-invisible government that seems to have taken over every single moment and aspect of its citizen’s life. From the moment people wake up in the morning and to the moment they go back to sleep, every single part of the day is thoroughly controlled. There is no such thing as intimacy, not to mention actual freedom.
The totalitarian ruling portrayed by George Orwell in his 1984 novel controls the minds of the people living in this society. Every single household has a giant telescreen that constantly promoted propagandistic messages and they control the minds of the people with the idea that the “Big Brother” is watching everyone everywhere they go, like an omniscient and omnipresent God.
Even more, the government in Orwell’s 1984 also controls the bodies of its “subjects” as well. The control reaches such a high point that even a face twitch can show that a person has not been loyal to the Big Brother and to the totalitarian ruling in the society.
The information people have access to and the history of the place in which they live is also thoroughly controlled and nothing gets through without thorough beforehand analysis. The totalitarian government in this novel has completely reinvented history, so that they are portrayed in a good light.
All in all, Orwell’s novel can be considered to be a great alarm signal over the wide series of bad things that can come with a totalitarian ruling. Written in 1948 when the Nazi party and the fascist parties had already fallen, but when communism was flourishing in the entire Eastern Europe, this book can be considered to be an actual premonition on the things that might have happened if things had been let to go too far.