Big Brother's Totalitarian Regime

In George Orwell’s political satire, 1984, Big Brother’s totalitarian regime controls the dystopian society in which Winston Smith, the protagonist, is part of. The Party, the name of the government, controls people through oppression, psychological manipulation, and the use of technology to suppress individuality.

One method a totalitarian regime such as the one of Big Brother’s Party employs to stay in power is through a monopolized control on all aspects of the media. This includes newspapers, television, the radio, public broadcasts, and even the books and history itself. Winston himself works at the Ministry of Plenty (miniplenty) to rewrite history so that it is favorable to the Party. As Winston describes in Chapter IV of Book

I, “ as soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. (39).”All newspapers, books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs, and any other form of documentation or literature underwent the same meticulous editing. As Winston said, “All history was palimpsest, scraped clean and re inscribed as exactly as often was necessary.” Through the control of the media, the Party is able to use mass indoctrination to coerce people into conformist behaviour.
Control of the media also leads to loss of privacy.

Privacy, as Glenn Greenwald stated in his lecture about its value, is essential to the maintenance of individuality. It promotes creativity by allowing individuals to be free of pressures that they face when they are around other people to act in a certain way. In 1984, the slogan “Big Brother is always watching you” shows how privacy wasn’t a concept that existed for the people of Oceania. Privacy was nearly impossible due to the constant surveillance through telescreens, anonymous spies and informers, and the Thought Police. Winston describes his daily life, “You had to live-did live, from the habit that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. (3)” This instills a sense of fear in people, so that although they don’t necessarily fully commit to the beliefs of the Party, they act automatically in the manner that the Party expects them to for the sake of survival. During the Two Minute Hate, when the Party played the video of the thought criminal, Winston was horrified of the process, but participated to blend in with the crowd. This, according to Winston, reached the point where it was an automatic reaction so as to avoid suspicion. Privacy (or the lack of) is crucial to the plot of the book because it was the main reason for which Winston felt that he could not express himself. This was due to the fact that the Party was constantly recording and watching all of its

citizens, therefore rendering all of its citizens into submission through oppression.