Journal 1

As much as I would hate to live in a distopian world such as the one depicted in 1984, I quite admire the techniques the government uses to keep the population under control. In "Nineteen eighty-four," the people have absolutely no freedom, but to prevent rebellion, the government has to completely conceal the fact that life could be better than what the people knew. An idea I quite admired was the "two minutes of hate." In a world like this, the people are bound to be angry about something, so to keep that anger from being directed to the government, they proposed the two minutes of hate, so all the hate of the people could be directed away from the government and towards the enemies of the government. This deals with the people who want to rebel, and also gives the people a false sense of patriotism, that by hating, they are doing good for their country.

The idea of "newspeak" is an ingenious idea. The thing about newspeak is that it is close enough to English for people to learn easily, but it has no words for ideas which could cause rebellion, such as freedom. As long as the youth are being educated in newspeak, they will not know that these ideas ever existed, and when the English speaking generation dies out, the government would have a population who did not even know what rebellion was. It is true that ideas can exist with out words for them, but with nothing even similar to the concept of freedom, the population would be completely patriotic and manipulable by the government.