1984 Context Cards

Cult of personality

In communist and other systems, the excessive adulation of a single leader. It is the result of an effort to glorify a leader.
Nazis and Hitler = 1932 (for election campaigns) nazi newspaper portrayed hitler as a man who had a united mass movement behind him.
Stalin = became the embodiment of the Soviet Union and created his own cult.

How is a cult of personality shown in 1984?

posters of BB and party slogans. The worship of BB and how people are encouraged. The censorship also paints them out as heroes.

The Holodomor - Ukrainian famine

It was a human-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians.
Some historians believe it was a deliberately engineered by Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement.
Since 2006 it was considered a genocide

How is this famine linked to 1984?

people are controlled by rations

Down and Out in Paris and London 1933

Written about Orwell's life when he dropped out of conventional society and lived on the streets. it exposes the poverty existing in 2 prosperous cities.

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

Views on the working classes are discussed most explicitly in his book.
talks about his upbringing and the developments of his political conscience. He questions British attitudes to socialism.

Forced labour

usually by relatively large groups of people. it was a prominent feature of totalitarianism regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Union.
Nazis throughout the 1930s was accompanied by the extensive use of concentration camps who were opposed to the regime or were undesirable
SU = 1923 soviet secret police established a concentration camp on Solovetski island in the white sea where political prisoners were first used extensively for forced labour and after established many in Northern Russia SFSR and Siberia.

how is forced labour linked to 1984?

people who are captured by the thought police
mentions in the novel about camps - Parsons says he would rather go there than Room 101.

Stalinism

Stalinism was based on the idea of "socialism in one country," asserting that while global socialist revolution remained a goal, a classless society could be achieved within the Soviet Union despite being surrounded by capitalist nations. In the late 1920s, Stalin pushed for rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture to support urban industry, despite rural resistance. He prioritized efficiency over the Bolshevik goal of equality, rewarding technical experts and creating a stratified society.
The Purge Trials (1936-38) targeted Stalin's perceived rivals, with confessions obtained under torture leading to the execution or imprisonment of prominent figures

how does Stalinism linked to 1984?

referenced by the Ministry of Love (MiniLuv) and room 101 where people are forced to confess to crimes - some crimes they didn't even commit - and links to Orwell as how physical pain can cause us to reveal anything.

Removing history

Stalin used photo retouchers to erase his enemies from photographs, including Nikola Yezhov, a secret police official who played a key role in the purges. After falling out of favor in 1938, Yezhov was arrested, tried, and executed. Censors then removed him from official photos, such as one with Stalin by a waterway, replacing him with water. This practice was applied to numerous other party officials who were purged, with retouchers repeatedly altering images as Stalin's list of enemies grew. In some photos, Stalin's deputies were progressively removed until only he remained.

how does removing history link to 1984?

Syme - vaporised and was removed from existence (no one remembers him)
Also just say the Ministry of Truth

Propaganda and Orwell

Orwell was both a willing participant and unwilling of it. Worked in the BBC where a lot of propaganda took place.

Disillusionment

a feeling of disappointment resulting from the discovery that something is not as good as one believed it to be
- 1984 shows how it seemed like (after 2 world wars) that Western civilisation was on brink of collapse

Joseph Goebbles

1984 tactics resemble Goebbles Nazi tactics
Concept of 'Newspeak' striking resemblance to Goebbles Sprachregelung (language manipulation)

Orwell's criticism with socialism

Socialist himself
He contented 1984 wasn't an anti-socialist novel but rather a warning against totalitarianism.

What economic system is parodied in party’s control of production and distribution

Collectivisation / command economy

What term describes the extreme form of loyalty demanded by totalitarian states, reflected in the 2 mins hate?

Indoctrination, fanaticism (radicalised) and orthodoxy

When was 1984 published?

1949

How bad physical pain can get - link to Spanish civil war

Orwell shot in neck/ suffering with TB - knows real pain so explores this and how it could cause people to break

You and the Atom Bomb Oct 1945 - 2 key quotes and links power and resistance?

“A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak” = Orwell’s interest in rebellion (socialist - on verge of communism) and revolutionary attitudes = cheap weapons give common people power.

“In that case we are back to where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless” = totalitarian control - power imbalance among society = 3 superstates are unequal to rest of the world and are becoming more violent (coins the Cold War = foreshadows it)

A Nice Cup of Tea Jan 1946- 2 key quotes and its link to social class and truth?

“…but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable” = he shows himself to be pretentious and a ‘man of tastes’ that no matter how much he tries to cover up him social class background and aristocratic small origins, his pretentious side comes through. He could be mocking and that is plausible due to his satire but he often writes in this manner in his essays.

Makes an essay about tea which links to truth as Orwell has constructed, perhaps hypocritically, his own over English persona as he was born in India and chooses a name somewhat after an English river in Sussex and discusses tea (an increasing stereotype of English civility)

“In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realised on every day of the week…” WW2 remains still in 1946.

Shooting an Elephant Autumn 1946, 3 key quotes and links to 1984?

His character and fear of losing support and being weak is shown through Winston and in this essay he feels very closely connected to Winston’s vulnerability towards succumbing to the Party just as Orwell succumbs to the people watching him as he shoots the elephant. The horrific imagery of the elephants painful and slow death echoes horrors in 1984 (Room 101) Hre also has simialr horrific imagingifs (“my greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts”)

“Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish”

“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

“I often wondered whether any of the groups grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looing a fool.”