Ingsoc in the context of "Thought Police"

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👉 Ingsoc in the context of Thought Police

In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell, the Thought Police (Thinkpol in Newspeak) are the secret police of the superstate of Oceania, who discover and punish thoughtcrime (personal and political thoughts unapproved by Ingsoc's régime). Using criminal psychology and omnipresent surveillance (via informers, telescreens, cameras, and microphones) the Thinkpol monitor the citizens of Oceania and arrest all those who have committed thoughtcrime in challenge to the status quo authority of the Party and of the régime of Big Brother.

Orwell drew inspiration from his observation of the NKVD's methods of surveillance, control, and punishment of dissent in the Soviet Union and from his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

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Ingsoc in the context of Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Big Brother is a character and symbol in George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party, Ingsoc, wields total power for its own sake over the inhabitants. His image appears everywhere on posters within Oceanian society as a metaphor for the Party's complete control of the population. Orwell was deeply concerned with the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany and wrote his novel as a warning about the potential of a totalitarian leader destroying objective truth.

The ubiquitous slogan "Big Brother is watching you" serves as a constant reminder that Party members in Oceania are not entitled to privacy. They are subject to constant surveillance to ensure their ideological purity. This is primarily through omnipresent telescreens, two-way video devices used for broadcasting propaganda and for spying on individuals by the Thought Police. As the figurehead of the Party, Big Brother is omnipotent and the subject of a cult of personality, illustrated in the daily, ritualistic Two Minutes Hate, a mass demonstration of hatred for the enemy of the state, Emmanuel Goldstein and adoration for the leader, Big Brother.

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