Totalitarian Government's Misuse Of Technology

Totalitarian Government’s Misuse of Technology
Will Lim
A totalitarian government seeks to control not only all economic and political matters, but the attitudes, values, and beliefs of its population, erasing the distinction between state and society. The theme of technology has been a significant subject throughout the whole history of totalitarianism. In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian government abuses technology for its own ends instead of exploiting its knowledge to improve civilization. In the story, the government created its own contradictory language called ‘Newspeak’ which is used in censoring ideas of freedom or rebellion. Big Brother, a character of a fiction, was able to oversee everything and virtually
Orwell’s novel about technology and dictatorship is a powerful statement of how technology empowers the totalitarianism government take control.

With the convenient use of technology, the government is able to censor any types of possibilities that might cause reformation. Nowadays there are many conspiracy theories about the governments like 9/11 terror or global warming, even staging events to create a result desirable to the government’s policy. However in the book, the government has gone to the extreme. “Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?” (Orwell 28) Newspeak is a fictional language, closely based on English, but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. The totalitarian regime of the Party’s aim is to make any contradictory thoughts inaccessible. As the government censors all types of meaning from language which contains the ideas
The government-controlled media engage in a massive falsification which affects the majority of the population’s psychological manipulation. As well as being surveillance device that acts as Big Brother’s all seeing eyes and all hearing ears, the telescreen is used as an instrument to transmit the party’s propaganda. Also the government deliberately weakens the independence and strength of individuals’ minds and forces them to live in a constant state of propaganda. One use of propaganda used by the Party is doublethink. “WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” (Orwell 2) In this quotation, the Party is trying to convince the citizens of Oceania that what they want is what they already have. They do not want freedom, because it is slavery. If they gain freedom, they would not be as happy as before as they would not live the way they do. Citizens are psychologically manipulated to believe that war is the reason for peace and serenity. The party uses these slogans in order to mind-control the citizens to trust that the government brings happiness. Consequently, citizens will not consider rebellion, as they believe what government is doing is always right. The website called German Propaganda Archive is a collection of Nazi’s propaganda (1933 – 1945) for their citizens. Nazi wrote their ideology on the newspaper about the weakness of other nation’s parliaments, evilness of Jews and Bolshevism in order to convince their citizens about the greatness of