Blog 13A

Book: 1984
Author: George Orwell
Pages read this week: 14
Pages red this semester: 1220
Weekly Style: Quotation
Summary
It was his neighbor at the door and she requests Winston to repair his sink. At his neighbors’ house, he is troubled by the kids who are junior spies. Back in his apartment, Winston remembers a dream in which a man's voice—O'Brien's, he thinks—said to him, “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” Winston writes in his diary that his thought crime makes him a dead man, and then he hides the book. At night, he dreams of his mother sinking in ship and blames himself for that. He awakes in the morning, hearing a loud voice from the telescreen which signals that it is exercise time. While exercising, he thinks about how the party does his propaganda.

“War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”
This quotation is the slogan of the Party in the novel 1984. It represents the propaganda done by the party to brainwash the people. To me, it presents how the meanings of words can be changed by a totalitarian regime. Demagogues like Hitler expanded the sizes of countries by rousing the people through speeches and propaganda. And here, the slogan seems to convey the idea that war is peace because war can result into expansion of the nation, and if the whole world or a huge area is under the control of one country, that country has a lot of resources and is more powerful. Freedom is slavery because one becomes slave of himself, his urges of mind. He becomes undisciplined. So, everyone should be under the control of a central power which sets up moral and behavioral extremes and absolutes. If you know more, you are more troubled and hence you lose the peace of mind. So, the best thing is to ignore what others are doing (here it means government) and just go with the flow. A nation whose citizens are strictly controlled by the government and their lives are heavily influenced by it, including the flow of necessary items, is a nation with no freedom.