George Orwell\'s 1984 in Orwell\'s

George Orwell's 1984

In Orwell's novel, the concept of Doublethink and Big Brother allowed the government to tell citizens carefully thought-out lies and to get rid of morality while claiming to be moral. After all, democracy was not possible in this fictional story and the Party would decide what is democratic and what was not, what was good for the people to know, and what was not good for the citizens to know. Unfortunately, in the U.S. over the past few years there are plenty of examples of Doublethink - in fact official lies and deception have been all too common.

In the novel 1984, the Ministry of Plenty had promised citizens they would produce 145 million pairs of boots, but only 62 million pairs were made. The information put out then was that "...the Party had made five million more boots last year then they had expected to." But wait, in the same paragraph in Chapter 3, it was possible that "no boots at all were made," because even though the newspaper said five million extra pairs were made, "...you could see that half the people in Oceania had no boots." This is an example of Orwellian government putting lies in the form of propaganda out in newspapers, to make the public think that things are fine, when they are not fine at all.

This concept is not unlike the Bush Administration in Washington, which, among many other things, has admitted bribing journalist Armstrong Williams with $241,000 to write positive stories about education programs (including "No Child Left Behind"), according to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. Paying a professional journalist to say and write untrue things about a program is similar to lying about how many boots the government has produced. it's pure propaganda. Designed to convince the public of things that are not necessarily true.

And perhaps just as jaded and unconscionable, former Bush Administration officials have testified in Congress under oath that they editorially changed science reports before they were released to the public, to make Global Warming seem not as serious as it really is, among other things. This fits right in the Orwell novel; Winston edits historical accounts in order to fit with the current policies of the government. In other words, Orwell's fictional government wanted the citizens to know what the government felt would be good for them to know, not what people really truly needed to know (i.e., the truth).

As to the Bush Administration's censoring science to spare the public from hearing the real facts, the Christian Science Monitor reported that the White House "has broadly attempted to control which climate scientists could speak with reporters, as well as editing scientists' congressional testimony on climate change..." (Clayton, 2007). The Bush Administration was "particularly active in stifling [scientists'] discussion of the link between increased hurricane intensity and global warming," the article reports.