jim wells Honors English 2 Compare and Contrast Essay Mr. bigsby October 15, 2014 Loss of Freedom It is hard to break away from something you were born into. Kids born in North Korea will never see outside of North Korea just because they were born in an oppressive and cruel government. In most societies people are free to do whatever they like and have lots of choices of what they want to do but everyone born in the country of North Korea lives with full government interference and false sense of what is really going on in the country. No one has freedom in the country and they never will. No one can control this loss of freedom.
Do pressure groups strengthen or weaken democracy? It is extremely difficult to reach a conclusion on whether groups are good or otherwise for democracy but it is important to realise how they can be both beneficial and damaging to it. In debating the matter we face the difficulty that the group’s methods, aims and composition vary significantly and so they cannot all be thrown into the same group. So while we make comments on judgements they are only generalised and do not apply to all groups in all circumstances. Government’s aims are always to please the public, or do the best for the state and so these groups clearly show the government what a certain band of people wish to happen.
Sometimes it feels like our own lives are careening towards the world described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, The population is rigidly controlled by the government there. But in The Brave New World The people in a sense, are the ones controlling themselves. In Brave New World, the people living in the World State are given the tools to live life happily and stably, and they do so. It Probably seems that one of the biggest issues we have today in the world might be the loss of the private self, But what we do everyday and the experience we have is what i think defines us as a society.
It becomes nearly impossible for people to question the Party’s power in the present when they accept what the Party tells them about the past—that the Party arose to protect them from bloated, oppressive capitalists, and that the world was far uglier and harsher before the Party came to power. Winston vaguely understands this principle. He struggles to recover his own memories and formulate a larger picture of what has happened to the world. Winston buys a paperweight in an antique store in the prole district that comes to symbolize his attempt to reconnect with the past. Symbolically, when the Thought Police arrest Winston at last, the paperweight shatters on the floor.
1984 was written by Orwell as a warning to the world as he saw it, he opposed totalitarianism in all it’s forms and, on one occasion said “I believe that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph again”. The concept for 1984 came about through Orwell’s experiences in Burma and Spain that involved propaganda and totalitarian regimes. This is reflected in the text through the party and the use of ‘Big Brother’ posters. Orwell helps the audience recognise the negative aspects of the dystopian and totalitarian world through Winston’s perspective, a perspective that the audience relates to, as Winston bears many of our own ideals, such as the want for freedom and a democratic society. It is undeniable that there are a number of parallels between the protagonists of both Orwell’s ‘1984’ and the Wachowski brothers’ ‘The Matrix’.
1984 remains as one of the most powerful sources of warnings issued against totalitarian societies. George Orwell aims to portray the worst human society, a dystopia. The negative utopian form is used to convince readers to avoid any actions similar to this that could lead to a reaction as shown in the novel. 1984 is one of the most famous novels of the negative utopian, or dystopian, genre. When 1984 was composed, a society that was monitored seemed possible, as it was the dawn of the nuclear age, before the television became a common appliance found in homes.
Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes are both realists. Their works might be referred to as cruel or immoral because of their division of politics and ethics in their respective political theories. Although they lived centuries apart their works carry immense similarities with regards to use of force and violence. Both these theories declare violence, force and fear as necessities for maintaining a strong government, although the means in which they are carried out and justified differ. Their overarching beliefs dealing with human nature and structure of government are relatively similar, with slight variations, while the most distinct differences within their ideologies appear when analyzing the purpose of government.
Big Brother is the example of all the ideals of the totalitarian party. In compare to Big Brother, Winston Smith keeps the idea of democracy underlines freedom; he has to hide his own thought because the Big Brother's party will punish him by death if the party finds it out. George Orwell evaluates of Big Brother's society by describing it as a dark and a gloomy place. It warns that people might believe that everyone must become slaves to the government in order to have an orderly society, but at the expense of the freedom of the people The super-country of Oceania is in a constant state of war in which the novel 1984 is set in, and bomb explosions are omnipresent. The living conditions are poor – very poor – with the buildings broken-down, the food artificial and rationed out, wages poor, and clothing cheap.
“The failure of political extremism in Britain, in the 1930’s was due to the strength of the National Government” Assess the validity of this statement. During the 1930’s political extremist parties failed to gain power in Britain, despite having success in Europe. It can be argued that this was because the National Government had many strengths and was able to effectively run the country to a stable state, thus the political extremist could not break into main stream politics within Britain. Between 1931 and 1940 the National Government held office, consisting of the main political parties at the time, and having popular leading figures such as MacDonald (1931-1935), Baldwin (1935-1937) and Chamberlain (1937-1940), helped the Government to have wide spread popularity and support throughout the country. This patronage was important because of the threat from political extremists; the government needed a strong army of support that could withstand the persuasions of the extreme left and right winged groups, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the British Union of Fascists (BUF).
In dystopian society, technology, social manipulation, and control are all factors used to maintain oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society, even at the expense of universal human values. The film Metropolis by Fritz Lang and the novel 1984 by George Orwell offer a variety of social and political perspectives that allow the audience to gain insight into the oppression of freedom, truth and love within their context. Both address loss of these values within society through control and oppression, but they differ in perspective, due to the contrasting views of each composer. Lang made Metropolis during the era of the Weimar Republic. This was the country's first attempt at creating a democracy in the very difficult years following the first world war, as he tapped into Germany's power struggles, issues of poverty and conflict.