1984 Comparison Essay

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1984 v. 2014 The NSA is watching you. In June of 2013, Edward Snowden, an intelligence contractor for the National Security Agency, revealed just how much Americans were being spied on by their government. He told of a few programs that allowed the NSA to collect information from cables that phone and internet signals ran through, sending shockwaves throughout the country (Smith). This brought many Americans to ask the question, “Are we living in 1984?” 1984 is a book by George Orwell that depicts the life of Winston Smith and his struggle to deal with the strict government of Oceania. This government watches and controls its citizens through telescreens, endless war, Doublethink, and Newspeak. Although there are many similarities between…show more content…
It doesn’t matter if the people knew in the back of their minds that Oceania was just at war with Eastasia and not Eurasia. The government brainwashed them into thinking that whatever it told them was true, and that the past had never been changed (Beale). This can be compared with today’s society with the phrase that proclaims America to be the “Land of the Free.” This phrase contradicts itself because the United States has more people imprisoned than any other country in the world. Nevertheless, it is still used. Doublethink in the book is different from doublethink today because the government is not forcibly putting examples of it everywhere in an effort to brainwash the population. (Raskin and Kolet). In the novel, Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. It was constantly being thinned out as to limit the range of thought among citizens in order to eventually make thought crime impossible. In today’s world, this is similar to the abbreviations used when texting. However, texting abbreviations are currently harmless and are not being used by the government for manipulative purposes
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