Media

Media

1. The Party takes propaganda to totalizing limits in its project of political control over not just everything that people do or say but everything they think or believe. T

   • Virtually every communication is calculated to propagate politically charged messages

2. Propaganda is under the Ministry of Truth

   • real past has been altered or destroyed, the fabrications become truth
   • Winston Smith works
     • he is himself a censor and a propagandist
       • he erases records of the past, he knows that what he is censoring and falsifying was probably not true either
         • “Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version”
         • The way the aunts describe the freedom the hadmaids had in the time before
       • he writes a news story to replace a story in the Times he has been instructed to rectify.
         • under the guise of the factual reporting of news
     • Winston’s fabricated replacement story about the fictitious Comrade Ogilvy is likewise calculated from the outset with the intent to propagate a values message.
       • For example, he “reports” that Ogilvy “denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversion which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies”
         • . His story thereby exemplifies, without mentioning, Party virtues such as loyalty to Party above family and zealousness in rooting out criminals.
         • Lest the moral of the story not be clear enough, Winston appends some editorial remarks that he attributes to Big Brother praising Ogilvy for abstinence and other virtues
         • the propagation of lies as facts.
           • Statistics, reports about the war, historical records,
           • are not simply false; they are lies because they are known to be false
           • the object is not just to propagate facts (or lies) but to propagate values, or value judgments
             • e propaganda of fact does indirectly
           • facts (or lies passed off as facts) are used to “prove” that, notwithstanding significant deprivation, people are better off than they were before the Party came to powe
   • Records Department
     • destroying the records of the past as they become inconsistent with always changing policy and substituting falsified records in their place
     • “was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth”
   • “to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise”
     • “Newspapers”, “biological treatises” and “textbooks” purport to be factual. T
     • the Ministry produces works in other genres that propagate values without pretending to be factual and that have to do not with falsehood or lies but with fiction, or more generally art.
   • Orwell worked with the BBC during World War II when certain kinds of restrictions limiting what news could be disseminated were common, and he became disturbed by what he perceived to be the falseness of his work.

3. People forget the chocolate rations are reduced and dolled out arbitrarily

4. Fiction Department

   • Julia represents the propaganda of fiction
   • one wonders in what sense any one could be a writer on a “novel-writing machine”.
   • if the purpose is to entertain, other propagandistic purposes piggy-back on its ostensible purpose
     • Winston’s news story, which is fictional but pretends not to be, shows us how this can be done.
     • interchangeability of fact and fiction for propaganda purposes,
     • normally concerned with the production of novels, retools to write atrocity pamphlets
       • These will be presented not as fiction but as fact.
   • If the mere propagation of values is enough for a communication to be counted as propaganda, clearly this applies to fiction.

5. “Big Brother Is Watching You”

   • propaganda about surveillance
   • Big Brother is depicted as being ruggedly handsome; an image we can suppose is calculated to dispose people to like if not love him, and to feel glad to know that he is looking out for them

6. Having been bombarded with propaganda on the way to his flat, Winston is immediately confronted with it once again, this time coming from the telescreen broadcasting “a list of figures which had something to do with the production of Pig Iron”

7. Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations—that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, then people of fifty years ago.

   • However, not “a word of it could be proved or disproved” because, as Winston knew from his job, documentary evidence (quite likely false to begin with) was continually being destroyed and replaced with new evidence to reinforce or prove new messaging.
   • In Goldstein’s book, the development of a technology with the dual capacity for broadcasting and receiving—propaganda and surveillance—is hailed as a turning point in the history of state power.
     • “The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further”
   • technologies of propaganda to constantly bombard them with messaging to “manipulate public opinion”.
     • With the development of television, and the technical advance that made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously, private life came to end.

8. “WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”

   • he citizens of Oceania are brainwashed to think that the Party is really there to help them, to make them happy.

9. Red centre = Rachel and Leah Re education centre

   • Handmaids are trained for their future roles and indoctrinated in the ideology in Gilead
   • “‘they were lazy women…they were sluts’”
   • remarks like these, which shame women who deviate from Gileadean ideals, serve to control and conform the women of Gilead into model citizens
   • The training from the Red Center strives to indoctrinate the new Handmaids with Gilead’s heavily religious customs, while emphasizing the impurities and immoralities in society before the regime took control.