Implicit and explicit relationships between texts deepen an individual’s understanding of the values, significance and context of each text. George Orwell’s satire novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) follows a working class rebel, Winston Smith, through totalitarian Oceania to satirise the totalitarian communist regimes of Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler and of the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin. Fritz Lang criticises capitalist values and the rise of technology by creating a totalitarian state ruled by the powerful industrialist, Fredersen, in his German expressionist film Metropolis. Both speculative texts present a dystopian vision of the future, and represent the Marxist struggle of the underclass in totalitarianism, allowing the responders…show more content… The paradoxical nature of the Party’s political slogan, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” exemplifies the strong psychological control they had over the civilians as the human mind is able to transform negative conditions imposed by the Party into positive ideals. This manipulation of the people is further revealed through the hyperbolic allegory of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, which aims to achieve the ideological needs of Ingsoc (English socialism). The “destruction of words” allows the control of thought by “tearing human minds to pieces and putting them back together again the new shapes of your own choosing.” This metaphor reinforces the psychological control the Party wields over the people. Orwell reflects on the ideologies of Stalin and Hitler through the Party’s constant monitoring of it’s subjects to instil fear and this maintain power and control over society. The telescreens through which they maintain their power are symbolic of the tendency of totalitarian governments to abuse technology to attain
