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Orwellian is an adjective which is used to describe a situation, an idea, or a societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. [2]
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky comment in their book Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media that Orwellian doublespeak is an important component of the manipulation of the English language in American media, through a process called dichotomization, a component of media propaganda involving "deeply embedded double standards in the reporting of news."
The term is named after the American policy analyst and former senior vice president at Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Joseph Overton, who proposed that the political viability of an idea depends mainly on whether it falls within an acceptability range, rather than on the individual preferences of politicians using the term or concept.
[4] [5] In contemporary usage, the term Thought Police and variants thereof often refers to the actual or perceived enforcement of ideological orthodoxy in the political life of a society. In North Korea , the Ministry of State Security ( MSS ) was established by the Kim dynasty in 1973 and was known by its nickname as ( North Korea's Thought ...
The Orwell Archive at University College London contains undated notes about ideas that evolved into Nineteen Eighty-Four.The notebooks have been deemed "unlikely to have been completed later than January 1944", and "there is a strong suspicion that some of the material in them dates back to the early part of the war".
In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), by George Orwell, Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate.To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking.
In the essay, Orwell speculated about the possible scenarios for the future of the European continent: the United States as the sole global nuclear power could wage a preventive war with the Soviet Union; [11] other countries could develop their own nuclear weapons and wage nuclear warfare against each other, causing societal collapse; [12] or the status quo would be frozen and the world ...
The essay focused on political language, which, according to Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". Orwell believed that the language used was necessarily vague or meaningless because it was intended to hide the truth rather than express it.