1984 Essay

George Orwell’s “1984” is most certainly a dire warning about the future. It is a polemic criticizing Stalin's regime, the government that Big Brother most resembles and that Orwell saw as a monstrous perversion of Marxist ideals. Through allusive details, we can see that this society is an allegory for Communist societies, specifically Stalin's USSR: the omnipotent, menacing, yet never-fully-explained "Party," and the reference to the "Three-Year Plan" (an allusion to Stalin's "Five-Year Plans"), are among these. George Orwell wrote 1984 as a political statement against totalitarianism, using themes such as destruction of personal freedom, a fraudulent and glorified government, and artificial truths.
To understand how Orwell shaped his observations and experience into 1984, the definitions of authoritarianism and totalitarianism need to be explored. Broadly speaking, an authoritarian system is one in which society is governed by a dictator or oligarchy not constitutionally resp...