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George Orwell Analysis

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George Orwell’s political views have been developed throughout his life based on personal experiences, although some may argue Orwell had no political label, due to his many different facets and aspects. Orwell witnessed Stalin’s Soviet Russia, the dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler, the Spanish civil war and World War 2. Orwell’s literary works such as 1984 and many others, touch on aspects of imperialism, anarchism, socialism, Nazism, capitalism and totalitarianism. “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical” in 1984, is a text within a text that Winston reads to understand many things about the totalitarian world he lives in. The purpose of the text within a text is to parallel the corrupt socialist world of 1984 with that of Stalin’s USSR, expand on Orwell’s ideas of imperialism, and to sound an alarm to warn readers of what a worst case scenario totalitarian world could be like. Firstly, “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical” was to provide greater insight, for Winston and the reader. Goldstein’s text takes apart each section of the party’s slogan “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is strength” (Orwell, 1), and explains what they mean to the party. After reading the text, Winston learned some new things, but the text mostly just reinforced things he already assumed or knew. Secondly, when thinking from a political standpoint, one could say that the point of this text within a text was to parallel the corrupt socialist world of 1984 with that of Stalin’s USSR (Stalin’s Capitalism). The party’s corrupt form of socialism is evident in “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical” when Goldstein states, “the official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of

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