Newspeak and doublethink in Orwell's 1984

NOV 23 2020

An analysis of the linguistic machinery in Orwell's novel: Newspeak as a vocabulary engineered so that dissent has no words, and doublethink as the trained ability to hold contradictory beliefs. Orwell's insight was that the deepest propaganda works on the tools of thought rather than on opinions, which is why his terms are still the ones reached for when describing political language. Literary analysis of a fictional system, not a historical one.