Thought Police
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The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) is the secret police in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is the job of the Thought Police to uncover and punish thoughtcrime and thought criminals, using psychology and omnipresent surveillance from telescreens to find and eliminate members of society who were capable of the mere thought of challenging ruling authority. The government attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects, labeling unapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime, or, in Newspeak, crimethink.
It also had much to do with Orwell's own "power of facing unpleasant facts", as he called it, and his willingness to criticise prevailing ideas which brought him into conflict with others and their "smelly little orthodoxies". Although Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist, many other socialists (especially those who supported the communist branch of socialism) thought that his criticism of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin damaged the socialist cause.
In the early part of the Twentieth Century, Japan actually had Thought Police. [1]
The term "Thought Police", by extension, has come to refer to real or perceived enforcement of ideological correctness, or pre-emptive policing where a person is apprehended in anticipation of the possibility that they may commit a crime, in any modern or historical contexts.
[edit] References
- ^ "The TOKKO (Special Higher Police, or thought police) was the civilian branch whose duty it was to enforce the idea of proper thought." [1]
[edit] See Also
- Secret Police
- List of fictional secret police and intelligence organizations
- Gestapo
- Sicherheitsdienst
- Stasi (GDR)
- BND, German intelligence agency
- Cheka
- NKVD
- KGB
- People's Commissariat for State Security (USSR)
- Tokko (Japan)
- NIS (South Korea)
- Ministry of State Security (china)
| Characters | Winston Smith | Julia | O'Brien | Big Brother | Emmanuel Goldstein |
|---|---|
| Places | Oceania | Eastasia | Eurasia | Airstrip One | Room 101 |
| Classes | Inner Party | Outer Party | Proles |
| Ministries | Ministry of Love | Ministry of Peace | Ministry of Plenty | Ministry of Truth |
| Concepts | Ingsoc | Newspeak (wordlist) | Doublethink | Goodthink | Crimestop Two plus two make five | Thoughtcrime | Prolefeed | Prolesec |
| Miscellaneous | Thought Police | Telescreen | Memory hole | Goldstein's book Two Minutes Hate | Hate week |
| Adaptations | 1956 film | 1984 film | 1953 US TV | 1954 BBC programme | Opera |
| Influence | Nineteen Eighty-Four in popular media Parody: Me and the Big Guy |
