Journal #19: Topic A

"All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother [...] for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hour? Yes, they swallowed it [...] Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? [...] Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?" (Orwell 52).

The government has essentially brainwashed the Society in which Winston lives into believing everything they hear. They do not question the government and take everything without thinking. This happens because of what the government has done with Society. They have scared them into not thinking through the "Thought Police" and the secretive societies that are meant to strike fear into the people. The Party manipulates them and forces the society into a totalitarian state. Winston seems to be the only person who remembers a time before this was the way things worked. No one in Winston's world remembers a time when it was different from the one it is in right now because they are taught not to think. The government ca do whatever it wants because it has complete control over the past, present, and future. In this section, there is a report about how the production of every product is at a record high and how all of the people in the city are praising Big Brother. The passage talks about how the certain rations of chocolate have been raised. Winston, however, remembers that it was only yesterday when the announcement had been made to lower the ration. Yet, the people praise BB because they "know" that it has been raised from what ever it was before. Everyone including Winston take this without showing outward emotion. On the inside, Winston knows that everything is a lie.