1984 {blog two}

              The next section of the book that I have read concerns Winston’s beliefs on how he thinks the government can be over run. From chapter six, he tells us that he hired a prostitute to well you know… Anyway he believes that these women are the lowest form of life that the society has to deal with. Essentially they follow none of the rules that the rest of the society has to abide by and the actual number of “proles” as they call them is astonishing. Winston thinks that if the Party were to be overrun, it would have to be done by these people. “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.” (pg. 77)
            We know that Winston’s job for the Party is to pretty much rewrite history to make it seem as though the government has made Oceania a wonderful place to live, free of enemies, crime, poverty, and hunger. But we have learned of it to be the exact opposite, with the electricity almost never working, people going hungry in the streets and their houses are crumbling right before their eyes. Everything that is told to the citizens sounds legitimate because everyone thinks that if the records show this as the truth than all be! It must be right! However, Winston knows that history is a lie. Heck, he is one of the people rewriting it and actually conscientious about what he is doing. Even though he has to perform this task without questioning it, he believes that everything that he has done is just giving the party more power. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” (pg.37)
               Going along with this last quote, Winston begins to read a child’s history book.  He is astonished at how the Party can manipulate the human mind just by telling people that something is the way it is because they say so. “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”  (pg. 82) In my opinion, I think that Winston is not scared of the Party itself, but the unquestioned power it maintains. The power it has over all the citizens who just are going along for the ride. These people don’t question this power and this is one of the sole reasons that the Party has been so successful in controlling the population. And that is why Winston is terrified about the Party! Because there is nothing he can do to regain sanity in the world, at least not by himself and he doesn’t want to get caught trying. But it seems as though he isn’t the only one who is aware of this… and that gives him hope.