For the most part, that's true. I'm given to believe that it takes place in London at the very least, because Winston still has vague memories of life before Party rule, and recalls sheltering in underground train stations.hermes said:
Could V for Vendetta challenge the government of 1984
- Thread starter Samtemdo8_v1legacy
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Since they can't even spell "Strength", they should not be that much of a challenge. (Unless that's the joke, since it is paired with ignorance.)Samtemdo8 said:V may have toppled the facist goverment of Adam Susan, but if possible could he challenge the governmant of the novel 1984, "The Party"?
If anyone loves these 2 pieces of work, speculate?
Can V challenge and even topple Ingsoc and Big Brother?
Or are they too powerful and influential even for him?
It's hard to tell because the whole point of 1984 is that you don't really know what's going on. Maybe Oceania really is at war with two other super powers and controls The Americas, the British Isles and South Africa. Maybe it actually controls the entire world and keeps talking about the war to keep people busy. Maybe it's actually a tiny little nation a-la North Korea and the rest of the world is normal and it's just spewing bullshit.
If it was the North Korea case then MAYBE but unlikely, as with the other cases, it's a flat out no.
If it was the North Korea case then MAYBE but unlikely, as with the other cases, it's a flat out no.
It's Newspeak. The government is shown to want to control every last aspect of the lives of their people, to the point where they try to discourage sex that isn't purely for the sake of procreation. Newspeak is a very dumbed down version of the English language that sounds like it came from a flunked out eighth grader, and the government is constantly trying to push it into the people. It's said that it would take decades to fully integrate it, but it was already starting to catch on.COMaestro said:
Did the story imply that the government was intentionally exposing the protagonist to the true history sources to try and get him to look into them on his own? Or was it implied that his inquiry was a genuine personal investigation into the subject? If the former then....well I don't really know why they would do that, as it seems silly to intentionally provoke people to rebel, only to punish them for rebelling. But it's a distopian future so logic doesn't apply much. If it's the latter, then it's reasonable to assume that someone is going to resist. Also, is this government United Kingdom only? The wiki didn't specify if this was a global society or just that one country. If it's one nation, then we're basically talking about North Korea, and plenty of outside sources could push to incite rebellion, just like we do today. And plenty of people inside NK try to get away, and resist the regime they live under, even after generations of being spoon fed bullshit.Samtemdo8 said:
And even if it is a global society, I still think that humanity would rebel to some degree or other no matter what, and that eventually they would push back in a significant way. And if they had charismatic, bombastic, in your face kind of figureheads like V, that would be more likely to happen.
I might be remembering stuff wrong, but I think it is closer to the later. Some of the elements are unearthed by the protagonist, but when he tries to inconspicuously run away with the information and contact the resistance, he discovers (too late), that the resistance is also part of the party. The logic behind it is that the party is aware some people are not gullible enough to remain loyal, so they created the rumor of a resistance so that once someone tried to rebel and contact them, they would be singled out easier.Happyninja42 said:
The book defined the geography but it is also intentionally vague in terms of geopolitics. We are told that we live in Oceania, which includes most of the western hemisphere, and there are another two "countries", one of which we are constantly at war with (which one changes in the middle of the book and few people seems to notice). Of course, given that almost all that information is given by the official propaganda means, and we never actually go outside the city, all that information about the world is very unreliable. At some point, though some subversive book within the book, we are given to believe the other countries do exist but are into charades of their own, so while the war is real, the balance of power is never changed. Please take into consideration that the subversive book is also revealed to be written by the party so... yeah.
I'll have to look that up. It's been a long time since I read 1984, so I may be forgetting something. That would be an awesome idea for a book, though. If that's the case, then yeah, I think V would stand a pretty good chance.Samtemdo8 said:
That said, I thought the state held public executions? Wasn't that in there somewhere? And I'm pretty sure the prisoners were implied to be from India or China, as opposed to the presumably mostly white England area. Didn't the main character remember the party rising to power when he was a small child? The party couldn't be more then a few decades old, if that's the case. Damn, I need read that book again now. I guess I'll be visiting Barnes and Noble later : P
The main character Winston Smith "claims" to remember the party forming, but its implied whether he does remember it or its something that party imprinted in his head. Like I remember reading a part saying he does not remember or vaguely remembers his childhood.Fox12 said:
God said:
V is REALLY not good. V "was" an un-person? Send V to the Ministry of Love. Big Brother is really REALLY good.God said:
The whole point of 1984 is that even thought is monitored. Winston never stood a chance. V wouldn't either.
Yeah but then in 1984's paradigm the Proles are depicted as fairly knockabout, I doubt V would be successful in riling them up.Silvanus said:
But a problem is that the Proles don't organize, and in fact can't given how the system is set up. That's the whole reason they aren't monitored to a noteworthy level: they aren't a threat to the Party. They're too busy trying to get by day-to-day and maybe get their hands on one of life's small pleasures outside of basic necessities to even have the idea cross their minds.Silvanus said:
And hell even if they did organize the Party controls all distribution directly, meaning that any uprising would simply require a few places being blockaded and them left to starve. It's not like their no longer taking part in the system would be missed, their labour is mostly wasted intentionally on things which will create no value. For all we know Prole uprisings are common but are dealt with with efficiency through quarantine and starvation.
The world of 1984 was hopeless, with the only real hope is that someday the system will eventually reach its braking point and collapse. The hope in the Proles seems more Orwell making a statement about reality then the story itself, and if you ask some they'd argue he was right (and others would say the opposite. Say what one will about it being a good or bad thing, but there's a reason why it's the working and lower class supporting people like Alternative for Deutschland, Freedom Party of Austria, Leave and Trump. People with nothing to loose tend to be the first to take action)
That's just it, we don't see any real reason to believe that those are genuine war prisoners and not just guys they snatched up and declared war prisoners. We don't even know if those other two nations exist in the first place because the information we get is SO unreliable in 1984 that we know pretty close to nothing with any certainty.Fox12 said:
As for the original question could V defeat Ingsoc? Well V is the hero, as someone stated above the man is on God Mode and makes a lot of plays that work out primarily because protagonist armor is some thick shit to overcome. In no particular order Evee NEVER turns on him despite ample reason and opportunity, nobody shoots him in the head or even a shot to his arms that would render him unable to knife nut everybody to death. That many men that many bullets it's less a matter of one of them being bright enough to "think outside the box" and more one of them not controling their aim perfectly in their excitement. And the police are not portrayed as being particularly inept, not catching up ever is also a bit odd. Anyway I'm digressing.
Ingsoc was completely dug in to the point that nobody remembered what freedom even was. So the arrival of a V is unlikely. On the other hand it seems like as smoothly as shit is running in Ingsoc the moment a single thing goes wrong for them it's all gonna fall to shit on it's own. You don't need V to tear down an evil but ultimately stable society. You need a bad winter to starve the proles into being more interested in toppling the machine than breathing.
While that's generally true, in the case of 1984, as I understand it, it wasn't just that the people thought Big Brother was a good thing, it was that they were left unable to conceptualise there being anything wrong with it. Sure, people might be starving, but the idea of blaming The Party might not occur.Sean Renaud said:
Of course, how successfully you could get that sort of thing to work is another issue.
From how I understand it the Ingsoc government is very much like the Legislaturist government in the People's Republic of Haven, in the Honorverse. That means V would never be able to topple the government by himself, or even with the help of the proles. Like with the PRH I'm pretty sure that Ingsoc would cluster bomb a large dissident movement within the mob... Which means the only way Ingsoc would fall would be like...
Which of course lead to...
But none of that would have been possible without...
So with the nature of such totalitarian states, where the people don't remember anything prior to the broken system they have... You need a serious external threat to allow the internal threats to gain power in the system, fester, and eventually topple the system.
...Rob S. Pierre's coup against the Legislaturists, in which he couldn't count on using the Doleists(Proles/underclass) to do the dirty work. He had to organize people in powerful positions and use a lot of black market acquired goods. At which point he had to assassinate basically all the Legislaturists in Neuvouz Paris. Then he had to institute his own government, The Committee of Public Safety, and a reign of terror to purge the remaining Legislaturists and loyalists. The Committee of Public Safety was functionally the same as the old Legislaturists system, if more brutal, sacrificing any failed Committee member or military officer to appease the mob.
Which of course lead to...
...A series of attempted coups by various groups, including a particularly nasty one by a group called 'The Levelers' which ended with Admiral McQueen cluster bombing civilian crowds. It got to a point where the treachery was so endemic and the paranoia so high, no one except for the core members of the Committee, like Rob Pierre and Oscar Saint-Just were safe from public execution within the PRH. But the instability and necessary placement of traitorous types, like McQueen as the secretary of the Navy caused no one to be safe. To the point where Rob Pierre was likely killed along with McQueen and everyone else in Haven's Naval Headquarters, the Octagon, when Oscar Saint-Just detonated the thermonuclear bomb in the Octagon's basement. Due to the attempted naval coup started by McQueen. Which left Oscar Sain-Just as the sole remaining member of the Committee of Public Safety... His actions and indiscressions finally got him killed by admiral Thomas Theisman, which finally toppled the despotic tyrant communist system of Haven and allowed for the restoration of the Republic.
But none of that would have been possible without...
...The build up to the war with the Star Kingdom of Manticore, the single most powerful military that the People's Republic of Haven faced in the string of conquests to keep it's economy afloat. The initiation of the war allowed the Legislaturists to be killed off, it's on going nature and the havoc the Manticorans and their allies caused allowing for the Committee of Public Safety to become destabilized. Without that particular issue the focus of both governments would never have slipped enough to allow for the coups to happen in the first place... Still they were unavoidable due to the fact that Haven couldn't float it;s own economy with out conquering other star nations and looting their economies to pay Haven's debts and the ever rising "Basic Living Stipend" which the Doleists relied on.
So with the nature of such totalitarian states, where the people don't remember anything prior to the broken system they have... You need a serious external threat to allow the internal threats to gain power in the system, fester, and eventually topple the system.