Could V for Vendetta challenge the government of 1984

Silvanus

Elite Member
Legacy
Jan 15, 2013
11,025
5,794
118
Country
United Kingdom
Zontar 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.

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.
Well, that's the intention, but V's whole deal is being very effective at that challenging that kind of thing.
 

Madmatty

New member
Apr 5, 2016
110
0
0
I thought of a sequel to 1984 in game form. It's called 1991 and it stars an Oceanian special forces operative. Yes your playing as a bad guy but your fighting against a country run by a religious cult so utterly horrid that they make Oceana seem good in comparison a lighter shade of black if you will.
 

Pseudonym

Regular Member
Legacy
Feb 26, 2014
802
8
13
Country
Nederland
Of course not. V wouldn't stand a chance in our own world and only ever stood a chance in his due to na?eve writing. (I've only seen the movie) Lets be honest here, V for Vendetta is a superhero story, not a dystopic story. It is drastically different in tone from 1984, in that a single person can run about, kill a bunch of bad guys, make an impassioned speech, and save the day. One of the major themes of 1984 is that it doesn't work that way. An individual on his own has no chance.

There are several other things that made matters easy for V: one is that apparently everyone already hated the government in V for Vendetta and even its highranking members had their doubts, didn't trust eachother etc. Another is that they had actual leaders that were worth shooting and a police force that couldn't handle a single guy. You can't shoot big brother because he isn't a person. You can shoot some of the leaders of the V for Vendetta Britain.

Silvanus said:
Johnny Novgorod said:
The whole point of 1984 is that even thought is monitored. Winston never stood a chance. V wouldn't either.
It's monitored among the Outer Party, sure, but not the Proles (or at least, not extensively). Winston was quite probably right when he thought that if there was hope, it lay there.
It is mentioned that the thought police does keep some track of the proles and assasinates, arrests, or otherwise deals with figures that are a bit too charismatic or draw attention to themselves. V certainly wasn't the subtle type. We also know from the story that highranking party members live amongst the proles. (the shopkeeper that winston rents a room from) The hope that Winston had for the proles lay in the fact that they might collectively do something.
 

FalloutJack

Bah weep grah nah neep ninny bom
Nov 20, 2008
15,489
0
0
Well, given that V has apparently the clever genius to use one's own system against them, then yes.

You see, Mr. Susan's computer in charge of the Eyes, the Ears, the Voice, and the Fingers of his power base was infiltrated by V at some point where he could quietly tap into it and be fully aware of everything they were. He had control of their system. He used their delivery service to mail his stuff around, plant anything he wanted, see anyone he wanted to see or show them what he wanted them to be shown.

SO! In the world of Big Brother, where there is a constant stream of similarly-watching BB moniters everywhere, isn't this just the same setup? Isn't he going to be able to walk into a place with a disguise, tap into the machine with the same expertise and genius, make Big Brother HIS brother and turneth a blind eye to his own actions while he sets up his designs? Doesn't this mean that he can do precisely everything he did overseas, only without having to bother killing everyone who could even come close to him first? He could send a bomb to anywhere and nobody will question it in 1984-land.

Or better still. What if he suddenly just silenced the BB's main system, or blew it up, and just took over the role? If he were to erect a similar system at his own base as he had with Adam Susan's FATE computer, he could destroy the original Big Brother complex and become Big Brother himself. And then...if Big Brother were to simply tell everyone that The Party had lied to them, that they were traitors to their country...what do you think all of the loyal citizens would do? Utter chaos, attacking the government and its guards until everyone who was in charge lay dead. And then, V would explain that what he said was all true, and that Big Brother would be leaving them now, forever.
 

Pseudonym

Regular Member
Legacy
Feb 26, 2014
802
8
13
Country
Nederland
FalloutJack said:
That is not remotely how Oceania is set up. There isn't a dr.evil style leader with a giant machine giving him super powers. There is a vast decentralized bureaucracy that controls everything. There isn't a single center, nor a central leader figure. Big Brother is not an actual leader, he is God, and like God, is never actually seen anywhere. Big Brother doesn't exist. There are various ministries which control certain subregions within Oceania but even those are relatively decentralized. You need to keep in mind that in 1984, written in 1949, there are no computers and the internal dissemination of information in a ministry is, besides being on a need to know basis, slow, inefficient, and hard to 'tap into' on any sort of useful scale. You could steal some actual bits of paper with instructions or information on them, but to get anything from the archives, you'd need to be at physical archives and whatever you wanted would be doublechecked to see if you had actual business with it. If you want to not be seen by the telescreens your best bet would be to convince the vast army of people watching on the other end to not watch you. Disguises won't get you very far, because you'd need to have clearance to go where you want to go, in which case you'd have to be a party member, meaning that you'd have to be under constant surveillance. Party members suddenly appearing out of nowhere, without records or clearance would probably end up in the ministry of love in short order. There is no main system to silence. You can't infiltrate anything which is large enough to matter, and you'd quickly be purged anyway because infiltration would require you to be in view of a whole lot of telescreens and near a whole lot of guards and suspicious party members. The whole system is carefully set up so that the individual can't gain a lot of power. Only the party has power. Like I said in my previous post, this clashes entirely with V for vendetta which is in some sense a superhero story, where a single man can tople governments.
 

Vault Citizen

New member
May 8, 2008
1,703
0
0
Possibly. The Outer party does have a much greater capacity to monitor its population but V already demonstrated a good deal of skill for hacking in V for Vendetta. It is possible that he could use the very apparatus that the party use to stay in power to get enough of the population rising up at once to topple them. The system in place in 1984 seemed like it was best suited for dealing with only a few dissenters at a time. I don't think it could cope with a mass influx of people who were rebelling.
 

FalloutJack

Bah weep grah nah neep ninny bom
Nov 20, 2008
15,489
0
0
Pseudonym said:
Beg pardon, but Big Brother's monitering system is a machine and a machine must be housed somewhere. The fact that it relies on NOT telling people alot of things makes it easier for the V guy. The more you take control out of a people's hands, the easier it is to manipulate people if they are unwilling to do things for themselves. But hey, let's talk about the real power behind all of this: The Fear Room. You have BB watching you and just about anybody willing to discipline you, but let's talk about what breaks even the most solid of individuals, that place in which you are put into a dreadful sittuation that will either break you out of a necessity to survive or you die. We've established quite clearly that V will kill, creatively and massively. If what motivates everybody in this society truly is fear, and you have a man who does not exist running around, doing terrible things, there is fear in great quantities. Truly, V has always been about putting free will back into the hands of the people, hell or highwater. This includes doing so through acts of murder and destruction, and he does so patiently, and with a flair for the dramatics. The thing is that he will destroy lives to do it, and he really does not care if even the innocent die as long as society lives to some degree, or gets put out of its misery. He has absolutely nothing you can threaten him with, no ties beyond what he makes or breaks, and far too much skill. Frankly, if you're saying it's 'impossible to take over the system', then all he has to do is keep knifing Party members in the back from the shadows until the fear of him is greater than the fear of Big Brother, and then they do what HE tells them until he lets them go. There is no way for them to beat this singularly devastating man.
 

DoPo

"You're not cleared for that."
Jan 30, 2012
8,665
0
0
hermes said:
Samtemdo8 said:
IF those other two "countries" even exists.
Why wouldn't they?
Because the Party it is just an excuse for the Party to do what they do. Sure, it's not stated for a fact that the countries are made up but there is no actual firm evidence that they do.

hermes said:
at some point they change the target of the war to an entirely different nation and hope no one notice it.
No, they don't "hope". They absolutely make sure nobody does.

hermes said:
Why would they even bother with it if they could use the same made up enemy?
Because they want the population to believe absolutely anything the Party tells it. Did you seriously not read the book? That was the entire point of the INGSOC. If there only one word to describe it with, it'd be capital "C" Control - they control the population, their speech, thoughts, the history and (with it) the future. The entirety of Newspeak is introduced to reduce dissident thought. The Party is brainwashing each generation more and more to follow its ideals. They make sure that doublespeak and doublethink are hardly embedded everywhere in society.

By switching enemies in the conflict, they both train the population to accept anything it's told ("We've always been at war with Eastasia") and weed out any dissidents who haven't internalised doublethink (it's one of the reasons they got Winston).

Moreover, the war is used to control other types of resources - society's attention can be directed to it, when convenient, goods can be rationed thus used as a leach to keep everybody in check.

As a matter of fact, this very thing is discussed IN THE BOOK. Have you seriously missed it? It's Emmanuel Goldstein's book that explained the concepts behind the Party. It's more specifically, chapter 3: War is Peace. You should recognise this as part of the slogan of INGOC: "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"

You can see the chapter here [https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chapter2.9.html] because you apparently managed to miss the 16 paragraphs which contain 5000 words of explanation.

The war doesn't really seem to matter. As long as there is war, the Party would be happy. The enemies in the war don't matter but a war requires an opposing side. So, why wouldn't they make up enemies for that reason? Especially considering that the Party does everything in its power to manipulate, command, steer and direct the population as it sees fit.

Again, maybe the countries exist, maybe they don't. The fact is both of these are possibilities.
 

hermes

New member
Mar 2, 2009
3,865
0
0
DoPo said:
hermes said:
Samtemdo8 said:
IF those other two "countries" even exists.
Why wouldn't they?
Because the Party it is just an excuse for the Party to do what they do. Sure, it's not stated for a fact that the countries are made up but there is no actual firm evidence that they do.
hermes said:
at some point they change the target of the war to an entirely different nation and hope no one notice it.
No, they don't "hope". They absolutely make sure nobody does.
hermes said:
Why would they even bother with it if they could use the same made up enemy?
Because they want the population to believe absolutely anything the Party tells it. Did you seriously not read the book? That was the entire point of the INGSOC. If there only one word to describe it with, it'd be capital "C" Control - they control the population, their speech, thoughts, the history and (with it) the future. The entirety of Newspeak is introduced to reduce dissident thought. The Party is brainwashing each generation more and more to follow its ideals. They make sure that doublespeak and doublethink are hardly embedded everywhere in society.

By switching enemies in the conflict, they both train the population to accept anything it's told ("We've always been at war with Eastasia") and weed out any dissidents who haven't internalised doublethink (it's one of the reasons they got Winston).

Moreover, the war is used to control other types of resources - society's attention can be directed to it, when convenient, goods can be rationed thus used as a leach to keep everybody in check.

As a matter of fact, this very thing is discussed IN THE BOOK. Have you seriously missed it? It's Emmanuel Goldstein's book that explained the concepts behind the Party. It's more specifically, chapter 3: War is Peace. You should recognise this as part of the slogan of INGOC: "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"

You can see the chapter here [https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chapter2.9.html] because you apparently managed to miss the 16 paragraphs which contain 5000 words of explanation.

The war doesn't really seem to matter. As long as there is war, the Party would be happy. The enemies in the war don't matter but a war requires an opposing side. So, why wouldn't they make up enemies for that reason? Especially considering that the Party does everything in its power to manipulate, command, steer and direct the population as it sees fit.

Again, maybe the countries exist, maybe they don't. The fact is both of these are possibilities.
Passive aggressive much?

Yes, I read the book, and I still believe you are jumping to conclusions. Perhaps "hope" is not the right word, more like "they are sure most people won't notice"... that still doesn't explain the change. They could blame a country that has nothing to do with it (ala Starship Troopers) to justify their pointless war and nationalism, or create an enemy out of thin air, because they clearly care more about "having an enemy" that actually beating it.

Doublethinking is institutionalized in a way that the party can contradict themselves constantly and no one is the wiser, however the change of target is not made to force doublethinking, but the other way around: doublethinking is enforced constantly (through the slogan, the use of doublespeak, etc), so that they can make changes at will and expect no reaction.

This is a common feature of Orwell's novels, like the barn wall in Animal Farm, where the pigs would change the laws overnight and the rest of them would not react because they took what was written as law, even if it wasn't there the day before. By the same token, the target of the war is not part of the brainwashing techniques, but one of many examples that they are succeeding at it. In fact, Goldstein's book states that the powers change alliances periodically among themselves, but using doublethinking, they keep rewriting history to make it look like those alliances were always like the current state of affairs, not the other way around.
 

OneCatch

New member
Jun 19, 2010
1,111
0
0
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"?
Not a chance. The plot of V for Vendetta hinges around V making a prediction/promise to the people, then climactically delivering on it.
In 1984 no-one would even know about the promise - everyone would have been ordered to forget it, records would have been purged, and, perhaps most damningly, the majority of the populace (being uneducated and apathetic by design) wouldn't even give a shit even if they knew.
And tbh even if it did come to it, that great and glorious final march gets shut down by machine gun fire and barrel bomb while most of the people applaud and laugh. 1984 is a society in which watching refugees get blown up by helicopters is considered entertainment.
 

DoPo

"You're not cleared for that."
Jan 30, 2012
8,665
0
0
Happyninja42 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?
Well, it's a complex answer. The protagonist works for the Ministry of Truth. Which is the institution responsible for disseminating lies and propaganda. There certainly was an element of "prodding" from the Party trying to make Winston rebel. However, whether or not his entire life was orchestrated around it is hard to tell. Most likely it wasn't. The Party just needs normal folks to do administrative jobs, even if that exposes them to potentially "harmful" information.

The thing is, the society is conditioned into "doublethink". This is a term coined by 1984[footnote]and has since become more mainstream[/footnote] that essentially means that a person is able to hold two opposing thoughts or ideas in their mind and accepting them both as true without question. This is one of the tools INGSOC uses to manipulate people, as they use it to lie to the people in their faces which people would accept due to doublethink.

So, this is something they rely on when they give non-Party members access to privileged information. Indeed, some of Winston's colleagues seem to be content clocking in and out of work without ever questioning what they do day to day.

If someone were to show that doublethink hasn't taken hold in them firmly, then the Party can certainly test them to see to what extent. But it's merely giving them more rope to hang themselves with.

Happyninja42 said:
intentionally provoke people to rebel, only to punish them for rebelling.
Yes, that is, more or less, what happens. Moreover, the amount of punishment is entirely disproportional to the subject's crimes. Winston is severely mentally and physically broken after the punishment. But alive. However, he and his partner are completely under the influence of the Party and any thought of disobeying rooted out. Yes, it might be easier and more cost efficient to simply kill them but the regime is both cruel and also wants everybody to unquestionably comply. Making all opposition "disappear" may prompt more to show up, while if you turn the opposition "to your side", future dissidents would be far fewer, as there wouldn't be much of an example to follow.

Happyninja42 said:
Also, is this government United Kingdom only?
The UK + the USA. Well, these are the two that are explicitly mentioned, the geographical borders are stated to be "roughly)
Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles
 

Therumancer

Citation Needed
Nov 28, 2007
9,909
0
0
The movie version of "V" probably couldn't, the comic version of "V" on the other hand is a pure anarchist and just as whacked as the government he's fighting. He's also got backdoor control of the supercomputer Susan uses to run the government.

In Batman terms he "just wants to watch the world burn" when you get down to it. Given the same capabilities V would actually be running parts of "Big Brother" and the "Thought Police" without them realizing it, and he'd be wrecking things left and right at the same time.

Let's just say in the comics it was NOT a straightforward Good Vs. Evil, or "Totalitarian Government Vs. Freedom Fighter" storyline. Indeed in the comics Mr. Susan (who was replaced by "Sutler" because it sounded more like Hitler) was actually well intended, and one had to question how many excesses of the government were actually orchestrated by V himself.

I recommend reading the comic version (it's been a long while) to really "get it" and why the writer distanced himself from the movie even though it wound up being quite popular, it was ultimately more a criticism of "W" era politics, or fear over them, than anything like the story it was based on, despite a few nods here and there.

In short I think "V" in the comics would rip the 1984 government a new one, he'd be turning the government on itself, and knows everything it's going to do ahead of time because he's such a mega-hacker he's got a foot in on the whole process. He's the kind of guy where you'd find out that the faux resistance is actually triple agent construct working towards his ends. Of course given that V wants Anarchy and is to put it mildly is totally bloody insane, you'd probably find living in the 1984 world better than the post apocalyptic ashes V would leave behind. His vendetta against the system has nothing to do with leaving the world a better place for the average joe to live in, although his ranting might occasionally sound like it.

That's my opinion at any rate.

That said the movie version of "V" could easily become their most wanted criminal, what he is fundamentally is a prisoner who escapes with an eye towards becoming a freedom fighter. He's defined as being good enough where your average detachments of police couldn't do a lot to take him down. Ironically the movie version of "V" might wind up being counter productive to his own goals and used as an example of why more draconian methods are needed, and a poster child for wrongthink.

See in the movies V is the kind of guy who takes over a TV station to get a message out about the government and encourages people to revolt. In the comics V *might* do that, but at the same time he might just blow up a federal landmark (if civilians get in the way, so what), use secondary devices on the first responders, and then roast marshmellows in the aftermath while twiddling away on the government framework to ensure the fallout maximizes chaos (traffic problems, slowing hospital supplies and making it seem like the government's fault, etc..). This is why he used Guy Fawkes (a dude who was going to blow up Parliament with gun powder), that wasn't a mistake, and something people seem to miss, Guy Fawkes was not bloody Robin Hood.

... and half the fun of V in the comics is he's supposed to be so utterly crazy that accurately predicting what he's going to do is nearly impossible. He has bloody conversations with statues. :)
 

Freyr

New member
Mar 19, 2014
29
0
0
erttheking said:
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.
To be clear for people who somehow might not be aware, 1984 is a social commentary looking forwards from 1948 basically as a satire of the direction society was going.

If you were from 200 years ago and reading this thread, I think you'd have about the same opinion on the modern english as we have of newspeak. I think that upon reading a number of antique books it becomes quite difficult to dispute that in teaching everybody to read and write that there has been a gradual degraduation of the literiary standard required to be described as "literiate".


If you were going about destroying a system like the one in 1984 then blowing up random landmarks wouldn't do anything, and i'm not convinced that a nice speech would work. However hijacking the broadcast system to command all citizens to destroy the monitoring devices/viewing screens because an enemy nation was using them to observe and control them might work, especially if it's followed by immediately blowing the central broadcasting/monitoring system up and blowing up the factory where they make the sets.

The resulting chaos would be something to behold and would might create the conditions to change things, especially if you then went killing off high ranking party members who started doing anything about rebuilding the system. Would it work? Maybe, maybe not. It's probably the best shot a single person would have though.
 

Thaluikhain

Elite Member
Legacy
Jan 16, 2010
18,576
3,532
118
FalloutJack said:
Beg pardon, but Big Brother's monitering system is a machine and a machine must be housed somewhere. The fact that it relies on NOT telling people alot of things makes it easier for the V guy. The more you take control out of a people's hands, the easier it is to manipulate people if they are unwilling to do things for themselves. But hey, let's talk about the real power behind all of this: The Fear Room. You have BB watching you and just about anybody willing to discipline you, but let's talk about what breaks even the most solid of individuals, that place in which you are put into a dreadful sittuation that will either break you out of a necessity to survive or you die. We've established quite clearly that V will kill, creatively and massively. If what motivates everybody in this society truly is fear, and you have a man who does not exist running around, doing terrible things, there is fear in great quantities. Truly, V has always been about putting free will back into the hands of the people, hell or highwater. This includes doing so through acts of murder and destruction, and he does so patiently, and with a flair for the dramatics. The thing is that he will destroy lives to do it, and he really does not care if even the innocent die as long as society lives to some degree, or gets put out of its misery. He has absolutely nothing you can threaten him with, no ties beyond what he makes or breaks, and far too much skill. Frankly, if you're saying it's 'impossible to take over the system', then all he has to do is keep knifing Party members in the back from the shadows until the fear of him is greater than the fear of Big Brother, and then they do what HE tells them until he lets them go. There is no way for them to beat this singularly devastating man.
I'd disagree there, it wasn't fear dominating society, nor was the fear room a particularly essential part of it. The fear room seemed to be about breaking people because they refused to accept that people couldn't be broken, not because breaking a prisoner you can just as easily kill is that important for your government to survive. Now, sure, they can't break V, but he's not actually bullet proof.

Of course, if you are saying that he can kill absolutely whoever he wants and get away with it, he'd eventually win, but only because the state would run out of people.

"I love Big Brother", remember. It's not just running on fear.
 

direkiller

New member
Dec 4, 2008
1,655
0
0
Freyr said:
I think that upon reading a number of antique books it becomes quite difficult to dispute that in teaching everybody to read and write that there has been a gradual degraduation of the literiary standard required to be described as "literiate".
Most people have always sucked at writing, you just don't notice it because professional writers get published. common stuff gets lost in time, unless it is carved in stone.
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/rogerwolsey/files/2014/04/alexamenos1-300x238.jpg
"Alexmenos, worship his god."
Alexmenos here is clearly a great literary master, with great command of the language and mastery of penmanship? chiselemenship?
 

Pseudonym

Regular Member
Legacy
Feb 26, 2014
802
8
13
Country
Nederland
FalloutJack said:
Pseudonym said:
Beg pardon, but Big Brother's monitering system is a machine and a machine must be housed somewhere.
Flat out wrong for various reasons. The monitoring system is the entire thought police which has installed thousands of telescreens throughout society which are watched by members of the thought police. There is no single machine which moniters everything, there are thousands of small ones. I'll also reiterate that Big Brother does not really monitor anyone because he doesn't exist. The party, more specifically, the thought police does. Throughout your post you give me the strongest impression that you haven't actually read 1984 at all, or have forgotten what you have read.

FalloutJack said:
The fact that it relies on NOT telling people alot of things makes it easier for the V guy. The more you take control out of a people's hands, the easier it is to manipulate people if they are unwilling to do things for themselves. But hey, let's talk about the real power behind all of this: The Fear Room. You have BB watching you and just about anybody willing to discipline you, but let's talk about what breaks even the most solid of individuals, that place in which you are put into a dreadful sittuation that will either break you out of a necessity to survive or you die. We've established quite clearly that V will kill, creatively and massively. If what motivates everybody in this society truly is fear, and you have a man who does not exist running around, doing terrible things, there is fear in great quantities.
You clearly don't understand the purpose of Room 101. First off, most people don't know about it. It's relevance is mostly to the party itself, as O'Brien explains. The purpose of everything that happens in the ministry of love isn't to scare people who could threathen the party, it is to brainwash and torture their enemies/victims for the sake of it. Secondly, room 101 is very personalized in a way that V couldn't possibly be. For Winston rats scared him enough to stop loving Julia, for other people, other tortures are devised. V merely blows up buildings. That wouldn't scare anyone because: secondly, everyone in Oceania assumes that traitors are everywhere, that a rocket bomb could kill them tomorrow, that terrorists run around murdering people, etc. Fear of death by some guy from the shadows doesn't come close to the fear of the ministry of love, or the fear of Eurasia/Eustasia generally. Thirdly, fear is not the motivating factor for most people in Oceania, most of the time. Most party members have long been brainwashed to believe that big brother and the party are good. If the party found out the only reason you didn't rebel was because of fear, they would regard that as rebellion in and of itself and drag you off to the ministry of love anyway. Finding such things out is why they monitor everything to begin with. You are assuming that people are allowed to commit thoughtcrimes. As for the proles, even they are mentioned to mostly support the government when required to and to otherwise be entirely apathatic. The lottery matters more to them. The few of them who care about government matters and are stupid enough to make that known are disappeared by the thought police.

FalloutJack said:
Truly, V has always been about putting free will back into the hands of the people, hell or highwater. This includes doing so through acts of murder and destruction, and he does so patiently, and with a flair for the dramatics. The thing is that he will destroy lives to do it, and he really does not care if even the innocent die as long as society lives to some degree, or gets put out of its misery.
So he'd be what Goldstein in Oceania is more or less portrayed to be.

FalloutJack said:
He has absolutely nothing you can threaten him with, no ties beyond what he makes or breaks, and far too much skill. Frankly, if you're saying it's 'impossible to take over the system', then all he has to do is keep knifing Party members in the back from the shadows until the fear of him is greater than the fear of Big Brother, and then they do what HE tells them until he lets them go. There is no way for them to beat this singularly devastating man.
Eh, from that last sentence I get the sense that you are trying to make a sort of joke but I don't really get it. In any case: V did get shot and died in his own movie, and he would have been shot far earlier if he didn't have all sorts of plot armour. Even if he could run around killing people indefinately (which would be flat out impossible for a single guy in any society and only works in V for Vendetta because of plot armour, and which would certainly not work at all in such a militarized place as Oceania) he would still likely cause less deaths than either the rocket bombs or the thought police, and most of his acts could easily be covered up with judicious use of doublethink and falsification of records. Lets be reasonable here, unless we pretend that V is superman, which even according to his own story, he isn't, he can actually very much be stopped by conventional means. He can be captured, which happens in his own story, shot, which happens in his own story and killed, which happens in his own story. If you want to argue to me that a hypothetical superman who speaks in rhymes, and who can magically win any fight, somehow could singlehandedly topple governments, then fine. But even V, who is already a charactar godgamed to no end by his writers, doesn't have those kind of powers. He won because his enemies, were weak, his support amongst the populace strong, and because he had plot armour as strong as a mountain. Factors which wouldn't be there in a 1984 universe, nor even in our own. Assad or Kim-Jong Un would have had him killed by now. Maybe superman could do what you think V might, because that is a charactar who is supposed to be a god amonst men. V, or any other charactar that is meant to be human could not topple Oceania's government.
 

Freyr

New member
Mar 19, 2014
29
0
0
direkiller said:
Most people have always sucked at writing, you just don't notice it because professional writers get published. common stuff gets lost in time, unless it is carved in stone.
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/rogerwolsey/files/2014/04/alexamenos1-300x238.jpg
"Alexmenos, worship his god."
Alexmenos here is clearly a great literary master, with great command of the language and mastery of penmanship? chiselemenship?
I'm not entirely sure how you got to "grafetti in a dead language 2000 years ago" from "antique books" and "from 200 years ago"?

My point was largely that 1984 was a satire, a parody. Personally, I think the author was making a subtle dig at the decline of standards in English in 1948, and making a point that eliminating the education of certain words and concepts could be used in a hostile manner.
 

Pseudonym

Regular Member
Legacy
Feb 26, 2014
802
8
13
Country
Nederland
Freyr said:
direkiller said:
Most people have always sucked at writing, you just don't notice it because professional writers get published. common stuff gets lost in time, unless it is carved in stone.
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/rogerwolsey/files/2014/04/alexamenos1-300x238.jpg
"Alexmenos, worship his god."
Alexmenos here is clearly a great literary master, with great command of the language and mastery of penmanship? chiselemenship?
I'm not entirely sure how you got to "grafetti in a dead language 2000 years ago" from "antique books" and "from 200 years ago"?

My point was largely that 1984 was a satire, a parody. Personally, I think the author was making a subtle dig at the decline of standards in English in 1948, and making a point that eliminating the education of certain words and concepts could be used in a hostile manner.
If you want to know precisely what Orwell was getting at about language, you can read specific parts of the book. Most notably the conversation with the charactar Syme and the appendix explain in great detail what newsspeak was for. We also have Orwells written opinions on the matter of the decline of the English language in 1948 elsewhere:

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/
 

direkiller

New member
Dec 4, 2008
1,655
0
0
Freyr said:
direkiller said:
Most people have always sucked at writing, you just don't notice it because professional writers get published. common stuff gets lost in time, unless it is carved in stone.
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/rogerwolsey/files/2014/04/alexamenos1-300x238.jpg
"Alexmenos, worship his god."
Alexmenos here is clearly a great literary master, with great command of the language and mastery of penmanship? chiselemenship?
I'm not entirely sure how you got to "grafetti in a dead language 2000 years ago" from "antique books" and "from 200 years ago"?

My point was largely that 1984 was a satire, a parody. Personally, I think the author was making a subtle dig at the decline of standards in English in 1948, and making a point that eliminating the education of certain words and concepts could be used in a hostile manner.
You made it sound like you had the opinion with all those I's you used.
& I was trying to dispute.

"I think that upon reading a number of antique books it becomes quite difficult to dispute that in teaching everybody to read and write that there has been a gradual degraduation of the literiary standard required to be described as "literiate".

Is not true, and never was true.
classical books were not the everyday writings & even in a day when the literacy rate was worse then 200 years ago, most writing never goes above that of your average forum post.
 

FalloutJack

Bah weep grah nah neep ninny bom
Nov 20, 2008
15,489
0
0
Pseudonym said:
So, to sum up, in a discussion as to whether V - the comic book character - can take out the government of 1984, you are saying no because you are discounting everything that ever happened in V For Vendetta and why, among other things. Well then, you have ended discussion because you are not willing to entertain discussion as per subject. You have to accept IN the line of discussion to discuss it, ergo if you do not...you're not on topic.

Thaluikhain said:
Moving on...
Oh, I think you are wrong about fear. Consider that that world was designed specifically to keep people on edge. They were constantly 'at war' (A lie to keep people thinking there was a perceived threat and enemy from 'over there'), they were observed at all times (Big Brother, giving you no privacy at all), there's a Red Scare for traitors always on (Which means everybody's hardwired to point fingers and scream like Body Snatchers, essentially, if they find an inconsistancy), and there is a specter of a consequence held in total mystery (But we know it to be the fear room, which is designed to absolutely break you or you die).

I think "I Love BB" was as forced as "I Love Stallin" (although there would be fanatics, no doubt). If you didn't grin to the tune, you quickly find yourself in a position most ungratifying. To me, 1984 is no new challenge to a guy like V. You see, his time in prison was already the breaking point...which he utterly destroyed in chemical explosions and mustard gas. You might argue that because he's in the society, that he can be dealt with, but he's NOT in the society. He's under it. Hell, I'd lay odds on him staking out the fear room as a secret entrance to his new Under Gallery.