1984 Section 1 Reflection

Initially I was skeptical about  if I would enjoy this book but after reading the first 10 pages or so I quickly became less worried. From the first section I have seen that knowledge is power and freedom is essential to keep us from becoming mindless and ignorant. The whole backward society with Big Brother ruling and everyone looking to catch someone being dishonest to the party is not unlike the times of Hitler and Mao. In those regimes people were made to believe that the men and party in power were always right and anyone who questioned them had to be "vaporized."  Although I have discovered many interesting themes in the first section the one that I think is most relevant to our class is that of the power of language. On Pages 53-54 Syme says 


"Dont you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words  in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." 


The importance of language to express oneself, to motivate, to destroy, etc have been paramount in the world history. Although many of the other measures that Big Brother uses to control the populace are terrible, the destruction of language would be the most disruptive in the long-run. If people have no way of expressing themselves then they will remain aloof and ignorant to the fact that they are exploited, as is the case with the proles. Im looking forward to how the plot develops and what other themes and ideas we will discuss.