Isabela's Insights on Utopias & Dystopias

 First I want to slightly touch on something before I begin to answer the question that is the title of this blog post. Right-wing people love the word "Orwellian", so much so that there are actual memes online making fun of how often they use it. This  article  from the Washington Post summed it up best, explaining how conservatives ironically use the phrase "Orwellian" while actually doing actions that would be called "Orwellian". Whenever someone, usually a white supremacist nazi, gets removed from a social media platform (which the company has full rights to do, I mean you sign terms of service when you join) they cry out "Orwellian" without realizing that their philosophy is full of "doublespeak" and perpetuates lies. So whenever I hear "Orwellian" I am instantly worried and thrown off.  For another example, let's look at this tweet and the response to it: Now, having read 1984, does this really seem like a case of re...

In part three of 1984, we are treated to a very long and intense description of the brainwashing and torture that Winston went through at the hands of the party. And at the end of the novel, we see that to some extent, Winston would rather come to terms with his reality rather than challenge it. Aka, the brainwashing worked to some degree. While there have been instances of individuals from the U.S. government, for instance, torturing their prisoners and attempting to brainwash them in a way- I am instead going to explore the more general and widespread ways that the media (not governments) serves to brainwash its individuals into believing certain things that we would think are unthinkable. I am going to exemplify my point using the homeless population. (Which is extremely relevant during our circumstances and the pandemic, which in turn has left way more people homeless) According to the federal government, at any given time there are approximately 553,000 homeless people in the Unit...

Part Three, chapters 1-2 of 1984 details Winston's imprisonment at the Ministry of Love, and his subsequent torture. During one of these torture sessions with O'Brien, Winston wonders why the party would go through all of this trouble to torture him into a confession- when they are just gonna kill him anyways. O'Brien answers that this is because they are trying to get rid of martyrs- a flaw that he claims many extermination groups of the past, such as the nazis and conquistadors, failed to take into account. Instead, O'Brien explained, he wanted to change all of them into "perfect" versions, aka ones that believed in Big Brother and the party, before they killed them. Ideally, this then leaves no hope for anyone.  But what actually is a martyr? According to Wikipedia, martyrs are "people who suffer persecution and death for advocating, renouncing, refusing to renounce, or refusing to advocate a religious belief or cause as demanded by an external party...