Context

• Sales of both novels:

  1984 spiked when:

  • Edward Snowdon leaked the files relating to the PRISM project by the NSA in 2013
  • Kelly-Ann Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” after Trump's inauguration in January 2017

  THT spiked when: 

  • Donald Trump was re-elected in November 2024. A woman in North Carolina wore a THT costume to vote. “Your body my choice” on social media
• 4B Movement (Korea)

  • "Four Nos" is a radical feminist movement that originated in South Korea.
  • By refusing to marry, have children, engage in romance, or participate in sexual relationships with men, 4B feminists seek to redefine their lives outside the confines of traditional gender roles.
  • In the wake of the reelection of Donald Trump, there has been increased interest in the 4B movement from women in the United States.
• • Original title - “The Last Man in Europe” vs Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man” (19th century)
• • Stalin’s dehumanisation of political enemies (e.g. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamanev) through propaganda
• • Soviet Union’s Great Purge (1936-1938)
• • Special Facility 110 dehumanised people
• • Igor Kon “repressive sexophobia was the main means of totalitarian repression of individuality” in Stalinist Russia
• • Russia had a “pathological animosity towards sex” under Stalin according to one sociologist
• • 1953-1973: MK Ultra, CIA programme to distort psychology and extract false confessions
• • Since 2017 - Chinese re-eduction camps for Uyghurs under the label of ‘voluntary job training’ - Adrian Zenz calls it ‘cultural genocide’ & ‘course of social reengineering’
• • ‘Politics and the English Langugae’ (1946)  - “All issues are political issues”“The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language
• • “Belief in God is all too easily replaced by a belief in Stalin,Mussolini, Hitler” (Orwell - an agnostic)
• • North Korea – Kim Jong Un supposedly able to walk at 3 weeks old and drive a car
• • ‘Why I write’ (1946) - ‘against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’
• • PREVENT - introducing stop to radicalisation; including believing in socialis, anti-facism & anti-abortion
• • The Appendix Theory: It reveals an optimistic end to the novel, whereNewspeak and Ingsoc have faded. 1984 is therefore ultimately not only about the tyrannical, brutal power of totalitarian strategy, but also about its folly, as it can never achieve the inevitability it claims.
• • Sandra Newman’s feminist spin on 1984, as Julia isn’t in love with Winston but is secretly working for the thought police.
• • Lower birth rate in South Korea and Japan due to stagnation ofmarriages and love following economic decline.
• • In US prisons, AI is being used as surveillance on prisoners’ phone calls.
• • Nazi concentration and extermination camps – Block 11 was windowless, used for prisoners suspected of outside communication.
• • Pentonville prison (18th century) - locked in cells for 23hrs a day
• • The rise of innocent people confessing to crime through increasingly brutal police techniques incountries like Japan.
• • Comrade Ogilvy = David Ogilvy - a Bristish advertising executive, known for captivating campaign themes - ‘dont let anything district you from selling’
• • Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War to repress the Facist government
• • ‘Facsim and Democracy’ (Feb 1941) - ‘the world is debunking Democracy’
• • Snowden and PRISM - UK & US surveillance ‘worse than 1984’
• • In 1980s Somalia, “faqash” (“boots”) was used as a nickname for soldiers/secret police under totalitarian regime. ‘Future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.’
• • Apple’s TV commercial (1984) - suggests that technology is a liberating force rather than oppressive - resulted in a cease and desist letter from Orwell’s estate
• • Hannah Arendt was an American historian and philosopher. One of her key texts was The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), where she wrote:“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
• • Stalin represented as a divine figure by personality cult –the Sun or the Man/God.
• • Forms of torture and manipulation used to extract false confessions and guilty pleas in Western countries since, e.g. the Central Park Five.
• • Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon developed in 1786 based on his brother’s work on how workers can be monitored and controlled in Russia.
• • Orwell: ‘till the age of fourteen I believed in God… But I was well aware that I did not love him… I hated him, just as I hated Jesus…’
• • "Torches of Freedom" was a phrase used to encourage women's smoking by exploiting women's aspirations for a better life during the early twentieth century first-wave feminism in the United States.  Bernays hired women to march while smoking their "torches of freedom" in the Easter Sunday Parade of 31 March 1929, which was a significant moment for fighting social barriers for women smokers.
• • 'There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law.'

  In Genesis, there are four matriarchs of the Jewish people, and three of them were described as “barren”: Sarah (wife of Abraham), Rebekah (wife of Isaac) and Rachel (wife of Jacob).There is no mention of “sterility” in men, and other ancient cultures (such as Greeks, Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen) treated fertility as an exclusively female concern.
• • 'The small tattoo on my ankle. Four digits and an eye, a passport in reverse.'


  Tattoos used to mark prisoners began in the 19th century, but reached its horrific climax in the Nazis’ concentration camp: more than 400,000inmates were forcibly tattooed at Auschwitz.
• • 'What I must present is a made thing, not something born.'“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)).

  Atwood’s reformulation of de Beauvoir’s idea suggests that Gilead is imposing a distorted construction of women, and an exaggerated, artificial conception of femininity: less than a woman, she is a “made thing”.
• • “Les Sylphides. That's what I hear now, in my head, as I lift, tilt, breathe. Behind my closed eyes thin white dancers flit gracefully among the trees, their legs fluttering like the wings of held birds.”


  ​Les Sylphides … is considered the 1st plotless, or abstract, ballet. Premiered in 1909 in Paris with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The “pure dance” that carries the piece, rather than the storyline. What occurs is a lone male (the ‘poet’) surrounded by woodland nymphs or, Sylphs, dancing in the moonlight.
• • “Her fault. Her fault. Her fault”


  Victim-blaming refers to the practice of blaming someone for a crime committed against them. William Rylan coined the phrase in “Blaming the Victim” (1971).
• • Augustine – “Some women of a depraved mind are on their way to be violated by men”