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Fictional police states have featured in a number of media ranging from novels to films [1] to video games.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(August 2020) |
Fictional police states have featured in a number of media ranging from novels to films [1] to video games.
Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism, wherein all socio-political power is held by a dictator, who also controls the national politics and the peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and by friendly private mass communications media.
The Galactic Empire, also known simply as the Empire, is a fictional autocracy featured in the Star Wars franchise. Introduced in the 1977 film Star Wars, it is the main antagonistic faction of the original trilogy, which also includes The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). An oppressive dictatorship with a complicated bureaucracy, the Galactic Empire seeks the rule and social control of every planet and civilization within the galaxy, based on anthropocentrism, nationalisation, state terrorism, power projection, and threat of lethal force.
Galactic empires are a science fiction setting trope, in which most or all of the habitable planets in the setting's galaxy are ruled by a single centralized political entity. Galactic empires most frequently appear in works in the sub-genres of science fantasy and space opera, although they may appear in other sub-genres as well. Works featuring galactic empires may have them as the story's focus, chronicling the empire's growth and/or decline. Alternatively, they may merely serve as a backdrop against which the events of the story play out.
Telescreens are two-way video devices that appear in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Omnipresent and almost never turned off, they are an unavoidable source of propaganda and tools of surveillance.
We is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin that was written in 1920–1921. It was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York, with the original Russian text first published in 1952. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state that is rebelled against by the protagonist, D-503. It influenced the emergence of dystopia as a literary genre. George Orwell said that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly derived from We, although Huxley denied this. Orwell's own Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was also inspired by We.
Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizations, but it may also be carried out by corporations. Depending on each nation's laws and judicial systems, the legality of and the permission required to engage in mass surveillance varies. It is the single most indicative distinguishing trait of totalitarian regimes. It is often distinguished from targeted surveillance.
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is a fictional book in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The fictional book was supposedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein, the principal enemy of the state of Oceania's ruling party. The Party portrays Goldstein as a former member of the Inner Party who continually conspired to depose Big Brother and overthrow the government. In the novel, the fictional Goldstein's book is read by the protagonist, Winston Smith, after a supposed friend, O'Brien, provided one copy to him. Winston had recalled that "There were ... whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author, and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as The Book."
Squealer is a fictional character, a pig, in George Orwell's 1945 novel Animal Farm. He serves as second-in-command to Napoleon and is the farm's minister of propaganda. He is described in the book as an effective and very convincing orator and a fat porker. In the 1954 film, he is a pink Large White pig, whereas in the 1999 film, he is a Tamworth pig who wears a monocle.
Prisoners of Power, also known as Inhabited Island, is a science fiction novel written by Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It was written in 1969 and originally published in the same year in the literary magazine Neva. It appeared in a book form in 1971, with great number of changes as demanded by the state censor; the English translation was released in 1977. The protagonist is a youngster, Maxim Kammerer, who comes from the version of Earth that exists in the Noon Universe and gets stranded on an unknown planet named Saraksh.
References to George Orwell's 1949 dystopian political novel Nineteen Eighty-Four themes, concepts and plot elements are also frequent in other works, particularly popular music and video entertainment. While the novel is technically public domain under United Kingdom copyright, it is still copyrighted in the United States and as such most uses of it are as non-infringing metaphors.
In George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is divided into three superstates: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, who are all fighting each other in a perpetual war in a disputed area mostly located around the equator. All that Oceania's citizens know about the world is whatever the Party wants them to know, so how the world evolved into the three states is unknown; and it is also unknown to the reader whether they actually exist in the novel's reality, or whether they are a storyline invented by the Party to advance social control. The nations appear to have emerged from nuclear warfare and civil dissolution over 20 years between 1945 and 1965, in a post-war world where totalitarianism becomes the predominant form of ideology, through Neo-Bolshevism, English Socialism, and Obliteration of the Self.
A police state describes a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes. Such governments are typically one-party states and dominant-party states, but police-state-level control may emerge in multi-party systems as well.
A dystopia, also called a cacotopia or anti-utopia, is a community or society that is extremely bad or frightening. It is often treated as an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence, and poverty. The relationship between utopia and dystopia is in actuality, not one of simple opposition, as many dystopias claim to be utopias and vice versa.
"Second Thoughts on James Burnham" is an essay, first published in May 1946 in Polemic, by the English author George Orwell. The essay discusses works written by James Burnham, an American political theorist.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a staunch believer in democratic socialism and member of the anti-Stalinist Left, modelled the Britain under authoritarian socialism in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism and on the very similar practices of both censorship and propaganda in Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.
The History of a Town, also translated as Foolsburg: The History of a Town, is a 1870 novel by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. The plot presents the history of the town of Glupov, which may be translated as the "town of fools", a grotesque microcosm of the Russian Empire. Written during the period of the "Great Reforms" in the 19th century Russia, it was neglected for a long time and rediscovered only in the 20th century. It is regarded by critics as the author's masterpiece and sometimes even compared to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Mass surveillance in popular culture is a common theme. There are numerous novels, nonfiction books, films, TV shows, and video games, all taking a critical view of surveillance. Some well known examples include George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), Peter Jackson's film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003), and Christopher Nolan's film The Dark Knight (2008). However, there are also a few novels that are optimistic about surveillance.
The Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty are the four ministries of the government of Oceania in the 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell.
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.
Toward European Unity was a 1947 essay by George Orwell on the subject of European integration. In the essay, Orwell speculated about possible futures in which the world could fall to nuclear war or totalitarianism. He proposed the creation of a democratic socialist European Union as an alternative to such scenarios, although he also predicted that it would have to overcome opposition from imperial powers.
Zamyatin's We (1924), another terrifying police state utopia, whose citizens live without privacy in glass apartments.