1984

George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Nazi Germany, and Stalin ruled Russia can all be related to Walker Percy's essay, The Loss of the Creature. In the book 1984 the world is run by a brainwashing committee called the Party. In Brave New World everybody is conditioned, from the time they are artificially conceived, to perform specific tasks and believe specific ideas. Nazi Germany was run by Adolf Hitler who took control of Germany with brainwashing propaganda, with some specifically trained on the youth of Germany (Heyes pg 17). Stalin also used propaganda to brainwash, or at least terrify people into cooperating with him (encarta.com). In Percy's essay he speaks of a planner and a consumer; the planner being the one radiating the ideas and the consumer being the one to either accept or reject those ideas based on what they choose to believe. The Party, Big Brother, or whomever the government leader is, could be considered the planner, while the people of the ruled nation would be considered the consumer. In the cases of these four governments almost every person always accepted and never rejected whatever ideas or facts the leader put forth because they had been brainwashed either since the leader came to pow

The Russian people knew that if they didn"tmt conform to what Stalin perceived they should be then they ran the risk of having themselves or their families executed so they obeyed; because of this most people of Russia were what the planner (Stalin) thought they were. Applied to 1984, "the loss of sovereignty", as Percy puts it, can be very dangerous. The sun was already high when he awoke then suddenly he remembered everything. "Every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Part, so that he is the Party. "Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right" (Huxley, 267). Applied to Russia; Stalin had public trials of high officials so people might feel that he is protecting them; Stalin simply executed anybody who would keep their sovereignty; "Stalin set in motion a massive purge of the party following the assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergey Kirov in December 1934, which many have speculated was masterminded by Stalin because he viewed Kirov as a threat" (Encarta. These people were so brainwashed that they would believe they were happy because the Party manipulated their minds into believing they were; they could almost never be unhappy which might seem appealing to some people. The Hitler Youth believed they were happy; "All things considered, life was good for young members of Hitler"tms master race.