作业分享 | 上海协和双语学校9年级学生英文读书报告

自从上篇作业分享发布之后，很多学生向外滩君发来自己的作业，希望通过外滩教育的平台与大家分享，Chenny Jiang的《1984》读书报告就是其中一篇。在这篇读书报告中，Chenny Jiang同学在《1984》原作之外，还阅读了很多相关研究及历史报告，通篇文章已经显露出一种研究式的格局，另外文献引用也做得十分规范。

Chenny Jiang就读上海协和双语学校，开学即将升入10年级，此篇读书报告写于9年级。

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Book Review: About《1984》

作者：Chenny Jiang，9年级，上海协和双语学校

George Orwell’s 1984 is a satire of totalitarian countries and it reveals that any totalitarian staterelies on relationship control, corruption, and torture in order to eliminateany opposition among ordinary people and hence keep the regime safe. Readersfrom all ages can learn that totalitarian states should be avoided by all means.

To begin with, the world Winston where lives is divided intothree major parts with wars and conflicts. Oceania, the country where Winstonlives, has been under harsh control since he was six years old. Without theloving relationships among family, friends, and lovers, the only human bondacceptable in Oceania is with the Party, or Big Brother.

This restriction is necessary to achieving complete power and control over its citizens, as theParty must eliminate all loyalties derived from love, sex, and family. Bydestroying relationships, the Party has "cut the links between child andparent, and between man and man, and between man and woman"(page 220).

To train the citizens of Oceania for complete loyalty to BigBrother and the Party, the family bond has been completely destroyed, as"No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer."(page220) Children are trained to be spies to watch and denounce their parents inthe name of Big Brother.

By this means, the Party has managed to turn parentallove into fear and children into faithful servants of the Party as an extensionof the Thought Police. Parsons' remark in response to his daughter's betrayal,describes the Party's influence in the family breaking up. “In fact I'm proudof her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway"(page 193).The daughter valued the Party's approval more than her family life.

The betrayal of the family bond is a common theme in 1984. Winston's memories of his mother'slove "in a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know thereason"(page 28) confirm his opinion that to "remain human", one was "not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to oneanother"(page 136). The strict relationship control policies were oftenseen in totalitarian states throughout history.

During the Nazi Germany period, for instance, women had toconform to the German society desired by Adolf Hitler, which meant beingracially pure and physically robust. Consequently, marriages were oftenarranged for racial purity. [1][2] Women did not work, following the slogan of theformer emperor: “Kinder, Küche, Kirche”, meaning "Children, kitchen,church". The time a family spent per day decreased sharply since womenwere “confined” at home and men were often forced to take part in militarytraining.

At the end of the Second World War, the number of women in Germanywas far more than the number of men. Women were even allowed to marry three orfour men to “contribute to the front”[3] by giving birth to many babies who had selected Aryanracial purity.

In the Soviet Union, another example of relationship controlwas carried out as collectivism. Peasants were gathered to form a collectivefarm, getting rid of the landlords and re-distribute the land. During thedistribution, many families were actually separated. There was also violenc eduring the process since many peasants rejected the idea of collectivism andrefused to work under the system of an arranged economy.

Millions of people died in the following years because of violence, hunger and infectiousdiseases. Children were indoctrinated in the state-owned schools and started toinform the officials of their parents' “guilt”. This happened as well in George Orwell's 1984. Parents were arrested and were tortured and confined untilthey confessed. Many of them were sent to Gulags to labor for years. The tortureaggravated the relationship within a family and the only belief was communismsince Orthodox Christian churches were also banned.

George Orwell spent tens of pages on torture, attempting toremind and warn us that totalitarian states also rely on torture as a tool toinstill terror thus, and then keep the regime safe. Winston’s torture startswith physical torture, in order to make him implicate everybody. Then the guards are replaced by the intellectuals of the Party who torture him by sheerhumiliation and exhaustion.

Winston is also administered frequent druginjections which sometimes increase his pain and sometimes knock him outcompletely. In the last stage, O’Brien takes over personally, with Winstonconnected to an electric dial by means of which O’Brien can impose any degreeof pain he wishes.

O’Brien tells Winston that he is there to be cured of hismental illness. O’Brien points out that unlike the people of the old Regimes,Nazism or the Inquisition. They did not stop with extracting forced confessions.They break men till they actually become what they are tortured into being.Even the three leaders Winston had once admired – Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford had been broken by the same method till they had been completely broken. He tells Winston that there is no escape. Even if they allow him tolive, there would be no chance left in him to be a full human being again.

O’Brien mentioned that the torture is different from that insome old regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

However, the torturein Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was still common in those countries. Thefirst Nazi concentration camps were hastily erected in Germany in February 1933immediately after Hitler became Chancellor and his Nazi Party was given controlover the police through the Reich Interior Minister and Prussian Acting Interior Minister. [4]

Used to holding and torturing politicalopponents and union organizers, the camps held around 45,000 prisoners by 1933and were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of thatyear. [5] Between 1939 and 1942 during World War II, the number ofcamps exploded to more than 300, [6] as political prisoners and"undesirable elements" from across Europe were putin [7] generally without judicial process. Between 1933 and the fallof Nazi Germany in 1945, more than 3.5 million Germans were forced to spendtime in concentration camps and prisons for politicalreasons, [8][9][10] and approximately 77,000 Germans were executedfor one or another form of resistance.

Many of these Germans had served ingovernment, the military, or in civil positions, which enabled them to engagein subversion and conspiracy against the Nazis. [11]

Many of the prisoners died in the concentration camps through deliberate maltreatment,disease, starvation, and overwork, or were executed as unfit for labor.Prisoners were transported in in humane conditions by rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination. The prisoners were confined to the boxcars for days or even weeks, with little or no food or water.

Many died of dehydration in the intense heat of summer or froze to death in winter.Concentration camps also existed in Germany itself, and while they were notspecifically designed for systematic extermination, many of their inmatesperished because of harsh conditions or were executed.

In the Soviet Union, similar treatment was carried out to theircitizens. The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Sovietforced labor camp systems during the Stalin era, from the 1930s until the1950s. [12]

While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, frompetty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted bysimplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments ofextrajudicial punishment. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument ofpolitical repression in the Soviet Union. Unlike the concentration camp systemof Nazi Germany the Gulag did not have death camps, [13] i.e. campsdesigned to kill the prisoners right away, but the Gulag consisted of many morecamps with many more prisoners over many more years than the Nazi concentrationcamp system did.

There was not always physical torture in Gulags but being confined in those camps itself was a severe torture. Most of the Gulags werelocated in the remote Siberia or even within the Arctic Circle. The lowesttemperature recorded during winter was -68 degrees Celsius (-90 degreesFahrenheit). Heavy labor was conscripted in the camps and because of that, themortality rate in Gulags was high. Those labor mainly contained mining,deforesting and constructing, and sarcastically, civilization and industry inSiberia hence developed. Some camps were even not fortified since there was nopossibility to survive if prisoners escaped.

However, some people could utilize the loopholes in the systemto benefit themselves. Socialism is defined as “a political and economic theoryof social organization which advocates that the means of production,distribution, and exchange should be owned and regulated by the community as awhole” [14]

According to this definition, not a single individual in asocialist society would have control over their own economic or socialwell-being. In creating his novel, 1984, George Orwell describes a society inwhich the government possesses a vast amount of economic control and displaysextreme examples of corruption, which accurately relate to several real-lifeexamples, and display the theme that wealth is power and power corrupts.

Economically, Orwell’s socialist society possessed a vastamount of control and wealth. For example, in Orwell’s society, basiccommodities such as electrical energy were regulated to create more wealth forthe government.

When attempting to use the elevator in his apartment, Winstoncomes to the realization that “the electrical current was cut off during theday light hours. It was part of an economic drive in preparation for Hate Week”(page 1).

In this scene, Big Brother, the leader of the socialist society, hadenough economic control to prevent electrical service to entire buildings as aneconomic plan, demonstrating extreme control over the people and his society’seconomy. Also, war in Orwell’s society was often used as a means for producingmore wealth for the country. According to Orwell, “…war had a direct economicpurpose; it was a war for labour” (page 187).

Oceania used war as an excuse toreserve cheap labor and produce more wealth for their central government; warbenefited the rich. Finally, Orwell’s government possessed the ability to limitthe use of nearly everything in their society. For example, Orwell’s “…Ministryof Plenty had issued a promise…that there would be no reduction of thechocolate ration in the year 1984. Actually…the chocolate ration was to bereduced from thirty grams to twenty at the end of the present week” (page 39).

Corrupt and powerful, Orwell’s government possessed the ability to rationeverything so that less and less was given to the people and the governmentobtained more wealth. Therefore, by controlling basic materials such aselectricity, creating fear of war to produce more goods inexpensively, and byrationing nearly all goods, Orwell’s socialist government was able to obtainvast amounts of wealth through economic control.

Orwell’s society also depicted a vast amount of socialcorruption. First, this government prevented any form of personal conviction todevelop by simply changing past events to always benefit the Party. Accordingto Orwell, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the presentcontrols the past” (page 248).

Members of Orwell’s society were not permittedto keep any form of personal memory such as photographs or journals; thus, theypossessed no concept of long-term memory and believed whatever the Party toldthem. The Party controlled the present, and could change the past in order tomanipulate the future.

In addition, Orwell’s government also psychologically corrupted its people by making them think the Party was never at fault.

While being tortured by the government Winston selfishly wished his pain onto hisaccomplice, and later reminisced that “…perhaps [he] might [havepretended] , afterwards, that it was only a trick and that [he] just said it tomake them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that [was not] true. At the timewhen it [happened], [he did] mean it. [He thought] there [was] no other way ofsaving [him]self and [he was] quite ready too save [him]self that way. [Hewanted] it to happen to the other person. [He did not] give a damn why theysuffer. All [he cared] about [was him]self” (page 292).

This was an example of the extreme psychological corruptionthat the party possessed over its citizens; instead of being angry with theParty, he wished his suffering on his friend.

When Orwell discussed his novelin an interview, he claimed his inspiration for corruption came from modern daygovernment. Orwell believed that “the growing power of moderngovernments…[threatened] to obliterate such widely ideals as love of family ,tolerance towards others, and the right to make up one’s mind” (page 4).

Orwell believed that the power of a government inevitably lead to the demise of basichuman nature, as demonstrated in his novel. The extreme power of Orwell’sgovernment led to extreme psychological and social corruption of its people.

Admittedly, the world where Winston lived was an extreme formof totalitarian state, even worse than the Soviet Union and North Korea.However, those totalitarian states are all similar to each other since theyrely on relationship control, corruptions and torture to eliminate opposition.We can find out that not only the regimes disappeared from the world, but alsotheir reputation were ruined throughout the history.

Any regimes attempting tocontrol human nature will be overthrown by people who are exploited by it. Asone of the Chinese saying goes, “There will always be opposition where there isoppression.”

Works Cited

[1] "Women in the Third Reich". United StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved August 21, 2011.

[2] "Le IIIe Reich et les Femmes". Retrieved August21, 2011.

[3] “Russia and The USSR”. Terry Fiehn, Colin Shepard, 2008.

[4] Evans 2003, pp. 307-

[5] Evans 2005, p. 81

[6] "Nazi Camp System". United States HolocaustMemorial Museum.

[7] Andrew Szanajda "The restoration of justice in postwarHesse, 1945-1949" p.25 "In practice, it signified intimidating thepublic through arbitrary psychological terror, operating like the courts of theInquisition." "The Sondergerichte had a strong deterrent effectduring the first years of their operation, since their rapid and severesentencing was feared."

[8] "Ein Konzentrationslager für politische Gefangene Inder Nähe von Dachau". Münchner Neueste Nachrichten ("The MunichLatest News") (in German) (The Holocaust History Project). 21 March 1933.

[9] "German Reactions to Nazi Atrocities". TheAmerican Journal of Sociology (The University of Chicago Press) 52 (Number 2):141–146. doi:10.1086/219961.

[10] Henry Maitles NEVER AGAIN!: A review of David Goldhagen,Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust", furtherreferenced to G Almond, "The German Resistance Movement", CurrentHistory 10 (1946), pp409–527.

[11] David Clay, "Contending with Hitler: Varieties ofGerman Resistance in the Third Reich", p.122 (1994) ISBN 0-521-41459-8

[12] Земсков В.Н. К вопросу о репатриации советских граждан.1944-1951 годы // История СССР. 1990. № 4 (Zemskov V.N. On repatriation ofSoviet citizens. Istoriya SSSR., 1990, No.4

[13] The Gulag Collection: Paintings of Nikolai Getman

[14] “Socialism.” The Concise Oxford English Dictionary. OxfordReference Online. Oxford UP. GHS Library. 11 Jan. 2007 .

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