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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 form of government and political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism. In totalitarian states, political power is often held by autocrats, such as dictators and absolute monarchs, who employ all-encompassing campaigns in which propaganda is broadcast by state-controlled mass media in order to control the citizenry. It remains a useful word but the old 1950s theory was considered to be outdated by the 1980s, and is defunct among scholars. The proposed concept gained prominent influence in Western anti-communist and McCarthyist political discourse during the Cold War era as a tool to convert pre-World War II anti-fascism into post-war anti-communism.
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin, sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamyatin, was a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire.
The Galactic Empire is a fictional autocracy featured in the Star Wars franchise. It was first introduced in the 1977 film Star Wars and appears in its two sequels: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). It is the main antagonistic faction of the original trilogy. An oppressive, autocratic regime with a complicated bureaucracy, the Galactic Empire seeks to ensure singular rule and social control over every planet and civilization within the galaxy.
Galactic empires are a common trope used in science fantasy and science fiction, particularly in works known as 'space operas'. Many authors have either used a galaxy-spanning empire as background or written about the growth and/or decline of such an empire. The capital of a galactic empire is frequently a core world, such as a planet relatively close to a galaxy's supermassive black hole, which has advanced considerably in science and technology compared to current human civilization. Characterizations can vary wildly from malevolent forces attacking sympathetic victims to apathetic bureaucracies to more reasonable entities focused on social progress and anywhere in between.
We is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 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. It influenced the emergence of dystopia as a literary genre. George Orwell claimed that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly derived from We, but Huxley denied this.
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is a fictional book in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The 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 book is read by the protagonist, Winston Smith who recalls 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."
The exploration of politics in science fiction is arguably older than the identification of the genre. One of the earliest works of modern science fiction, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, is an extrapolation of the class structure of the United Kingdom of his time, an extreme form of social Darwinism; during tens of thousands of years, human beings have evolved into two different species based on their social class.
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 from Earth, Maxim Kammerer, who gets stranded on an unknown planet named Saraksh.
In both science fiction and utopia/dystopian fiction, authors have made frequent use of the age-old idea of a global state and, accordingly, of world government.
Me and the Big Guy is a 1999 short film that parodies George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by way of lampooning the fact that Big Brother is watching everyone, even those he'd rather not.
The T'au Empire is a fictional alien empire and one of the playable armies in the setting of a miniature wargame Warhammer 40,000.
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.
The National Fascist Party was an Italian political party, created by Benito Mussolini as the political expression of Italian Fascism and as a reorganization of the previous Italian Fasces of Combat. The party ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 when Fascists took power with the March on Rome until the fall of the Fascist regime in 1943, when Mussolini was deposed by the Grand Council of Fascism. It was succeeded, in the territories under the control of the Italian Social Republic, by the Republican Fascist Party, ultimately dissolved at the end of World War II.
Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia are the three fictional superstates in George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. 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, so far as can be inferred, appear to have emerged from nuclear warfare and civil dissolution over 20 years between 1945 and 1965.
A police state describes a state where its 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, totalitarianism or illiberal regimes. Such governments are typically one-party states, but police-state-level control may emerge in multi-party systems as well.
"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 social science fiction novel and cautionary tale written 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 democratic socialist, modelled the totalitarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated.
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.
Zamyatin's We (1924), another terrifying police state utopia, whose citizens live without privacy in glass apartments.