Ministries in Nineteen Eighty-Four

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.[1]

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.

— Part II, Chapter IX

The use of contradictory names in this manner may have been inspired by the British and American governments; during the Second World War, the British Ministry of Food oversaw rationing (the name "Ministry of Food Control" was used in World War I) and the Ministry of Information restricted and controlled information, rather than supplying it; while, in the U.S., the War Department was abolished and replaced with the "National Military Establishment" in 1947 and then became the Department of Defense in 1949, right around the time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.[2][3][4]

  1. ^ Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker and Warburg. ISBN 0-452-28423-6.
  2. ^ "Sixty years of Orwellian spin". The Economist. December 10, 2010.
  3. ^ Khwaja, Mahek (April 7, 2020). "The Impersonality of Nutrition in Orwell's 1984". Medium.
  4. ^ Charman, Terry (22 March 2018). "How the Ministry of Food managed food rationing in World War Two". Museum Crush.