When one thinks of the term thought police, the immediate association is often George Orwell’s seminal work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. However, the origins of this phrase extend beyond Orwell’s dystopian narrative and can be traced back to earlier usages. While Orwell undoubtedly popularized the term in the English-speaking world, he was not the first to coin it.
To fully grasp the origins of thought police, we must look beyond the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949 and delve into a different cultural context altogether. Nevertheless, it is essential to recognize Orwell’s significant role in embedding the term in contemporary discourse.
George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903, was an influential writer whose contributions to literature remain vital today. Renowned not only for his incisive essays but also for his powerful novels, Orwell’s last two works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, continue to be studied widely in academic institutions.
Orwell’s final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, completed in 1948 and published the following year, serves as a classic representation of dystopian fiction. The narrative is set in a totalitarian regime, where the state exerts extreme control over every facet of life.
The premise of the novel is straightforward yet chilling. By the year 1984, Great Britain has been rebranded as Airstrip One and is governed by a totalitarian superstate known as Oceania. This regime is dominated by a singular entity referred to as ‘the Party’, whose ideology is termed Ingsoc, shorthand for ‘English Socialism’. At the helm of this oppressive regime is the figure of Big Brother, who embodies the Party’s authoritarian grip on society.
The story follows the life of Winston Smith, the protagonist, who navigates this oppressive world. Early in the narrative, readers are introduced to the concept of the Thought Police:
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
The Thought Police symbolize the extent of state surveillance, where citizens’ words and actions are subject to scrutiny at all times. The chilling reality is that one does not need to commit a crime to draw attention; even the mere suspicion of harboring ‘dangerous thoughts’ can lead to dire consequences, including a visit from the Thought Police.
This notion extends the limitations on freedom of speech to an alarming degree. Not only are individuals punished for what they say, but they can also be targeted for what they might be thinking. This introduces a terrifying dimension to the concept of freedom, as the state seeks to control not only actions and words but also the very thoughts of its citizens.
However, as we mentioned earlier, the term thought police did not originate with Orwell’s dystopian vision. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) uncovers several citations that predate Orwell’s work, emphasizing the term’s earlier usage in different contexts. Among them, two notable instances from 1934 stand out. Upton Close, in his book Challenge: Behind the Face of Japan, remarked: “An entire picnic party of intellectuals was taken up on the beach by dangerous-thoughts-police.”
Additionally, the Billings Gazette, a local newspaper in Montana, featured the term on October 7, 1934, stating: “The change is to be credited not to the ‘thought police’, but to the approaching emergency.” The OED also includes references from 1938 and 1945, with the latter alluding to the imperial regime of Japan rather than the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union.
Interestingly, the term thought crime also emerged in imitation of the Japanese term shisō-keisatsu, which translates as ‘thought police’ and was coined in 1930. While Orwell played a crucial role in popularizing the term within English literature, its true origins lie within the historical and linguistic context of Japan.