Ministry of Love

The Ministry of Love (or Miniluv in Newspeak) is one of the four ministries that govern Oceania in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Ministry of Love enforces loyalty and love of Big Brother through fear, a repressive apparatus, and brainwashing. The Ministry of Love building has no windows and is surrounded by barbed wire entanglements, steel doors, hidden machine gun nests, and guards armed with "jointed truncheons". Referred to as "The place where there is no darkness," its interior lights are never turned off. Its importance is played down by the Party,^{[citation needed]} but its function is well known and it is arguably the most important ministry, controlling the will of the population. The Thought Police is part of Miniluv.

It contains Room 101, within which is "the worst thing in the world".

The Ministry of Love, like the other ministries, is ironically named, since it is largely responsible for the practice and infliction of misery, fear, suffering, and torture. In a sense, however, the term is accurate, since its ultimate purpose is to instill love of Big Brother in the minds of thoughtcriminals. This is typical of the language of Newspeak, in which words and names frequently contain both an idea and its opposite; the orthodox party member is nonetheless able to resolve these contradictions through the disciplined use of Doublethink.

References in comics

In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, set in Britain after the fall of the Big Brother government, the Ministry of Love is actually MI5 and Vauxhall Embankment, noted by a young spy named Jimmy (a thinly-veiled James Bond).^[1]

References

1. ^ The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, Page Six