War Is Peace Freedom Is Slavery

These are the three slogans of the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), displayed on the Ministry of Truth building in Part I, Chapter 1. They exemplify "doublethink" — the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept both. Orwell invented the concept to describe how totalitarian regimes manipulate language to make populations accept absurdity as truth, drawing on his observations of both Nazi and Stalinist propaganda during the 1930s and 1940s.