A police state describes a state where its government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities. A police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and authoritarian regimes. The best-known literary treatment of the police state is George Orwell's novel 1984, which describes Britain under a totalitarian régime that continuously invokes (and feeds) a perpetual war as a pretext for subjecting the people to mass surveillance, policing, and modification of language and the way people think in order to make dissent not only swiftly punished, but also grammatically and logically…   Read more