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 impossible to conceive and express. The state destroys not only the literal
freedom after action and thought meant by expressions like "
freedom of thought", but also literal
freedom of thought.
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