Rhetoric, Persuasion, and Propaganda

The quotes that I chose were numbers 521, 534, 574, and 580. The quote that I chose to analyze was number 574. "The first step in liquidating a people... is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will forget what it is and what it was." I agree with this quote wholeheartedly. To me, it seems to almost be summarizing George Orwell's 1984 in a few sentences. In the book, Orwell demonstrated quite clearly how well the people of a country can fall under the government's control when they are fed lies about their history and how their culture is suppose to be. There was no outright persuasion in the book, but the citizens were fed quite a lot of propaganda, such as the posters that read "Big brother is watching you." This scared the citizens into behaving, thinking that they would be punished if someone was always watching them. If they had known their history, then they would know that that was not how a reasonable life was suppose to be and they would do something about it, but they didn't.