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In the book, Winston Smith, the main character, writes in his diary:
He also makes remarks to the effect that "Thoughtcrime is the only crime that matters".
The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) were the secret police of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four whose job it was to enforce thoughtcrime. The Thought Police used psychology and omnipresent surveillance to find and eliminate members of society who were capable of the mere thought of challenging ruling authority.
Orwell's Thought Police and their pursuit of thoughtcrime was based on the methods used by the totalitarian states and competing ideologies of the 20th century. It also had much to do with Orwell's own "power of facing unpleasant facts", as he called it, and his willingness to criticise prevailing ideas which brought him into conflict with others and their "smelly little orthodoxies". Although Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist, many socialists thought that his criticism of Stalin damaged the socialist cause. The term, by extension, has come to refer to real or perceived enforcement of ideological correctness in any modern or historical contexts.
To extend the concept of thoughtcrime to the Early ChristianThe Early Christians were Christians in the period before there was an established Christian orthodoxy. While there is no specific date at which the Early Christian period ends, the term usually refers to the first 300 500 years of the Christian era. obsession with extirpating heresyHeresy according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a "theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the ‘catholic’ or orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church is anachronistic. Nevertheless, the Christian concept of Internal sinThe Christian concept of internal sin is the idea that sin (a crime of religion) may be committed not only by outward deeds but also by the inner activity of the mind, quite apart from any external manifestation. Thought crimes were as old as heresy, but, analogous to "thoughtcrime", became common in the mid 16th century15th century 16th century 17th century more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 16th century was that century which lasted from 1501 to 1600. Events Beginning of the " Little Ice Age" a cooling period that resulted in lower crop yi, largely as a reaction against the protestant reformation.
In the Soviet era, the USSR frequently used psychiatry as a weapon against dissidents. The diagnosis of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia (a condition unknown to Western medicine) was used to commit many dissidents to psychiatric hospitals, where they were then treated aggressively with psychoactive drugs. One justification given for this diagnosis was that "most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure". (See the article on Psikhushka for more details on this.)