The irony of the four ministries in 1984

     In 1984 their are four ministries: The ministry of love, The ministry of truth, The ministry of plenty, and The ministry of peace. However, each of these ministries names are very ironic to what actually lies beneath each of these ministries.
     The first ministry is the ministry of love, they are responsible for all the government aspects of Oceania such as police, security, and emergencies. The function of this ministry is to instill love for Big Brother through fear. The ministry has no windows, is surrounded by barbed wire, steel doors, guards, and have hidden machine gun nests. Not very homey, right? Another thing that lies in the ministry of love is room 101, a torture chamber.                                                                                                   In chapter V O'brien

Room 101

tells Winston "You asked me once, what was in room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in room 101 is the worse thing in the world". The party has complete access to every ones worse nightmare, in room 101 is where your nightmare becomes brought to life. The party put Winston in room 101 not to make him terrified but so he would betray Julia by saying he would rather have her tortured, resulting back to the fear aspect of this ministry.
     The second ministry is the ministry of truth, the propaganda ministry. Their job is to rewrite the historical events, ironically they do this by lying. They rewrite these historical events for propaganda purposes, and to make Big Brother always seem correct so people will value him more. Without this ministry the party would not seem absolute and the people would not think highly of them. In my opinion this probably the most important ministry to the story line.

Ministry of Truth

      The third ministry is the ministry of plenty, they take care of Oceania's economy. The function of this ministry is to keep everyone in poverty because poor people are easier to rule than wealthy, established people. Big Brother does this by convincing the people that production has gone up when in reality it has gone down, of course this is with the help of the ministry of truth. Winston says "statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version" meaning that the statistics that are "true" and the statistics that are told to the people are both nonsense.
       The last ministry is the ministry of peace, which is ironically responsible for war. They take charge of Oceania's military defense. This relates back to the common theory of Big Brother and one of the party's slogans "War is Peace". The idea of this ministry is to keep Oceania in a perpetual state of war to keep the people busy and at work so they don't learn the truth about their society. Of course it is broad casted that Oceania always wins all the wars, but once again that has no credibility.
      As you can see the names of these ministries are very contradictory to their actual functions. Once again bringing in the theme of "double speak" that is prominent in this book. What ministry do you believe to most vital for the plot line? Why?