Thought Police

The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) are the secret police of Oceania in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is the job of the Thought Police to uncover and punish thoughtcrime and thought-criminals, using psychology and omnipresent surveillance from telescreens to find and eliminate members of society who were capable of the mere thought of challenging ruling authority. The government attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects, labeling unapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime, or, in Newspeak, crimethink. It was the thought police that had arrested Winston and Julia.

It also had much to do with Orwell's own "power of facing unpleasant facts", as he called it, and his willingness to criticize prevailing ideas which brought him into conflict with others and their "smelly little orthodoxies". Although Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist, many other socialists thought that his criticism of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin damaged the socialist cause.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Special Higher Police in Japan was sometimes known as the Thought Police.

The term "Thought Police", by extension, has come to refer to real or perceived enforcement of ideological correctness, or preemptive policing where a person is apprehended in anticipation of the possibility that they may commit a crime, in any modern or historical contexts.

Jay Leno sometimes exclaims "thought police" if the audience finds a joke in his monologue offensive.

See also

• Secret police
• List of fictional secret police and intelligence organizations