Nineteen Eighty-Four essay "Notes on Nationalism" about the lack of vocabulary needed to explain the unrecognised phenomena behind certain political forces. In "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the Party's artificial, minimalist language 'Newspeak' addresses the matter. O'Brien concludes: "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." In the book, Inner Party member O'Brien describes the Party's vision of the future: A major theme of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is censorship, especially in the Ministry of Truth, where photographs are modified and public archives rewritten to rid them of "unpersons" (persons who are erased from history by the
O'Brien (Nineteen Eighty-Four) however is more sadistic than the cold, detached Gletkin, and prefers to use torture himself, whereas Gletkin prefers to torment his prisoners psychologically. The torture scenes (undertaken by O'Brien) were influenced in part by the stories leaked out of the USSR of the punishments inflicted on political prisoners in mental hospitals and the Gulag. The choice of the clearly Irish surname is regarded as a reference to Brendan Bracken, 1st Viscount Bracken, under whom Orwell worked during the war creating propaganda, and whom Orwell detested. In what has been described as "one of the strangest coincidences in literature", it was