Book 2 Chapters 3-6: The Influence of the Party

Quotes:

Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up. (page 152)

"I don’t mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal."
She thought it over. "They can’t do that," she said finally. "It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—ANYTHING—but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you." (page 166)

What I have to Say:

Julia is arguing in the second quote above that people always have power over the Party by simply continuing their own beliefs, but really, she herself is evidence that they can totally "get inside you". Whether Julia understands it or not, what she believes has already been molded by the Party. Even if she knows that all of their news and announcements must be fake since everything is rewritten, she never cares about the implications, because the Party has her convinced that no revolution could actually change anything. She has been taught from the beginning that that is the truth in Oceania, and therefore, she has been made to believe it.

Sure, when you are already aware of inconsistencies it is going to be a lot harder to convince you of otherwise, like Syme, who was very aware that he was destroying words rather than just making them. You couldn't dispute that with Syme because he does the job every day and he has already understood the connection. The dangerous thing about knowledge is that you don't always know what it is that you don't know; in Oceania the children are raised to envision a sad past with no freedom and to think of the present as a sort of heaven on earth. They have no idea that the past was better or what has changed because they don't know that they are being duped, unlike the older generations, like people of Winston's age.

Julia herself didn't realize that the Party did not in fact invent the airplane. Of course, she doesn't really care about that, but it is still something that she believed, because that is what the Party taught her. The only weapon you have is your current state of knowledge or knowledge that you can receive from a credible source. She has a point that they can't really change your mind if you have enough willpower, although willpower must wane when you don't have hopes for any change or result from your persistence.

If anything, the opposite of what Julia says is more likely to be true. They cannot actually make you do anything; your actions are purely your own, and while there are likely (terrible) consequences, you still have the choice. The Party does, however, have the power to control what information you get and what you are exposed to over time, thus molding what you think based on what they have given you as your realities. You can't so much control the environment you are placed in, especially if you do not know or are not exposed to different realities. You can only make connections with what you actually know, as in, your thinking is based on the information you have. Of course, this stance on Julia's suggestion is pretty specific to Oceania.