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Click on this text to read 1984 by George Orwell in PDF format  Click on this text to listen to 1984 by George Orwell Full Audiobook...
Click on this text to read Orwell's "1984" online... GEORGE ORWELL & ALDOUS
HUXLEY Englishman Eric Blair (aka: George Orwell) was born in India in 1903, where his father was employed in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service (the Opium Department being a whole other can of worms). As a young man Blair entered the Eaton college preparatory
boarding school in England where his French teacher was none other than Aldous Huxley. Blair and Huxley became friends and shared a common love of literature. Orwell and Huxley read Henry Ford’s re-prints of the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and Ford's articles that were printed
in his Dearborn Independent newspaper and formulated two separate, albeit similar, novels hat are both considered classics. Those being "1984" by George
Orwell and "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. Both novels describe a bleak futuristic world that would exist if the Protocols of Zion were successfully executed to fruition. If
you don’t want to read all of "1984", then at least read the “document” by the book’s character Emmanuel Goldstein titled, "The Theory
and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism." It’s located in the middle of the book (OR SCROLL DOWN FURTHER ON THIS PAGE). You will recognize what has
come, or is coming, to be our reality. Such as Europa is today’s European Union, Oceania is the countries that subscribe to NAFTA; Eastasia is forming as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which are China, Japan and Indonesia, etc.. "1984" describes state sponsored torture,
24/7 television brainwashing media machines , perpetual war and war
hysteria, war not for territorial gains, omnipresent security cameras, concentration of wealth, representatives appointing other representatives, rampant pornography, gun control leading to total gun confiscation, well-spaced terror events, and so on. Blair and Huxley weren’t genius predictors of the future, they
simply read the Protocols of Zion and made some very accurate conclusions. “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco- hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.” ...Aldous Huxley BTW: My paperback copy of Orwell’s "1984" contains an afterword by German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, son of Orthodox Jewish parents and member in good standing of the FRANKFURT SCHOOL, Erich
Fromm. The FRANKFURT SCHOOL can be examined at this website... (search in the navigation bars or net search: http://www.chuckmaultsby.net/id109.html). Fromm will have you believe that "1984" is all about the danger of a communist takeover of the planet. And if you consider that most commies were, and are Jews, then he is correct. But he never once alludes to the Jewish hand in the world domination scheme. Fromm was included in Orwell’s masterpiece for the purpose of distraction. I have no doubt that Orwell himself would not have approved of Fromm’s inclusion as some sort of an expert on his novel. Fromm’s afterword was added to the New American Library of World Literature version of "1984" in 1961 (the height of the Cold War). "1984" was first published on June 8th, 1949.
Orwell died on January 21st, 1950 and did not know what an impact his novel would have on humanity. "1984"
was required reading in many American public high schools in the 1960s, but is no longer required reading because it has become a glimpse of today's reality and our progeny’s future. _______________________________________________________________________ THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM by Emmanuel Goldstein Winston began reading: Chapter I Ignorance is Strength Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been
three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low.
They have been subdivided in many ways, they
have borne countless different names, and their relative
numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted
itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium,
however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable... Winston stopped
reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint
shouts of children: in the room itself there was no
sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled
deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it at a different place
and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading:
Chapter III War is Peace The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the
three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already
effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged
as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines.
Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of
the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to
the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the
countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and
a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia,
and Tibet. In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century.
It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants
who are unable to destroy one another, have no material
cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either the conduct of
war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become
less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners
which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are
looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed
by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on
the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man
can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses
which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact
changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for
which war is waged have changed in their order of importance.
Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon. To understand the nature of the present war -- for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same
war -- one must realize in the first place that it is
impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast
land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic
and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness
of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and
consumption are geared to one another, the scramble
for markets which was a main cause of previous wars
has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far
as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war
for labour power. Between the frontiers of the super-states,
and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession
of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern
ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling.
In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless
changes of alignment. All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable
products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa,
or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India,
or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn
out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control
more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture
more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of
the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and
the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured
by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely unihabited and unexplored: but the balance of power
always remains roughly even, and the territory which
forms the heartland of each super-state always remains
inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world's economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging
a war is always to be in a better position in which
to wage another war. By their labour the slave populations
allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different. The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously
recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to
do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent
in industrial society. At present, when few human beings
even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world
that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared
with the imaginary future to which the people of that
period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every
literate person. Science and technology were developing
at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume
that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could
not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a
whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty
years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties
have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless
the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt,
illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a
few generations. And in fact, without being used for any
such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth centuries. But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a
world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough
to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator,
and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt,
to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense
of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly
distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure
and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass
of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty
would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical
society was only possible on a basis of poverty and
ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some
thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover,
any country which remained industrially backward was
helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated,
directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals. Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent
during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between
1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this,
too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations
it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition
inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise
be used to make the masses too comfortable,
and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress,
for example, has locked up in it the labour that would
build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit
to anybody, and with further enormous labours another
Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort
is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage
of half the necessities of life; but this is looked
on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep
even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth
century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere,
laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries
that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world from a member
of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party
have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged
masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being
at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over
of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable
condition of survival. War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste
the surplus labour of the world by building temples
and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up
again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned
here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within
narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should
be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods
are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does
not matter whether the war is going well or badly.
All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members,
and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of
war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks
one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item
of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware
that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening
or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and
that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania
the undisputed master of the entire world. All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and
so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power,
or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon.
The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense,
has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no
word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought,
on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human
liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters
of vital importance -- meaning, in effect, war and
police espionage -- the empirical approach is still
encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore
two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how
to kill several hundred million people
in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.
The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist
and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness
the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his
special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.
In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and
in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned
simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or
for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such
quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others
strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way
under the soil like a submarine under the water, or
an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes
and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the
earth's centre. But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable
is that all three powers already possess, in the atomic
bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their
present researches are likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten years later.
At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on
industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western
Europe, and North America. The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever
made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All
three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs
and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters are more used than they were
formerly, bombing planes have been
largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the
machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are
still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughters
reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated. None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre which involves the risk of serious defeat.
When any large operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally. The strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting,
bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to
acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or
other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally
they will all be fired simultaneously, with effects
so devastating as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power,
in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it
is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible
of realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the superstates are arbitrary.
Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the British
Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on
the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would violate the principle, followed on all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to conquer the areas
that used once to be known as France
and Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technical development
goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level. The problem
is the same for all three super-states. It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the official ally of the moment
is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War
prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never
sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told
about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives
would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness
on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs. Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called
Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called
by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not
allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other
two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them
as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the
same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy
existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that
the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups
of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware
of what they are doing. Their lives are dedicated to
world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile the fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature
of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it
is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that
by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character. In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end,
usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers,
but they could not afford to encourage any illusion
that tended to impair military efficiency. So long
as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might
make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane
they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always
conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past.
Newspapers and history books
were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard
of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned
it was probably the most important of all safeguards.
While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible. But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military
necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most
palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is
not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable,
each is in effect a separate universe within which
almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life -- the need
to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid
swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and
the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the
past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar
space, who has no way of knowing which direction is
up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death
in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they
are obliged to remain at the same low level of military
technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose. The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles
between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special
mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society
needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries,
although they might recognize their common
interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are
not fighting against one another at all. The war is
waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and
the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become
misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased
to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite
different. The effect would be much the same
if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from
the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that
was truly permanent would be the same as a
permanent war. This -- although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense -- is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace.
 GEORGE
ORWELL'S EVOLVING VIEWS ON JEWS Raymond S. Solomon - The Jerusalem Post (Israel) To be aware that Orwell
had an antisemitic streak, you only have to read Down and Out in Paris and London, in which the term "the Jew" is used many times. Both Boris, a former soldier in
the Czarist army, and the narrator of Down and Out, who is based on Orwell, are antisemitic. A diary written by Orwell, in preparation for Down and Out, has many antisemitic comments. There is
also significant antisemitism in
A Clergyman's Daughter. In the Trafalgar Square scene there is a character called "The Kike." The tendency to use terms like "the
Jew," and "pro-Jew" continues into his later writings, letters and diaries. For example, in a July 15, 1942, letter to Alex Comfort
discussing the book The Clue to History,
Orwell comments, "This was a rather unbalanced book and extremely pro-Jew in tendency."  |
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