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.
 
 
For those who have not read either book, read "1984" first.
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.
 
 

 https://dsv62le7do0mm.cloudfront.net/file/pic/comment/1135_5a25cc6b98d5d20fbc6b92e2b67295b079874415.jpg
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."
 
 
 

Click on this text to read DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON

 
 
 
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