As a whole the world is more
primitive
today than it
was fifty years ago.
was fifty years ago.
Orwell - 1984
It is important to change one's hid-
ing-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of
THE BOOK' — even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to
pronounce the words as though they were in italics — 'Gold-
stein's book, you understand, as soon as possible. It may
be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not
many in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought Police
hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can
produce them. It makes very little difference. The book is
indestructible. If the last copy were gone, we could repro-
duce it almost word for word. Do you carry a brief-case to
work with you? ' he added.
'As a rule, yes. '
'What is it like? '
'Black, very shabby. With two straps. '
'Black, two straps, very shabby — good. One day in the
fairly near future — I cannot give a date — one of the messag-
es among your morning's work will contain a misprinted
word, and you will have to ask for a repeat. On the following
day you will go to work without your brief-case. At some
time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on
the arm and say 'I think you have dropped your brief-case. '
The one he gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book.
You will return it within fourteen days. '
They were silent for a moment.
'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said
1984
O'Brien. 'We shall meet again — if we do meet again '
Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where there is no
darkness? ' he said hesitantly.
O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. 'In the
place where there is no darkness,' he said, as though he had
recognized the allusion. 'And in the meantime, is there any-
thing that you wish to say before you leave? Any message?
Any question? . '
Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further
question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any
impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of any-
thing directly connected with O'Brien or the Brotherhood,
there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the
dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days,
and the little room over Mr Charrington's shop, and the
glass paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood
frame. Almost at random he said:
'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's'? '
Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he
completed the stanza:
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When willyoupay me? say the bells of Old Bailey,
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch. '
'You knew the last line! ' said Winston.
'Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 225
for you to go. But wait. You had better let me give you one
of these tablets. '
As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His pow-
erful grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm. At the
door Winston looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to
be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting
with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen.
Beyond him Winston could see the writing-table with its
green-shaded lamp and the speakwrite and the wire baskets
deep-laden with papers. The incident was closed. Within
thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O'Brien would be back at
his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.
1984
Chapter 9
Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was
the right word. It had come into his head spontane-
ously. His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a
jelly, but its translucency He felt that if he held up his hand
he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood
and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous
debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure of nerves,
bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. His
overalls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet,
even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that
made his joints creak.
He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So
had everyone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and
he had literally nothing to do, no Party work of any descrip -
tion, until tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in
the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in
mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the
direction of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open
for the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this after-
noon there was no danger of anyone interfering with him.
The heavy brief-case that he was carrying bumped against
his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and
down the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book, which he
had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet
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opened, nor even looked at.
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the
speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters,
the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squeal-
ing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding
of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the
booming of guns — after six days of this, when the great or-
gasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of
Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd
could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-crim-
inals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the
proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them
to pieces — at just this moment it had been announced that
Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was
at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had
taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme sud-
denness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not
Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a dem-
onstration in one of the central London squares at the
moment when it happened. It was night, and the white fac-
es and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square
was packed with several thousand people, including a block
of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the
Spies. On a scarlet- draped platform an orator of the Inner
Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms
and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks strag-
gled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin
figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the
1984
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at
the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his
head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed
forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, depor-
tations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing
of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken
treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without
being first convinced and then maddened. At every few mo-
ments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the
speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose
uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most sav-
age yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech
had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a
messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper
was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it
without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice
or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but sud-
denly the names were different. Without words said, a wave
of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was
at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremen-
dous commotion. The banners and posters with which the
square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them
had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of
Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude
while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to
shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prod-
igies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting
the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within
two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping
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the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward,
his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with
his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage
were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued
exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was
that the speaker had switched from one line to the other ac-
tually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without
even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other
things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of dis-
order while the posters were being torn down that a man
whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder
and said, 'Excuse me, I think you've dropped your brief-
case. ' He took the brief-case abstractedly, without speaking.
He knew that it would be days before he had an opportuni-
ty to look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was
over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the
time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff
of the Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issu-
ing from the telescreen, recalling them to their posts, were
hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always
been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political lit-
erature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports
and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets,
films, sound-tracks, photographs — all had to be rectified
at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued,
it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended
that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia,
1984
or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence
anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so
because the processes that it involved could not be called
by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department
worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-
hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from
the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals con-
sisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round
on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that
Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to
leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled
back sticky- eyed and aching, it was to find that another
shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snow-
drift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the
floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a
neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst
of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical.
Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for an-
other, but any detailed report of events demanded care and
imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one
needed in transferring the war from one part of the world
to another was considerable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his
spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was like
struggling with some crushing physical task, something
which one had the right to refuse and which one was never-
theless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he
had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that
every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke
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of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as
anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be
perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cyl-
inders slowed down. For as much as half an hour nothing
came out of the tube; then one more cylinder, then nothing.
Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off.
A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the Depart-
ment. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had
been achieved. It was now impossible for any human being
to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia
had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly
announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till
tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case
containing the book, which had remained between his feet
while he worked and under his body while he slept, went
home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, al-
though the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he
climbed the stair above Mr Charrington's shop. He was
tired, but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit
the dirty little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee.
Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book.
He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps
of the brief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no
name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly
irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart,
easily, as though the book had passed through many hands.
The inscription on the title-page ran:
1984
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 count-
less 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 im-
pulse 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 chil-
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 233
dren: 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 Chap-
ter 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 ab-
sorption 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 de-
cade 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
1984
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 twen-
ty-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 genu-
ine ideological difference This is not to say that either the
conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has be-
come 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 com-
mitted 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 com-
paratively 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 For-
tresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the
centres of civilization war means no more than a contin-
uous 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
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order of importance. Motives which were already present
to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth
centuury 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 al-
ways the same war — one must realize in the first place that
it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three su-
per-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 indus tri-
ousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in
a material sense, anything to fight about. With the estab-
lishment 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 la-
bour 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, Brazza-
ville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about
a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the posses-
sion of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern
236 1984
ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In
practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disput-
ed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and
it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sud-
den 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 syn-
thesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all
they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Which-
ever 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 hun-
dreds 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 con-
queror, 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 In-
dian 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 terri-
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tories 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 ex-
ploited 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 bet-
ter position in which to wage another war. By their labour
the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous war-
fare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure
of world society, and the process by which it maintains it-
self, would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance
with the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simul-
taneously 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 be-
ings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not
urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artifi-
cial 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 com-
pared 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,
238 1984
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 nev-
er 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 think-
ing 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 humand being very greatly over a period of
about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the begin-
ning of the twentieth centuries.
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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 per-
haps 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 pos-
sessions 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 sta-
ble. 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 pov-
erty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as
some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury 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 indus-
trially backward was helpless in a military sense and was
bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more
advanced rivals.
1984
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, rough-
ly 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 popula-
tion 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 unneces-
sary, 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 pro-
ducing 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 any-
body, 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 meet-
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ing the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs
of the population are always underestimated, with the re-
sult 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 mag-
nifies the distinction between one group and another. By
the standards of the early twentieth century, even a mem-
ber 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 bet-
ter 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 dif-
ference 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 destruc-
tion, 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 produc-
ing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them.
1984
But this would provide only the economic and not the emo-
tional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned
here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unim-
portant 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 intel-
ligent 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 mental-
ity 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 ex-
ist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires
of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an at-
mosphere 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 administra-
tor, 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. Mean-
while 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
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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 build-
ing 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 Ocea-
nia 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 scien-
tific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to
the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even tech-
nological 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 go-
ing 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 espio-
nage — 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 be-
ing is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred
million people in a few seconds without giving warning be-
forehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this
1984
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 Ant-
arctic, 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 impen-
etrable 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 con-
tinents, 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 un-
der 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 artifi-
cial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the
earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near re-
alization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a
significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is
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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, ac-
cording 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 indus-
trial 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-pro-
pelled 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 end-
less 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 ma-
246 1984
noeuvre 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, bar-
gaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a
ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the ri-
val 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 con-
quer 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 assimi-
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late 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 of-
ficial ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest
suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Ocea-
nia 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 ex-
cept 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 Oce-
ania 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 citi-
zen 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
248 1984
sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distin-
guishable, and the social systems which they support are
not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same py-
ramidal 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 con-
quer 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 simultane-
ously 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 unmistak-
able 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
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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 inimi-
cal 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. Newspa-
pers 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 ir-
responsible.
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 es-
sentially 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 prac-
tised. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of
everyday life — the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and
1984
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 know-
ing 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 in-
convenient, 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 pre-
vious 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 anoth-
er. 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 an-
other, 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
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conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society
intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become mislead-
ing. 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 under-
stand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaning of
the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in
remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feel-
ing of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with
no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were
physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness
of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint
breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The
book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In
a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part
of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had
been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in or-
der. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but
enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-rid-
1984
den. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you
what you know already. He had just turned back to Chapter
I when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and started out
of his chair to meet her. She dumped her brown tool-bag on
the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was more than a
week since they had seen one another.
'I've got THE BOOK,' he said as they disentangled them-
selves.
'Oh, you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest,
and almost immediately knelt down beside the oil stove to
make the coffee.
They did not return to the subject until they had been
in bed for half an hour. The evening was just cool enough
to make it worth while to pull up the counterpane. From
below came the familiar sound of singing and the scrape
of boots on the flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman
whom Winston had seen there on his first visit was almost a
fixture in the yard. There seemed to be no hour of daylight
when she was not marching to and fro between the washtub
and the line, alternately gagging herself with clothes pegs
and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down
on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling
asleep. He reached out for the book, which was lying on the
floor, and sat up against the bedhead.
'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the
Brotherhood have to read it. '
'You read it,' she said with her eyes shut. 'Read it aloud.
That's the best way. Then you can explain it to me as you
go-'
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The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had
three or four hours ahead of them. He propped the book
against his knees and 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 count-
less 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 equilibnum, however
far it is pushed one way or the other
'Julia, are you awake? ' said Winston.
'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous. '
He continued reading:
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcil-
able. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The
aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The
aim of the Low, when they have an aim — for it is an abiding
characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed
by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of
anything outside their daily lives — is to abolish all distinc-
tions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its
main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods
the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later
1984
there always comes a moment when they lose either their
belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently
or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who en-
list the Low on their side by pretending to them that they
are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have
reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back
into their old position of servitude, and themselves become
the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one
of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle
begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are
never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims.
It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history
there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today,
in a period of decline, the average human being is physical-
ly better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance
in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolu-
tion has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.
From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has
ever meant much more than a change in the name of their
masters.
By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pat-
tern had become obvious to many observers.
ing-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of
THE BOOK' — even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to
pronounce the words as though they were in italics — 'Gold-
stein's book, you understand, as soon as possible. It may
be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not
many in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought Police
hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can
produce them. It makes very little difference. The book is
indestructible. If the last copy were gone, we could repro-
duce it almost word for word. Do you carry a brief-case to
work with you? ' he added.
'As a rule, yes. '
'What is it like? '
'Black, very shabby. With two straps. '
'Black, two straps, very shabby — good. One day in the
fairly near future — I cannot give a date — one of the messag-
es among your morning's work will contain a misprinted
word, and you will have to ask for a repeat. On the following
day you will go to work without your brief-case. At some
time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on
the arm and say 'I think you have dropped your brief-case. '
The one he gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book.
You will return it within fourteen days. '
They were silent for a moment.
'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said
1984
O'Brien. 'We shall meet again — if we do meet again '
Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where there is no
darkness? ' he said hesitantly.
O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. 'In the
place where there is no darkness,' he said, as though he had
recognized the allusion. 'And in the meantime, is there any-
thing that you wish to say before you leave? Any message?
Any question? . '
Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further
question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any
impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of any-
thing directly connected with O'Brien or the Brotherhood,
there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the
dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days,
and the little room over Mr Charrington's shop, and the
glass paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood
frame. Almost at random he said:
'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's'? '
Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he
completed the stanza:
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When willyoupay me? say the bells of Old Bailey,
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch. '
'You knew the last line! ' said Winston.
'Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 225
for you to go. But wait. You had better let me give you one
of these tablets. '
As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His pow-
erful grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm. At the
door Winston looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to
be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting
with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen.
Beyond him Winston could see the writing-table with its
green-shaded lamp and the speakwrite and the wire baskets
deep-laden with papers. The incident was closed. Within
thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O'Brien would be back at
his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.
1984
Chapter 9
Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was
the right word. It had come into his head spontane-
ously. His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a
jelly, but its translucency He felt that if he held up his hand
he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood
and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous
debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure of nerves,
bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. His
overalls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet,
even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that
made his joints creak.
He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So
had everyone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and
he had literally nothing to do, no Party work of any descrip -
tion, until tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in
the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in
mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the
direction of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open
for the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this after-
noon there was no danger of anyone interfering with him.
The heavy brief-case that he was carrying bumped against
his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and
down the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book, which he
had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet
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opened, nor even looked at.
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the
speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters,
the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squeal-
ing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding
of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the
booming of guns — after six days of this, when the great or-
gasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of
Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd
could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-crim-
inals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the
proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them
to pieces — at just this moment it had been announced that
Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was
at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had
taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme sud-
denness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not
Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a dem-
onstration in one of the central London squares at the
moment when it happened. It was night, and the white fac-
es and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square
was packed with several thousand people, including a block
of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the
Spies. On a scarlet- draped platform an orator of the Inner
Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms
and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks strag-
gled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin
figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the
1984
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at
the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his
head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed
forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, depor-
tations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing
of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken
treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without
being first convinced and then maddened. At every few mo-
ments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the
speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose
uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most sav-
age yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech
had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a
messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper
was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it
without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice
or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but sud-
denly the names were different. Without words said, a wave
of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was
at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremen-
dous commotion. The banners and posters with which the
square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them
had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of
Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude
while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to
shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prod-
igies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting
the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within
two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping
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the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward,
his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with
his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage
were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued
exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was
that the speaker had switched from one line to the other ac-
tually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without
even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other
things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of dis-
order while the posters were being torn down that a man
whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder
and said, 'Excuse me, I think you've dropped your brief-
case. ' He took the brief-case abstractedly, without speaking.
He knew that it would be days before he had an opportuni-
ty to look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was
over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the
time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff
of the Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issu-
ing from the telescreen, recalling them to their posts, were
hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always
been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political lit-
erature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports
and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets,
films, sound-tracks, photographs — all had to be rectified
at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued,
it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended
that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia,
1984
or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence
anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so
because the processes that it involved could not be called
by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department
worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-
hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from
the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals con-
sisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round
on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that
Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to
leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled
back sticky- eyed and aching, it was to find that another
shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snow-
drift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the
floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a
neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst
of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical.
Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for an-
other, but any detailed report of events demanded care and
imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one
needed in transferring the war from one part of the world
to another was considerable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his
spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was like
struggling with some crushing physical task, something
which one had the right to refuse and which one was never-
theless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he
had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that
every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke
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of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as
anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be
perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cyl-
inders slowed down. For as much as half an hour nothing
came out of the tube; then one more cylinder, then nothing.
Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off.
A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the Depart-
ment. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had
been achieved. It was now impossible for any human being
to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia
had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly
announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till
tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case
containing the book, which had remained between his feet
while he worked and under his body while he slept, went
home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, al-
though the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he
climbed the stair above Mr Charrington's shop. He was
tired, but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit
the dirty little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee.
Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book.
He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps
of the brief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no
name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly
irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart,
easily, as though the book had passed through many hands.
The inscription on the title-page ran:
1984
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 count-
less 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 im-
pulse 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 chil-
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 233
dren: 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 Chap-
ter 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 ab-
sorption 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 de-
cade 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
1984
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 twen-
ty-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 genu-
ine ideological difference This is not to say that either the
conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has be-
come 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 com-
mitted 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 com-
paratively 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 For-
tresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the
centres of civilization war means no more than a contin-
uous 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
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order of importance. Motives which were already present
to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth
centuury 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 al-
ways the same war — one must realize in the first place that
it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three su-
per-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 indus tri-
ousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in
a material sense, anything to fight about. With the estab-
lishment 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 la-
bour 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, Brazza-
ville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about
a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the posses-
sion of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern
236 1984
ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In
practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disput-
ed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and
it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sud-
den 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 syn-
thesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all
they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Which-
ever 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 hun-
dreds 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 con-
queror, 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 In-
dian 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 terri-
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tories 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 ex-
ploited 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 bet-
ter position in which to wage another war. By their labour
the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous war-
fare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure
of world society, and the process by which it maintains it-
self, would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance
with the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simul-
taneously 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 be-
ings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not
urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artifi-
cial 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 com-
pared 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,
238 1984
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 nev-
er 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 think-
ing 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 humand being very greatly over a period of
about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the begin-
ning of the twentieth centuries.
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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 per-
haps 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 pos-
sessions 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 sta-
ble. 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 pov-
erty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as
some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury 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 indus-
trially backward was helpless in a military sense and was
bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more
advanced rivals.
1984
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, rough-
ly 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 popula-
tion 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 unneces-
sary, 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 pro-
ducing 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 any-
body, 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 meet-
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ing the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs
of the population are always underestimated, with the re-
sult 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 mag-
nifies the distinction between one group and another. By
the standards of the early twentieth century, even a mem-
ber 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 bet-
ter 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 dif-
ference 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 destruc-
tion, 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 produc-
ing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them.
1984
But this would provide only the economic and not the emo-
tional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned
here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unim-
portant 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 intel-
ligent 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 mental-
ity 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 ex-
ist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires
of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an at-
mosphere 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 administra-
tor, 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. Mean-
while 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
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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 build-
ing 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 Ocea-
nia 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 scien-
tific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to
the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even tech-
nological 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 go-
ing 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 espio-
nage — 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 be-
ing is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred
million people in a few seconds without giving warning be-
forehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this
1984
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 Ant-
arctic, 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 impen-
etrable 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 con-
tinents, 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 un-
der 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 artifi-
cial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the
earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near re-
alization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a
significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is
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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, ac-
cording 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 indus-
trial 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-pro-
pelled 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 end-
less 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 ma-
246 1984
noeuvre 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, bar-
gaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a
ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the ri-
val 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 con-
quer 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 assimi-
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late 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 of-
ficial ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest
suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Ocea-
nia 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 ex-
cept 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 Oce-
ania 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 citi-
zen 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
248 1984
sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distin-
guishable, and the social systems which they support are
not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same py-
ramidal 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 con-
quer 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 simultane-
ously 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 unmistak-
able 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
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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 inimi-
cal 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. Newspa-
pers 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 ir-
responsible.
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 es-
sentially 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 prac-
tised. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of
everyday life — the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and
1984
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 know-
ing 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 in-
convenient, 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 pre-
vious 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 anoth-
er. 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 an-
other, 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
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conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society
intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become mislead-
ing. 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 under-
stand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaning of
the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in
remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feel-
ing of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with
no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were
physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness
of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint
breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The
book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In
a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part
of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had
been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in or-
der. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but
enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-rid-
1984
den. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you
what you know already. He had just turned back to Chapter
I when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and started out
of his chair to meet her. She dumped her brown tool-bag on
the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was more than a
week since they had seen one another.
'I've got THE BOOK,' he said as they disentangled them-
selves.
'Oh, you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest,
and almost immediately knelt down beside the oil stove to
make the coffee.
They did not return to the subject until they had been
in bed for half an hour. The evening was just cool enough
to make it worth while to pull up the counterpane. From
below came the familiar sound of singing and the scrape
of boots on the flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman
whom Winston had seen there on his first visit was almost a
fixture in the yard. There seemed to be no hour of daylight
when she was not marching to and fro between the washtub
and the line, alternately gagging herself with clothes pegs
and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down
on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling
asleep. He reached out for the book, which was lying on the
floor, and sat up against the bedhead.
'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the
Brotherhood have to read it. '
'You read it,' she said with her eyes shut. 'Read it aloud.
That's the best way. Then you can explain it to me as you
go-'
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The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had
three or four hours ahead of them. He propped the book
against his knees and 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 count-
less 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 equilibnum, however
far it is pushed one way or the other
'Julia, are you awake? ' said Winston.
'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous. '
He continued reading:
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcil-
able. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The
aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The
aim of the Low, when they have an aim — for it is an abiding
characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed
by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of
anything outside their daily lives — is to abolish all distinc-
tions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its
main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods
the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later
1984
there always comes a moment when they lose either their
belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently
or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who en-
list the Low on their side by pretending to them that they
are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have
reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back
into their old position of servitude, and themselves become
the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one
of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle
begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are
never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims.
It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history
there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today,
in a period of decline, the average human being is physical-
ly better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance
in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolu-
tion has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.
From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has
ever meant much more than a change in the name of their
masters.
By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pat-
tern had become obvious to many observers.
