Nineteen Eighty-Four: Encyclopedia II - Nineteen Eighty-Four - The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four - The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four

The novel focuses upon one man named Winston Smith who stands, seemingly alone, against the corrupted reality of his world: hence its original working name of The Last Man in Europe. Although the storyline is unified, it could be described as having three parts, and indeed has been published by some in such a fashion. The first part deals with the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four as seen through the eyes of Winston; the second part deals with Winston's forbidden sexual relationship with Julia and his eagerness to rebel against the Party, and the third part deals with Winston's capture and torture by the Party.

The world described in Nineteen Eighty-Four contains striking and deliberate parallels with the Stalinist Soviet Union and Hitler's Nazi Germany. There are thematic similarities; the betrayed revolution - with which Orwell famously dealt in Animal Farm; the subordination of individuals to "the Party"; the rigorous distinction between inner party, outer party and everyone else. There are also direct parallels of the activities within the society; leader worship whether it be Big Brother, Hitler or Stalin; Joycamps, concentration camps or gulags; Thought police, NKVD or Gestapo; daily exercise reminiscent of Nazi propaganda movies; Youth League, Hitler Youth or Octobrists/Pioneers.

There is also an extensive and institutional use of propaganda; again, this was found in the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Orwell may have drawn inspiration from the greatest propagandists of the time, the Nazis; compare the following quotes to how propaganda is used in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

• “The broad mass of the nation ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” - Adolf Hitler, in his 1925 book Mein Kampf

• “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” - Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels

• “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” - Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, before committing suicide at the Nuremberg Trials

• “Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with.”

• “The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep the people frightened'.”

• “The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.”

• “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.”

Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party, lives in the ruins of London, the chief city of Airstrip One — a front-line province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania. Winston grew up in post-Second World War Britain, during the revolution and civil war. When his parents died during the civil war, he was picked up by the growing Ingsoc movement and given a job in the Outer Party. Like the rest of the population, Winston lives a squalid and materially deprived existence. He lives in a filthy one-room apartment in "Victory Mansions", and is forced to live on a diet of hard bread, synthetic meals served at his workplace, and vast amounts of industrial-grade "Victory Gin". He is deeply unhappy in his life and keeps a secret diary of his illegal thoughts about the Party. Winston is employed by the Ministry of Truth, which exercises complete control over all media in Oceania: his job in the Ministry's Records Department involves doctoring historical records in order to comply with the Party's version of the past. Since the perception of the past is constantly shaped by the events of the present, the task is a never-ending one.

However, Winston is fascinated by the real past, and eagerly tries to find out more about the forbidden truth. At the Ministry of Truth, he encounters Julia, a mechanic on the novel-writing machines, and the two begin an illegal relationship, regularly meeting up in the countryside (away from surveillance) or in a room above an antique shop in the Proles' area of the city. As the relationship progresses, Winston's views begin to change, and he finds himself relentlessly questioning Ingsoc. Unknown to him, he and Julia are under surveillance by the Thought Police, and when he is approached by Inner Party member O'Brien, he believes that he has made contact with the Resistance. O'Brien gives Winston a copy of "the book", a searing criticism of Ingsoc that Smith believes was written by the dissident Emmanuel Goldstein.

Winston and Julia are apprehended by the Thought Police and interrogated separately in the Ministry of Love, where opponents of the regime are tortured and executed. O'Brien reveals to Winston that he has been brought to "be cured" of his hatred for the Party, and subjects Winston to numerous torture sessions. During one of these sessions, he explains to Winston the nature of the endless world war, and that the purpose of the torture is not to extract a fake confession, but to actually change the way Winston thinks. This is achieved through a combination of torture and electroshock therapy, until O'Brien decides that Winston is "cured". However, Winston unconsciously utters Julia's name in his sleep, proving that he has not been completely brainwashed. Room 101 is the most feared room in the Ministry of Love, where a person's greatest fear is forced upon them as the final step in the re-education. Winston is dreadfully afraid of rats, and a cage of hungry rats is placed over his eyes, so that when the door is opened, they will eat their way through his skull. In his absolute terror, he tries to think of the one thing he can say to stop the punishment, and he realizes what it is. He says, "Do it to Julia!" At the end of the novel, Winston and Julia meet, but their feelings for each other no longer exist. Winston has become an alcoholic and we know that eventually he will be killed. The one thing Winston had held on to when facing his inevitable end was that when he was killed, he would still hate Big Brother. This would be his victory, showing that the party's power was not absolute. However, the novel's conclusion reveals that the torture and 'reprogramming' have been successful; Winston realized one truth above all, 'He loved Big Brother'.

At the end of the novel there is an appendix on Newspeak (the artificial language invented and, by degrees, imposed by the Party to limit the capacity to express or even think "unorthodox" thoughts), in the style of an academic essay.

Nineteen Eighty-Four - History according to 1984

The novel does not give a full history of how the world of 1984 came into being. Winston's recollections, and what he reads from "The Book" (i.e., Emmanuel Goldstein's book) reveal that at some point after the Second World War, the United Kingdom descended into civil war, eventually being absorbed by the United States to form the new world power of Oceania; at roughly the same time, the Soviet Union expanded into mainland Europe to form Eurasia; and the third world power, Eastasia - an amalgamation of east Asian countries including China and Japan - emerged some time later.

There was a period of nuclear warfare during which some hundreds of atomic bombs were dropped, mainly on Europe, western Russia, and North America. (The only city that is explicitly stated to have suffered a nuclear attack is Colchester.) It is not clear what came first - the civil war which ended with the Party taking over, the absorption of Britain by the US, or the external war in which Colchester was bombed. To reconstruct it one needs to try combining the hints scattered in "1984" itself with the analysis and predictions contained in Orwell's non-fiction writings.

In articles written during the Second World War, Orwell repeatedly expressed the idea that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war, the only question being whether its end would come through a Fascist takeover from above or by a Socialist revolution from below. (The second possibility, it should be noted, was greatly supported and hoped for by Orwell, to the extent that he joined and loyally participated in "the Home Guard" throughout the war, in the futile expectation that that body would become the nucleus of a revolutionary militia). After the war ended Orwell openly expressed his surprise that events have proven him wrong.

The most complete expression of Orwell's predictions in that direction are contained in "The Lion and the Unicorn" which he wrote in 1940. There, he stated that "the war and the revolution are inseparable (...) the fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a textbook word into a realizable policy". The reason for that, according to Orwell, was that the outmoded British class system constituted a major hindrance to the war effort, and only a Socialist society would be able to defeat Hitler. Since the middle classes were in process of realizing this, too, they would support the revolution, and only outright reactionaries would oppose it - which would limit the amount of force the revolutionaries would need in order to gain power and keep it.

Thus, an "English Socialism" would come about which "...will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word".

Such a revolutionary regime, which Orwell found highly desirable and was actively trying to bring about in 1940, is of course a far cry from the monstrous edifice presided over by Big Brother, which was his nightmare a few years later. Still, one can see how the one may degenerate into the other (and The Party does provide "traitors" with "a solemn trial" before shooting them...)

The term "English Socialism", repeated numerous times in "The Lion and the Unicorn", is rather parochial - had events developed as Orwell predicted, the Scots and Welsh would have undoubtedly had a major share in such a revolution. Its importance for understanding "1984" is that the official Party ideology is "Ingsoc", an abbreviation of "English Socialism". This shows that Orwell perceived of the monstrous regime which he described in "1984", not only as a betrayal and perversion of Socialist ideals in general, but also as a perversion of Orwell's own specifically and dearly cherished vision and hope of Socialism.

In 1940 Orwell was quite optimistic about the chances of Socialism - his brand of Socialism. In 1947, when he wrote "Toward European Unity" he was far more pessimistic (which may have had to do, not only with objective conditions in the world but also with his fast deteriorating health). He no longer had hopes in the possibility of a Socialist revolution in Britain alone. The only real chance (and he considered it a slim chance) was through a Socialist Federation of Western Europe, "The only region where for a large number of people the word Socialism is bound up with liberty, equality and internationalism". Such a federation, embracing some 250 million people, would provide a large-scale working model of "a community where people are relatively free and happy and where the main motive in life is not the pursuit of money or power".

A lot of preconditions had to be fulfilled for that vision to materialise. The Western European countries had to remain independent both of the Soviet military might and of looking to the Soviet Union for their model of Socialism. Britain had to divest itself of its empire, since exploiting the labour of colonial masses was incompatible with building a true Socialist society. It also had to cut itself completely out of the American orbit, and ally with the West European countries in a common revolution. Orwell was not sanguine about the chances of all these conditions materialising, but stated in conclusion: "One thing in our favour is that a major war is not likely to happen immediately" - which would at least give some breathing space to the forces seeking Democratic Socialism.

"1984" was written at almost precisely the same time as "Toward European Unity", and the fictional history unfolding in the past of the novel could be considered as the exact mirror image of that article. A major war does break out almost "immediately" from the time of writing in 1948, the opposite happens of all the indispensable conditions for Democratic Socialism, and things go from bad to worse.

From the memories of Winston Smith, scattered through the book, one can try to piece out the following:

A) At the outbreak of war, when Colchester was A-bombed, the child Winston experienced an air-raid alarm and was taken by his parents to a tube station, where he heard an old man saying "We didn't ought to 'ave trusted them". This implies a sense of betrayal, felt in the British public in the aftermath of a surprise attack. The context would suggest a Soviet attack, possibly after a period of relative rapprochement or a failed peace effort.

The outbreak of war might have followed the withdrawal of US forces from Europe - a quite plausible future development when the book was written, before the creation of NATO and when the main available precedent was the American withdrawal from Europe in the aftermath of WWI. That would account both for the feeling of betrayal and for the Soviet success in sweeping, while Britain was heavily bombed but protected by the Channel from a ground invasion, westwards to the Atlantic and southwards into the Middle East. (A newsreel from the Middle East which Smith watches shows a boat full of Jewish refugees being sunk by an Oceanian helicopter; evidently, in this history the state of Israel, founded in 1948, had had only an ephemeral existence.).

The major invasion was followed by the Soviet Union being transformed into "Eurasia" and adopting the ideology of "Neo-Bolshevism" (possibly under the impact of absorbing the Communists of France, Italy etc. into its ruling party).

The isolated Britain kept its empire and was perforce drawn into a closer alliance and eventual political amalgamation with the United States - that might have been the time when the Dollar became the common currency.

At that time, in Smith's life, his father was still around and his sister was not yet born. The time must be the early 1950's, since Smith was born in 1944 or 1945 and these are for him dim childhood memories; in other words, for Orwell writing in 1948 this was the very immediate future. Winston Smith is about the same age as Richard Horatio Blair, Orwell's adopted son, who was born in May 1944.

B) After that, the war in Europe seems to have stabilized into exchanges of aerial bombardments (by tacit agreement avoiding the use of nuclear arms) and to naval blockades and submarine warfare, with ground battles confined to extra-European theatres. In effect, Orwell conceived the future war as taking virtually the same course that WWII took in 1940 after the Fall of France. This is the period from which come Winston Smith's later childhood memories, a time when the father was gone and the mother was left alone with Winston and the baby sister.

That was a time of very great economic privations - much worse even than the systematised and controlled privations which daily life in 1984 Oceania entails. There was presumably the destruction left by nuclear bombardment, which destroyed a part of Britain's industrial capacity, and also agricultural areas left contaminated ("1984" mentions Winston and Julia meeting in countryside areas still devastated and deserted after thirty years), the need to fight a full-scale war again without being fully recovered from the effects of WWII (in our history Britian only fully recovered in the 1950's, and in 1948 when Orwell wrote, there were predictions of a much longer time needed for recovery). To these would be added Soviet/Eurasian attacks on the supply lines, for which (unlike with Nazi Germany in WWII) the coasts of Spain, Portugal and North Africa, as well as those of France, would be fully available for Soviet/Eurasian submarine bases and airfields. (The development of the "virtually unsinkable" Floating Fortresses might have come later, as a means of securing the Atlantic sea-lanes and ensuring at least a trickle of vital supplies to Britain/Airstrip One - which would explain the popularity of the sailors serving in these fortresses, used in the Party's propaganda.)

Winston's memories of this time are full of political chaos and violence, as seen through an uncomprehending child's eyes. There is a specific mention of rival militias roaming the streets, each one composed of boys all wearing shirts of the same colour (a vision which Orwell might have taken from the last years of Weimar Germany, where Nazi, Communist and other militias constantly fought in the streets).

That corresponds, presumably, to the time when The Party (which at the time must still have had a name, being only one of several contending parties) was led by Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, and Big Brother had not yet risen to prominence. (The three are clearly modelled on Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, the prominent Bolshevik leaders which Stalin supplanted and purged).

Apparently, Orwell conceives of the three as sincere revolutionaries moved by outrage at the injustice of capitalism. There is the specific mention of Rutherford's "brutal cartoons", depicting slum tenements, starving children, street battles and capitalists in top hats, which "helped inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution". The revolutionaries eventually win - or so it seems. What Orwell hoped for in vain during WWII does take place during the WWIII of the 1950's, Orwell's immediate future - a revolution in Britain. But now he sees it as the beginning of a nightmare, not of hope.

The difference can be partly explained by the fact that the revolution takes place in far more brutal conditions than those of WWII Britain where Orwell hoped for a relatively mild revolution - and more similar to the conditions of 1917 in Russia from which the incipient Soviet regime had its introduction to brutality. While Rutherford's cartoons were obviously exaggerated, in order to be so effective in rousing public fury they must have to some degree reflected the reality of deep privations and social polarization in the immediate pre-revolutionary time. Under such conditions, the revolutionaries' victory could have easily been accompanied by widespread retaliations against "war profiteers" and "fat cats" (there was widespread resentment against such people in WWII Britain, where conditions had never been that bad). Such retaliations, condoned as "unavoidable excesses", would have set the new regime on a road of arbitrary brutality from its very inception.

Also, Orwell's essential conditions for the revolution to develop towards Democratic Socialism, set out in "Toward European Unity", were all not fulfilled - Western Europe is occupied and in no condition to join in the revolution, and Britain is inextricably tied to both the US and to its oppressive overseas empire. Indeed, the brutal all-out exploitation of colonial peoples as semi-slave labour could have been started by the old regime in the immediate aftermath of the occupation of Europe, as a desperate measure of survival, and deepened rather than abolished by the newly-arrived revolutionaries. Altogether, the revolutionary regime was inexorably perverted into the merciless tyranny of Big Brother.

At some time soon after, the revolution which started in Britain spread to America and won there as well. This is the least plausible aspect of Orwell's vision, and it is not by chance that the book contains no detail whatsoever of how it came about, and hardly any information of the situation in the American part of Oceania (beyond a single passing mention of a Party congress in New York).

Of course, severe deprivations in the aftermath of a nuclear war could push Americans in many directions inconceivable for our own history, which was fortunately spared that experience. Still, even had the American masses been driven by such conditions to go out on the barricades and foment a revolution in the name of Socialism, they would have been very unlikely to take "English Socialism" as their byword. In fact, in the set-up described in "1984", the ruling ideology should logically have been called "Amersoc" rather than "Ingsoc".

(Of course, given the complete control of the Party over communications and the utter lack of free movement between different parts of Oceania, it would be quite conceivable for the Washington branch of the Ministry of Truth to churn out, in the Party-controlled Washington Post and New York Times, editorials praising the ideology of "Amersoc" - with nobody in Airstrip One knowing of it...)

The later history of Oceania seems modelled, in a rather one-to-one basis, on Soviet history. Oceania's 1950's are based on the Soviet 1920's, a time of civil war and revolutionary turmoil. Similarly, the 1960's are the 1930's, the time when Stalin/Big Brother, consolidated his power and smothered all opposition. (Stalin's Moscow Show Trials took place in 1936, Big Brother's equivalent in 1965). By the end of the 1960's, Big Brother has completed the process of turning the revolution into a pretext for creating a terror state.

By the year 1984, the citizens of Oceania had been separated into three distinct, isolated classes - the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the proles. However, in the view of Emmanuel Goldstein (which seems to be Orwell's) these are but new names for classes which have essentially existed throughout human history - though under the new dispensation they are more rigid and unchangeable than ever before.

On the global level, as "The Book" (supposedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein though in fact its descriptive part turns out to be endorsed by the Party) explains, the three powers eventually realized that continuous stalemate war was preferable to conquest, as war allowed them to spend their surplus labour manufacturing products that would be wasted during fighting, rather than improving people's standards of living (an impoverished population being easier to control than a rich one).

By the time the novel is set, the three powers have taken over most of the world, but a large area is still disputed between them. This area, containing the northern half of Africa, the Middle East, southern India, Indonesia, and northern Australia, provides slaves, or low-paid workers who are effectively slaves, for all three powers.

The powers rarely if ever fight on their own territory — Airstrip One (the official name of Great Britain) has become the target of Eurasian rocket bombs, but it is hinted that the Oceanian government itself may launch these weapons in order to convince the population that it is under constant attack.

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Ministries of Oceania

Oceania's four ministries are housed in huge pyramidal structures displaying the three slogans of the party (see below) on their sides.

The ministries' names are, of course, paradoxical — the Ministry of Peace engages in war, the Ministry of Plenty administers over shortages, the Ministry of Truth spreads propaganda and lies, and the Ministry of Love inflicts human misery for its own sake.

Nineteen Eighty-Four - The Party

In his novel Orwell created a world in which citizens have no right to a personal life or to personal thought. Leisure and other activities are controlled through a system of strict mores. Sexual pleasure is discouraged; sex is retained only for the purpose of procreation, although artificial insemination (ARTSEM) is more encouraged.

The mysterious head of government is the omniscient, omnipotent, beloved Big Brother, or "B.B.", usually displayed on posters with the slogan "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU". However, it is never quite clear whether Big Brother truly exists or not, or whether he is a fictitious leader created as a focus for the love of the Party which the Thought Police and others are there to engender. It is perfectly possible that the conflict between Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein is in fact a conflict either between two fictitious or dead leaders, whose true purpose is to personify both the Party and its opponents.

His political opponent is the hated Emmanuel Goldstein, a Party member who had been in league with Big Brother and the Party during the revolution. Goldstein is said to be a major part of the Brotherhood, a vast underground anti-Party fellowship. The reader never truly finds out whether the Brotherhood exists or not, but the implication is that Goldstein is either entirely fictitious or was eliminated long ago. Party members are expected to vilify Goldstein and the Brotherhood via the daily "two minutes hate." During this ritual citizens are expected to ridicule and shout at a video of the hated "bleating" Goldstein expounding his alternative philosophy (indeed, the image ultimately morphed into a bleating sheep).

The three slogans of the Party, on display everywhere, are:

• WAR IS PEACE
• FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
• IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Each of these is of course either contradictory or the opposite of what we normally believe, and in 1984 the world is in a state of constant war, no one is free, and everyone is ignorant. The slogans are analysed in Goldstein's book. Through their constant repetition, the terms become meaningless, and the slogans become axiomatic. This type of misuse of language, and the deliberate self-deception with which the citizens are encouraged to accept it, is called doublethink.

One essential consequence of doublethink is that the Party can rewrite history with impunity, for "The Party is never wrong." The ultimate aim of the Party is, according to O'Brien, to gain and retain full power over all the people of Oceania; he sums this up with perhaps the most distressing prophecy of the entire novel: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.

Perhaps the most frightening thing about the nature of power in Orwell's society is its irrefutability. The Ministry of Truth can literally erase an individual from existence, while the Ministry of Love and its Thought Police can break one's soul. As we close on the broken Winston, utterly devoted to Big Brother, we see that there is no hope for the individual, as the Party is so infinitely secure.

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Political geography

The world is controlled by three functionally similar totalitarian superstates engaged in perpetual war with each other: Oceania (ideology: Ingsoc or English Socialism), Eurasia (ideology: Neo-Bolshevism), and Eastasia (ideology: Death Worship or Obliteration of the Self). In terms of the political map of the late 1940s when the book was written, Oceania covers the greater part of the British Empire (or the Commonwealth), and the Americas, Eastasia corresponds to China, Japan, Korea, and northern India. Eurasia corresponds to the Soviet Union and Continental Europe. That Great Britain is in Oceania rather than in Eurasia is commented upon in the book as a historical anomaly. North Africa, the Middle East, southern India, and South East Asia form a disputed zone which is used as a battlefield and source of slaves by the three powers. Goldstein's book explains that the ideologies of the three states are basically the same, but it is imperative to keep the public ignorant of that. The population is led to believe that the other two ideologies are detestable. London, the novel's setting, is the capital of the Oceanian province of Airstrip One, the renamed Great Britain.

Nineteen Eighty-Four - The war

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is built around an endless war involving the three global superstates, with two allied powers fighting against the third. The allied states occasionally split with each other and new alliances are formed, but as Goldstein's book explains, this does not matter, as each superstate is so strong it cannot be defeated even when faced with the combined forces of the other two powers. The war rarely takes place on the territory of the three powers, and actual fighting is conducted in the disputed zone stretching from Morocco to Australia, and in the unpopulated Arctic wastes. Throughout the first half of the novel, Oceania is allied with Eastasia, and Oceania's forces are engaged with fighting Eurasian troops in northern Africa. Mid-way through the novel, the alliance breaks apart and Oceania, newly allied with Eurasia, begins a campaign against Eastasian forces in India. During "Hate Week" (a week of extreme focus on the evilness of Oceania's enemies), Oceania and Eurasia are enemies once again. The public is quite blind to the change, and when a speaker, mid-sentence, changes the enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia (speaking as if nothing had changed) the people are shocked as they notice all the flags and banners are wrong (they blame Goldstein and the Brotherhood) and quite effectively tear them down.

The book which Winston receives explains that the war cannot be won, and that its only purpose is to destroy the produce of human labour and maintain a constant death toll, thus keeping the totalitarian society intact. The book also details an Oceanian strategy to attack enemy cities with atomic-tipped rocket bombs prior to a full-scale invasion, but quickly dismisses this plan as both infeasible and contrary to the purpose of the war. Although, according to Goldstein's book, hundreds of atomic bombs were dropped on cities during the 1950s, they are no longer used by the three powers as they would upset the balance of power. Conventional military technology is little different from that used in the Second World War. Some advances have been made, such as replacing bomber aircraft with "rocket bombs", and using immense "floating fortresses" instead of battleships, but such advances appear to be few and far between. As the purpose of the war is to destroy manufactured products and thus keep the workers busy, obsolete and wasteful technology is deliberately used in order to perpetuate useless fighting.

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Living standards

By the year 1984, the society of Airstrip One lives in abject squalor and poverty. Hunger, disease, and filth have become the social norm. As a result of the civil war, atomic wars, and Eurasian rocket bombs, the urban areas of Airstrip One lie in ruins. When travelling around London, Winston is surrounded by rubble, decay, and the crumbling shells of wrecked buildings. Apart from the gargantuan bombproof Ministries, very little seems to have been done to rebuild London, and it is assumed that all towns and cities across Airstrip One are in the same desperate condition. Living standards for the population are generally very low — everything is in short supply and those goods that are available are of very poor quality. The Party claims that this is due to the immense sacrifices that must be made for the war effort, but in fact, living standards are deliberately kept low so as to keep people's minds on the most basic of needs and avoid questioning the Party.

The Inner Party, at the top level of Oceanian society, enjoys the highest standard of living. O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, lives in a relatively clean and comfortable apartment, and has access to a variety of quality foodstuffs such as wine, coffee, and sugar, none of which is available to the rest of the population. Members of the Inner Party also seem to be waited on by slaves captured from the disputed zone. Although the Inner Party enjoys the highest standard of living, Goldstein's book points out that, despite being at the top of society, their living standards are far, far below those of society's elite before the revolution. The proletariat, treated by the Party as animals, lives in squalor and poverty. They are kept sedate with vast quantities of cheap beer, widespread pornography, and a national lottery, but these do not mask the fact that their lives are dangerous and deprived — proletarian areas of the cities, for example, are ridden with disease and vermin. As Winston is a member of the Outer Party, we discover more about the Outer Party's living standards than any other group. Despite being the middle class of Oceanian society, the Outer Party's standard of living is very poor. Foodstuffs are low-quality or even synthetic, and the main alcoholic beverage available to the Outer Party — Victory Gin — is industrial-grade, whilst the cigarettes smoked by Outer Party members are of very shoddy quality. Smith, like many other members of the Outer Party, lives in a filthy one-room apartment with no comforts. All members of the Outer Party are required to wear scruffy overalls, and clothes in general seem to be of very low quality. Members of the Outer Party are subject to a rigid timetable, being awoken each morning by the telescreens, and are required to participate in group "leisure" activities. Apart from Victory Gin, everything from artificial foods to badly-made razor blades is in very short supply, and living standards as a whole appear to be declining further.

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Newspeak

Newspeak, the "official language" of Oceania, is extraordinary in that its vocabulary decreases every year; the state of Oceania sees no purpose in maintaining a complex language, and so Newspeak is a language dedicated to the "destruction of words". As the character Syme puts it:

The true goal of Newspeak is to take away the ability to conceptualize revolution adequately, or even to dissent, by removing words that could be used to that end. The elimination of thought-crime is the goal. For example, though a person could say, "BB is ungood"(Big brother is bad), this would be seen as totally ludicrous to any member of the party, and he would have no words to support his claim. Syme openly discusses this aim, this indiscretion being the presumed reason for his disappearance later on. Since the thought police had yet to develop a method of reading people's minds to catch dissent, Newspeak was created. (This concept has been examined — and widely disputed — in linguistics: see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.)

See also: The Complete Newspeak Dictionary (newspeakdictionary.com).

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Technology

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is first and foremost a political, not a technological, dystopia. The technological level of the society in the novel is mostly crude and less advanced than in the real 1980s. Apart from the telescreens, speech-recognizing typewriters, and novel-writing machines (the credibility of which is stated to be dubious), technology is barely more advanced than in wartime Britain. Orwell explains that, in the latter part of the twentieth century, technology has been driven by only two things: "war, and the desire to determine against his will what another human being is thinking."

Living standards are low and declining, with rationing and unpalatable ersatz products; in that regard, Orwell's vision is diametrically opposed to the technologically advanced hedonism of Brave New World.

None of the three blocs has much genuine interest in technological progress, since it could destabilise their grip on power. Some scientific advance is conducted in the field of interrogation, developing techniques against thought criminals through advanced torture, drugs, and hypnosis, but in other fields, technology is stagnant. Atomic weapons are avoided in the perpetual war, since the whole point of the conflict is to be indecisive and wasteful. The technologies employed are obsolete and deliberately wasteful. This stagnation is related to what is perhaps the most frightening aspect of the novel: for all their brutality, the regimes are not going to burn themselves out in strategically significant conquests or technological arms races. Rather, they have reached a stable equilibrium which could theoretically last forever.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki