Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was theright word. It had come into his head spontaneously.His body seemed to have not only the weakness of ajelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand hewould be able to see the light through it. All the blood and lymphhad been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work,leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. Allsensations seemed to be magnified. His overalls fretted hisshoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening andclosing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak.He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So hadeveryone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he hadliterally nothing to do, no Party work of any description, untiltomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in the hiding-placeand another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild afternoonsunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction of MrCharrington’s shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols, butirrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no danger ofanyone interfering with him. The heavy brief-case that he wascarrying bumped against his knee at each step, sending a tinglingsensation 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 notyet opened, nor even looked at.On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, thespeeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing oftrumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of thecaterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming ofguns — after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quiveringto its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up intosuch delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged onthe last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably havetorn them to pieces — at just this moment it had been announcedthat Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was atwar with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.There was, of course, no admission that any change had takenplace. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness andeverywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the centralLondon squares at the moment when it happened. It was night,and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit.The square was packed with several thousand people, including ablock of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of theSpies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, asmall lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large baldskull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing thecrowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, hegripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other,enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacinglyabove his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomedforth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations,lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lyingpropaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almostimpossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled overand the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-likeroaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. Themost savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speechhad been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when amessenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper wasslipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it withoutpausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or inthe content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names weredifferent. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippledthrough the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The nextmoment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners andposters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quitehalf of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! Theagents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotousinterlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn toshreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies ofactivity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamersthat fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutesit was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of themicrophone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawingat the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more,and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. TheHate continued exactly as before, except that the target had beenchanged.The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that thespeaker had switched from one line to the other actually inmidsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breakingthe syntax. But at the moment he had other things to preoccupyhim. It was during the moment of disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tappedhim on the shoulder and said, ‘Excuse me, I think you’ve droppedyour brief-case.’ He took the brief-case abstractedly, withoutspeaking. He knew that it would be days before he had anopportunity to look inside it. The instant that the demonstrationwas over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the timewas now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministryhad done likewise. The orders already issuing from the telescreen,recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary.Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been atwar with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of fiveyears was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of allkinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks,photographs — all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Althoughno directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of theDepartment intended that within one week no reference to the warwith Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain inexistence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more sobecause the processes that it involved could not be called by theirtrue names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteenhours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep.Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all overthe corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffeewheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Eachtime that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried toleave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled backsticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of papercylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half-burying thespeakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job wasalways 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 meanspurely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute onename for another, but any detailed report of events demanded careand imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one neededin transferring the war from one part of the world to another wasconsiderable.By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectaclesneeded wiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with somecrushing physical task, something which one had the right torefuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious toaccomplish. In so far as he had time to remember it, he was nottroubled by the fact that every word he murmured into thespeakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. Hewas as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgeryshould be perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the dribble ofcylinders slowed down. For as much as half an hour nothing cameout of the tube; then one more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhereat about the same time the work was easing off. A deep and as itwere secret sigh went through the Department. A mighty deed,which could never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was nowimpossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidencethat the war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred itwas unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry werefree till tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-casecontaining the book, which had remained between his feet while heworked and under his body while he slept, went home, shavedhimself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the water wasbarely more than tepid.With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed thestair above Mr Charrington’s shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty little oilstove and puton a pan of water for coffee. Julia would arrive presently:meanwhile there was the book. He sat down in the sluttisharmchair and undid the straps of the brief-case.A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name ortitle on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. Thepages were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though thebook had passed through many hands. The inscription on the titlepage ran:
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OFOLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISMBYEMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN
Winston began reading:
Chapter IIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of theNeolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world,the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided inmany ways, they have borne countless different names, and theirrelative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, havevaried from age to age: but the essential structure of society hasnever altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seeminglyirrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself,just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far itis pushed one way or the other.The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable . . .Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the factthat he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glanceover his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweetsummer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far awaythere floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself therewas no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeperinto the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, itwas eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book ofwhich one knows that one will ultimately read and re-read everyword, he opened it at a different place and found himself atChapter III. He went on reading:
Chapter IIIWAR IS PEACE
The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was anevent which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle ofthe twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia andof the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existingpowers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. Thethird, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decadeof confused fighting. The frontiers between the three super-statesare in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate accordingto the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines.Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the Europeanand Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceaniacomprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the BritishIsles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia,smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier,comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japaneseislands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia,and Tibet.In one combination or another, these three super-states arepermanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle thatit was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare oflimited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy oneanother, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided byany genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either theconduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become lessbloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria iscontinuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping,looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of wholepopulations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extendeven to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and,when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy,meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very smallnumbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causescomparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takesplace on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average mancan only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guardstrategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of civilization warmeans no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods,and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a fewscores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. Moreexactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in theirorder of importance. Motives which were already present to somesmall extent in the great wars of the early twentieth century havenow become dominant and are consciously recognized and actedupon.To understand the nature of the present war — for in spite ofthe regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the samewar — one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it tobe decisive. None of the three super-states could be definitivelyconquered even by the other two in combination. They are tooevenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable.Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width ofthe Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in amaterial sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment ofself-contained economies, in which production and consumptionare geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was amain cause of previous wars has come to an end, while thecompetition 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 obtainalmost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. Inso far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labourpower. Between the frontiers of the super-states, and notpermanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a roughquadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, andHong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population ofthe earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions,and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantlystruggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of thedisputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it isthe chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke oftreachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment.All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, andsome of them yield important vegetable products such as rubberwhich in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize bycomparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain abottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controlsequatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or SouthernIndia, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies ofscores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to thestatus of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, andare expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out morearmaments, to capture more territory, to control more labourpower, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, andso on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never reallymoves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and thenorthern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the IndianOcean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recapturedby Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line betweenEurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powerslay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largelyuninhabited and unexplored: but the balance of power alwaysremains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartlandof each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labourof the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary tothe world’s economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world,since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and theobject of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which towage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow thetempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did notexist, the structure of world society, and the process by which itmaintains itself, would not be essentially different.The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with theprinciples of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneouslyrecognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the InnerParty) is to use up the products of the machine without raising thegeneral standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenthcentury, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumptiongoods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when fewhuman beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviouslynot urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificialprocesses of destruction had been at work. The world of today is abare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existedbefore 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary futureto which the people of that period looked forward. In the earlytwentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich,leisured, orderly, and efficient — a glittering antiseptic world of glassand steel and snow-white concrete — was part of the consciousnessof nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assumethat they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partlybecause of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars andrevolutions, partly because scientific and technical progressdepended on the empirical habit of thought, which could notsurvive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is moreprimitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areashave advanced, and various devices, always in some way connectedwith warfare and police espionage, have been developed, butexperiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages ofthe atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fullyrepaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are stillthere. From the moment when the machine first made itsappearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need forhuman drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for humaninequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberatelyfor that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could beeliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being usedfor any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — byproducing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not todistribute — the machine did raise the living standards of theaverage human being very greatly over a period of about fifty yearsat the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentiethcenturies.But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealththreatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was thedestruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyoneworked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with abathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even anaeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important formof inequality would already have disappeared. If it once becamegeneral, wealth would confer no distinction.