Audio Clip from the 1984 Movie 12min 44 sec.
http://www.apfn.net/audio/M001I060204134119-1984-CLIP.MP3
The book has three parts. This page has all three parts
listed as Chapters 1-24
1984
George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-four
http://www.apfn.org/APFN/1984.HTM
Chapter III War is Peace
The splitting up of the world into three great super-states
was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before
the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of
Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United
States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and
Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third,
Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another
decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three
super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others
they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in
general they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises
the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic
land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania
comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the
British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of
Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less
definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries
to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but
fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states are
permanently at war, and have been so for the past
twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate,
annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of
the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims
between combatants who are unable to destroy one another,
have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by
any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that
either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude
towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous.
On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in
all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the
slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to
slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even
to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal,
and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by
the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves
very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained
specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The
fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague
frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess
at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic
spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of civilization war
means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption
goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may
cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its
character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged
have changed in their order of importance. Motives which
were already present to some small extent in the great wars
of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and
are consciously recognized and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war—for in spite of
the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always
the same war—one must realize in the first place that it is
impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three
super-states could be definitively conquered even by the
other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and
their natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is
protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of
the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and
industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no
longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With
the establishment of self-contained economies, in which
production and consumption are geared to one another, the
scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars
has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials
is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of
the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost
all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries.
In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a
war for labour power. Between the frontiers of the
super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any
of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners
at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing
within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. It
is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions,
and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are
constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever
controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are
constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing
this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that
dictates the endless changes of alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals,
and some of them yield important vegetable products such as
rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to
synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all
they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever
power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the
Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian
Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or
hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.
The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly
to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to
conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the
race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory,
to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to
capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be
noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges
of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back
and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern
shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean
and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured
by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line
between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole
all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in
fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored: but the balance
of power always remains roughly even, and the territory
which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains
inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples
round the Equator is not really necessary to the world’s
economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since
whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the
object of waging a war is always to be in a better position
in which to wage another war. By their labour the slave
populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be
speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of
world society, and the process by which it maintains itself,
would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the
principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously
recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the
Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine
without raising the general standard of living. Ever since
the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do
with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in
industrial society. At present, when few human beings even
have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent,
and it might not have become so, even if no artificial
processes of destruction had been at work. The world of
today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the
world that existed before 1914, and still more so if
compared with the imaginary future to which the people of
that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century,
the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured,
orderly, and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of
glass and steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the
consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and
technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it
seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing.
This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment
caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly
because scientific and technical progress depended on the
empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a
strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more
primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain
backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in
some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have
been developed, but experiment and invention have largely
stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the
nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired.
Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still
there. From the moment when the machine first made its
appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need
for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for
human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used
deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt,
illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few
generations. And in fact, without being used for any such
purpose, but by a sort of automatic process—by producing
wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to
distribute—the machine did raise the living standards of the
average human being very greatly over a period of about
fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning
of the twentieth centuries.
CLICK FULL BOOK:
http://www.apfn.org/APFN/1984.HTM
George Orwell's 1984 • War is Peace • Freedom is Slavery •
Ignorance is Strength •
The Book On line
Nineteen Eighty-four
by George Orwell
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/
01/28/06 Mike Malloy re: Orwell's 1984
http://www.apfn.net/audio/6012822370801010-MALLOY.MP3
RADIO YOUR WAY:
http://www.apfn.net/POGO.HTM