PERSON #1: We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.
PERSON #2: No we haven’t.
PERSON #1: Prove it.
PERSON #2: Well, the newspaper says… damn… well, there are archival pictures of our troops fighting Eastasian troops… no, those are all gone, damn… well, it’s written down in the… no, nothing there. Crap.
<the next day>
PERSON #3: Hey, what was that Person #2 was saying the other day about us being at war with Eurasia.
PERSON #1: Who’s Person #2?
You make them scared. You show them what happens when they question. After a while they’ll just be wlaking in a kinda limbo willing to accept anything that is thrown at them. Some will actually believe it but others will just keep their head sown as they know that any non-conformist behaviour will get them killed.
What it is, is a question of omnipresent propaganda. The Party controls all information, everywhere, at all times. People were convinced that Eastasia was always the enemy because the Party scrutinously and carefully destroyed any mention, anywhere, of any sort, that it had ever been any other way. How can people disagree?
As for forecasting about the chocolate rations, hell, check out some real-life demand and production forecasting figures and how terrifyingly inaccurate they are. But in any case, it’s the same principle as before. Say that the chocolate ration is going to increase. Since you control all information about how much chocolate there is at any given time, then even if the ration is decreased you can claim it’s increased. And obviously any information about how much chocolate there was yesterday is spurious. All the proles have to go on about how much chocolate there is is the price, and nobody keeps track of what the price was yesterday, at least not consciously.
As for the final part about war is peace, the way it works is so.
If we make peace, then other nations will overrun us and obliterate us. Hence, we must make war so as to secure peace.
If people are free then they would not have the Party’s security, and as such they would be slaves to circumstances beyond their control.
The ignorance of the people protects them from doubt and from losing their faith and motivation in the Party. Hence, their ignorance is the Party’s strength.
It doesn’t have to be all of them. It just has to be enough of them; the government can deal with the rest.
All you have to do is put out a press release saying it’s going to be increased, and keep your department from leaking word that it will be decreased. Sounds pretty easy.
Most people already believe that you get peace by going to war from time to time. Is ‘war leads to peace’ any more self-contradictory than “War is Peace?”
This is really kind of a GD topic, I think. It’s hard to deal with these topics without pointing to either Nazi Germany, which is the basis for most of the country’s government, or other examples from politics.
Orwell was extrapolating from various contemporary regimes, including Stalin’s Soviet Union. On the “We have always been at war with …” meme, one example is the Hitler-Stalin pact, which was broken by Hitler. Immediately, the official line in all the communist parties controlled by the Soviets from Hitler being basically a good guy to Hitler being the incarnation of all evil.
There was a piece on 60 minutes recently about a concentration camp in Germany where they allowed the Red Cross in to show how nice the Jews were being treated. This was in the middle or toward the end of the war. They dressed everyone in nice clothes, had the kids put on a play, said nobody was being shipped out. The people in the camp already knew to keep their mouths shut. The Red Cross praised the Germans with how nice they were to the Jews. So, yeah, stuff like that happens.
Not to get all political, but AFAIK a significant percentage of the US population still believes that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq had a nuclear program and mobile weapons labs, that major combat operations in Iraq are over, etc. Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes once said (he may not have originated the quote but he’s who I remember saying it) “if you say something five times, it’s true.” If a government can convince a significant percentage of its population of the truth of various lies without benefit of a directly oppressive regime controlling all media, doing it under the auspices of one would be ridiculously easy.
However, would The Red Cross not have noticed how emaciated the prisoners were, the gas chambers, the smell of the place, the general atmosphere of fear which would have been all pervading.
There’s a special of CBSNews tonight about 1984
In reality Subterraneanus is talking about the fact that a lot of news isn’t actually news just propaganda. As has alrady been mentioned, just look at the number of people who still believe that Iraq was behind 9/11 etc.
Yeah. I’m a bit of a process nerd when it comes to things like this and while I was reading it in HS, I was sitting there wondering “Well… since there are people who have the job of picking up old editions and replacing them with the “corrected” version… how the hell does that work? Do they look in birdcages? What about the papers used to pack a shipping box? How do they even keep track of where every individual newspaper went after purchasing? What about the ones in the trash? The dumpster? The landfill? Are those replaced?”
Yeah, I know, “it’s an allegory”. It still doesn’t describe a functional society, however.
Okay, I’ll tell you what. If you want to hoard old newspapers in your flat, go right ahead. I suggest you keep them out of the telescreen’s field of view, though. Big Brother might not approve.
If the Official Record says that we’re at war with Eurasia then anything that contradicts the Official Record is a forgery, a fabrication generated by Emmanuel Goldstein to undermine the Party and our beloved Big Brother. We’ll discuss this further in Room 101.
But you’re assuming that they don’t want anyone to question their assertions. The point of the book is that they do. Most people are not going to go through the trash to check up on the government. The ones that do are the “final frontier” of governmental power.
During the 30s, there were pictures of Stalin that had been obviously retouched to remove people who had been discredited. The retouchings were so hamhanded, that they served as a warning to anyone who thought about demonstrating independence of opinion.
Heck, just look at election promises, and how often they are not held. Yet so many people want new promises when the next campaign takes place, to the point that a party that would not make promises would be sure to lose. People don’t necessarily want truth.
