Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia

[Sol Logos]

In Orwell's 1984, there's a perpetual war orchestrated between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four

I was wondering how close these regions are to a projected future. Given the potential for a stronger alliance between Russia and Europe, we could see a Eurasia, which would in turn create an Oceania. The remaining would then be an Eastasia of sorts.

While I reckon 1984 is a pivotal piece of work, it doesn't offer the reader a sense of freedom from the control system. As a side I always questioned whether Orwell's intent was aligned more with those that would benefit from "a boot stamping on the human face forever" - in other words, the cabal / elite / shadow government.

Its just conjecture but if 1984 is brought to us by the cabal, could we be seeing something like this in a more literal sense in our near future? I mean in terms of regions etc.

 

[Andrian]

Its just conjecture but if 1984 is brought to us by the cabal, could we be seeing something like this in a more literal sense in our near future? I mean in terms of regions etc.

I think we are heading in this direction and then there is this thread started by Lilou :Can the Banksters Take Down Russia? which i think resonates with your question. I hope that i din't make only noise.

 

[Mal7]

While I reckon 1984 is a pivotal piece of work, it doesn't offer the reader a sense of freedom from the control system. As a side I always questioned whether Orwell's intent was aligned more with those that would benefit from "a boot stamping on the human face forever" - in other words, the cabal / elite / shadow government.

The novel does end pessimistically with Winston Smith imprisoned, tortured by rats and confessing to his inquisitors. That is the dystopic world of the novel though. I think Orwell's actual intent was to have the opposite kind of world - one without thought control, doublespeak, and all-powerful totalitarian regimes in a permanent state of cold war with each other. I think the novel was written with polemical intent, with an optimistic hope of making people wake up and take notice of things like doublespeak, and the similarities between the real world and the world of the novel of 1984. Some of these similarities already existed in the world Orwell knew before and after the writing of the novel, and others have become even more apparent in the decades since Orwell's death.

One aspect of the three superpowers of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia in the novel was that they had the ability to rewrite history to serve their current purposes. So Oceania might have been allies with Eurasia and at war with Eastasia, and then next week Oceania is and, according to the history books, always has been at war with Eurasia and allies with Eastasia. This could be compared with the USA's changing stance towards different countries, allies at one moment, and roguish enemies the next.

I am currently reading Christopher Hitchens' book Why Orwell Matters (NY: Basic Books, 2001). Hitchens is very much an admirer of Orwell, and defends him in this book from those on both the Left and the Right who have misrepresented him, made various charges about him, or tried to claim him for their own agendas. At the same Hitchens avoids presenting Orwell as being some kind of saintly being without any contradictions or faults.

Here is a quote from Hitchens' book:

This is not a biography, but I sometimes feel as if George Orwell requires extricating from a pile of saccharine tablets and moist hankies; an object of sickly veneration and sentimental overpraise, employed to stultify schoolchildren with his insufferable rightness and purity. This kind of tribute is often of the Rouchefoucaldian type, suggestive of the payoff made by vice to virtue; and also of the tricks played by an uneasy conscience [. . .]
It would be too simple to say that the gentlemen mentioned above [other 'creative writers' with high political profiles during the 1930s and 1940s - George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley, Ernest Hemingway], along with many others in the business of mere journalism, were susceptible to the lures and enticements offered by power while Orwell was not. But it would be true to say that they could expect to see their work in print while he was never able to compose anything with the same confidence in having it published [. . .] He would appear never to have diluted his opinions in the hope of seeing his byline disseminated to the paying customers; this alone is a clue to why he still matters.

However, the image of the drudge in the garret, who takes his failure as a sign of his high principle, is an overfamiliar one, which Orwell lampooned with some thoroughness in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. His importance to the century just past, and therefore his status as a figure in history as well as in literature, derives from the extraordinary salience of the subjects he 'took on', and stayed with, and never abandoned.

- pages 4-6, Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens