Dialectic Journal 4

PAGE 230-231

"Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 231 or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two threehour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was always 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 means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable."

Even literature from 5 before then was considered obsolete. It's made known throughout the book that people don't know anything about the country's history, and they have no idea how people lived before. Keeping the citizens of Oceania in the dark is another way that the Party keeps its people under their control. They cannot complain about the way they're living because they have absolutely nothing to compare it to. If this is set in 1984 and they knew what was going on at the time that Orwell was writing the book, they would be motivated to try to take the Party down. They would also know about the actual effects of war. This brings us to what they're actually covering up in this quote. Prior to this quote they're going through Hate Week , and they're announce the fact that they're at war with Eastasia, but this isn't really news to them. In Oceania, always being at war seems to be the norm. In reality, or in current times, we don't really want to go to war. But, it's interesting how the Party has managed to convince its people that war is what allows them to have the lives that they have. This is similar to the fact that people say those who are in the army or military are fighting for our freedom, but there's nothing that really says "freedom" about war. So, what's really the difference between the perspective that people in Oceania have about war and what millions of people in the United States have about war? Another important thing in this quote to address is how hard people have to work to cover up literature that is considered obsolete. The people, Winston included, have to work 18 whole hours to do this. This explains how they're able to do it so fast and just erase everything, but it also seems to be a strategy. If you can keep people busy for that doing mediocre tasks, then they can't really devote time to, say, start a revolution. Quotes like these don't seem as important, but they're still very key to the big picture of the Party and Big Brother and, again, how they stay in power.