George Orwell's 1984

George Orwell's 1984

Winston reads Chapter 3, War is Peace before he reads the first chapter. Chapter 3 explains the full meaning of the Party slogan after which it is named. The author reviews how the three superstates of the world came into being: The United States absorbed the British Empire to form Oceania, Russia absorbed Europe to form Eurasia, and "after a decade of confused fighting" Eastasia emerged as the third superstate; it comprises China, Japan and some other adjacent areas. In various combinations, these superstates have been at war for twenty-five years (no concrete years are mentioned, but since the present is supposed to be 1984, the implication is that the war began at the end of the fifties — and to make room for the "decade of confused fighting", Oceania and Eurasia must have come into being virtually immediately after Orwell published his novel in 1949).

The never-ending war between the superstates is seemingly pointless — "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". (As this chapter of The Book reveals, all three superstates are based on very much the same totalitarian ideology as Big Brother's Oceania.) However, the Party and its counterparts in the rival superstates have excellent reasons to keep the war going.

Again, the author reviews the (non-fictional) history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, how the use of machines in production raised "the living standards of the average human being very greatly". It was "clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared...hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy and disease could be eliminated within a few generations". However, since the Party wants to maintain a hierarchical society with itself on top, this real possibility of eliminating poverty and inequality is a deadly threat rather than something to be desired: "If leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would learn to think for themselves" — eventually sweeping away the oligarchy ruling them. "In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."

Since large-scale machine production could not be eliminated once invented, the Party must see to it that the products are destroyed before they can make "the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent".