Nope... the FULL SUGAR one. Why do you think Dubya and the US need the Iraqi oil?Meef Chaloin wrote:is that the one with all the aspartame and e-numbers?
To fill up the V-8 SUVs and F-150s to carry fat American asses to KFC!
(OT): IN YER FACE BUSH! cant buy the supreme court
To fill up the V-8 SUVs and F-150s to carry fat American asses to KFC!
Last edited by hambone1 on Sun Jul 02, 2006 11:19 am, edited 3 times in total.
-
Meef Chaloin
- Posts: 2164
- Joined: Thu Jul 21, 2005 10:09 pm
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/ ... orge/o79n/
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese ricespirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never --
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming -- in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief -- or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope -- that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard -- a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed -- and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army -- row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandyhaired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B! ...B-B!' -- over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second-a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of 'B-B! ...B-B!' always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened -- if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew-yes, he knew!-that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all -- perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls -- once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals -
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother --
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.
As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was standing outside.
'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It's got blocked up and-'
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor. ('Mrs' was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party -- you were supposed to call everyone 'comrade' -- but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Games impedimenta -- hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out -- lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books. On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which-one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen.
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today. And of course-'
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on helplessly.
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said. 'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with his hands, Tom is.'
Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms -- one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
'Have you got a spanner? -said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children -'
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.
'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!'
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
'They do get so noisy,' she said. 'They're disappointed because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take them. and Tom won't be back from work in time.'
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!' chanted the little girl, still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
'Goldstein!' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between lceland and the Faroe lslands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother -- it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak -- 'child hero' was the phrase generally used -- had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O'Brien again.
Years ago -- how long was it? Seven years it must be -- he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.' It was said very quietly, almost casually -- a statement, not a command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that he had seen O'Brien for the first time, nor could he remember when he had first identified the voice as O'Brien's. But at any rate the identification existed. It was O'Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure -- even after this morning's flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship. 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:
'Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash -'
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling. The telescreen -- perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate -- crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'. You were supposed to stand to attention. However, in his present position he was invisible.
'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.
Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet -- everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed -- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past -- for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone -- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings!
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an oldfashioned pen, what he had been writing -- and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.
Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the fifties.
At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place -- the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave -- but it was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the green waters which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.
He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women's hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.
The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed -- naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600 -- and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.
'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. 'Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!'
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! ...'
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister -- or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station.
There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old man loved -- a little granddaughter, perhaps had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:
'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I? That's what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers.
But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted Winston could not now remember.
Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) -- the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened -- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.
'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially.
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One- two! ...'
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in wh
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/ ... orge/o79n/
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese ricespirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never --
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming -- in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief -- or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope -- that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard -- a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed -- and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army -- row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandyhaired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B! ...B-B!' -- over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second-a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of 'B-B! ...B-B!' always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened -- if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew-yes, he knew!-that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all -- perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls -- once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals -
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother --
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.
As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was standing outside.
'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It's got blocked up and-'
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor. ('Mrs' was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party -- you were supposed to call everyone 'comrade' -- but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Games impedimenta -- hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out -- lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books. On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which-one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen.
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today. And of course-'
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on helplessly.
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said. 'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with his hands, Tom is.'
Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms -- one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
'Have you got a spanner? -said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children -'
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.
'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!'
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
'They do get so noisy,' she said. 'They're disappointed because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take them. and Tom won't be back from work in time.'
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!' chanted the little girl, still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
'Goldstein!' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between lceland and the Faroe lslands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother -- it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak -- 'child hero' was the phrase generally used -- had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O'Brien again.
Years ago -- how long was it? Seven years it must be -- he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.' It was said very quietly, almost casually -- a statement, not a command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that he had seen O'Brien for the first time, nor could he remember when he had first identified the voice as O'Brien's. But at any rate the identification existed. It was O'Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure -- even after this morning's flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship. 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:
'Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash -'
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling. The telescreen -- perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate -- crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'. You were supposed to stand to attention. However, in his present position he was invisible.
'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.
Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet -- everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed -- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past -- for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone -- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings!
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an oldfashioned pen, what he had been writing -- and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.
Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the fifties.
At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place -- the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave -- but it was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the green waters which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.
He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women's hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.
The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed -- naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600 -- and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.
'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. 'Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!'
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! ...'
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister -- or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station.
There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old man loved -- a little granddaughter, perhaps had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:
'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I? That's what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers.
But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted Winston could not now remember.
Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) -- the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened -- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.
'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially.
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One- two! ...'
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in wh
Last edited by Meef Chaloin on Sun Jul 02, 2006 11:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
-
Meef Chaloin
- Posts: 2164
- Joined: Thu Jul 21, 2005 10:09 pm
no one seems very worried about Israel's nuclear capabilities....Meef Chaloin wrote:stuns me to hear you talk about the truth of al queda but then buy in to the bullshit of iran having nuclear material.robtronik wrote:Secondly, I'm not worried about Bush pressing the button. Try the North Koreans or the budding Iranians or the terrorists who've purchased dirty nuclear material from the Russian mafia.
Ummm... We've exchanged text on this issue Forge, and I'm not from the US.forge wrote:
I have never met or chatted online with anybody anywhere who is not American who thinks Bush is anything less than terrifying.
There are some non-US citizens who actually think that the world is a better place because of the neo-conservative movement. Remember:
John Howard was elected.
Stephen Harper was elected.
The neo-conservative movement has provided me in my daily life with continued protection, stability, and economic opportunity while safeguarding my right to criticize them should I choose. The comparison of neo-conservativism with nazism is bullshit, considering that a true totalitarian regime would never tolerate all the anti-neocon rhetoric on the internet and in the "alternative" media. The fact that guys like you forge can express your negative opinions is evidence that the neo-cons in Australia, Canada and the US are anything but fascists.
-
Hatchets McGee
- Posts: 251
- Joined: Sat Jun 17, 2006 12:23 pm
-
astronmr20
- Posts: 119
- Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2005 3:27 pm
- Location: Charlotte, NC, US
Hatchets McGee wrote:I am.Meef Chaloin wrote: no one seems very worried about Israel's nuclear capabilities....
I haven't laughed this hard in ages.
Really nothing to say to that. Whatever. Stupid is as stupid does, I guess.
In any event, here is the question du jour: What does the US do with the gitmo prisoners, then? These are battle-hardened killers, murders, jihadists, etc. MORE THAN ONE of them that has been released has already gone back to europe or the middle east and KILLED PEOPLE. AGAIN. So if there is a regular "civilian" trial for them... then what? It is a tough question to answer for both sides, because the geneva convention allows for detaining combattants during times of war. Well, some people don't think we are at war. I for one, DO think we are at war. You may not, and that's fine. If you don't think we are at war, ask a jihadistst yourself.
So the question remains.. what do you suggest? I am not being fascecious, I just want to know what other people (Bush haters) think we should do with them.
Steve
Metric Halo 2882, Dual 1.8G5, Logic, Ableton, UAD-1, Volumaxes, Sta-level
Metric Halo 2882, Dual 1.8G5, Logic, Ableton, UAD-1, Volumaxes, Sta-level
-
Hatchets McGee
- Posts: 251
- Joined: Sat Jun 17, 2006 12:23 pm
-
Meef Chaloin
- Posts: 2164
- Joined: Thu Jul 21, 2005 10:09 pm
how do you know?astronmr20 wrote:These are battle-hardened killers, murders, jihadists, etc.
isnt that a contradiction in terms? Surely a jihadist would always be at war if he was a jihadist, purely from what the name implies?astronmr20 wrote:If you don't think we are at war, ask a jihadistst yourself.
There's certainly a war but its not on who you think it is.
astronmr20 wrote:Stupid is as stupid does, I guess.
absolutely
-
subterFUSE
- Posts: 1557
- Joined: Tue May 31, 2005 11:04 pm
- Location: Winter Park, FL
-
astronmr20
- Posts: 119
- Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2005 3:27 pm
- Location: Charlotte, NC, US
Meef,
That's my point.. the one about Jihadists at war; yes, that's what the name means. According to the "rules of engagement (ones these scum would never follow), we can hold enemy combattants during times of war. Again, my honest question is "what do we do with them?"
How do I know they are enemy combattants?
By that logic of thinking, what it sounds like you ae saying is that EVERY combattant on EVERY battlefield we are on should be captured and tried, THEN shot. Or are you worried that they are simply "political prisoners" swept away to the equivelent of a gulog? That theory has already been proven incorrect.
Again, I think the problem here is that perhaps people seem to have a different definition of "war," that's all.
And Meef,
What do you mean by the war is not on who I think it is?
That's my point.. the one about Jihadists at war; yes, that's what the name means. According to the "rules of engagement (ones these scum would never follow), we can hold enemy combattants during times of war. Again, my honest question is "what do we do with them?"
How do I know they are enemy combattants?
By that logic of thinking, what it sounds like you ae saying is that EVERY combattant on EVERY battlefield we are on should be captured and tried, THEN shot. Or are you worried that they are simply "political prisoners" swept away to the equivelent of a gulog? That theory has already been proven incorrect.
Again, I think the problem here is that perhaps people seem to have a different definition of "war," that's all.
And Meef,
What do you mean by the war is not on who I think it is?
Steve
Metric Halo 2882, Dual 1.8G5, Logic, Ableton, UAD-1, Volumaxes, Sta-level
Metric Halo 2882, Dual 1.8G5, Logic, Ableton, UAD-1, Volumaxes, Sta-level
-
subterFUSE
- Posts: 1557
- Joined: Tue May 31, 2005 11:04 pm
- Location: Winter Park, FL
I think what Meef is saying when he asks: "How do you know?"
is that he thinks the US is randomly going around and grabbing civilians and putting them in jail. He does not believe in "terrorism". He thinks this is a made-up label which the evil United States has invented in order to abuse foreigners.... He thinks that the only real "terrorists" are the leadership of the USA.... and that they should be taken down.
Of course, I think this is absurd... but I am aware that many people believe this is exactly the case. He is probably among those who believe that 9/11 was planned by George Bush himself. (You know, the blubbering fool who can't put together a coherent sentence unless the words all contain fewer than 5 letters) Apparently this is just a ruse, however..... he is, in fact, quite the mastermind. Under this guise he has presumably managed to pull off the largest scam of all time.... and get away with it. Nevermind the fact that this would have required hundreds if not thousands of people to complete.... and they would ALL have to remain silent. I mean, we know that they can't even keep small leaks from getting to the New York Times.... but whatever... I'm sure they could do it.
is that he thinks the US is randomly going around and grabbing civilians and putting them in jail. He does not believe in "terrorism". He thinks this is a made-up label which the evil United States has invented in order to abuse foreigners.... He thinks that the only real "terrorists" are the leadership of the USA.... and that they should be taken down.
Of course, I think this is absurd... but I am aware that many people believe this is exactly the case. He is probably among those who believe that 9/11 was planned by George Bush himself. (You know, the blubbering fool who can't put together a coherent sentence unless the words all contain fewer than 5 letters) Apparently this is just a ruse, however..... he is, in fact, quite the mastermind. Under this guise he has presumably managed to pull off the largest scam of all time.... and get away with it. Nevermind the fact that this would have required hundreds if not thousands of people to complete.... and they would ALL have to remain silent. I mean, we know that they can't even keep small leaks from getting to the New York Times.... but whatever... I'm sure they could do it.
Last edited by subterFUSE on Sun Jul 02, 2006 7:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
M-Tech D900T laptop, 17" WSXGA+ wide-screen, Intel Pentium 4 3.4 GHz HT (600 series) 2 MB cache, 2048 RAM (Dual Channel DDR2 PC4200 533 MHz), Dual hard drives: 80 gig x 2 = 160 gig SATA 5400 rpm (RAID 0 config)
Korg Zero 8 mixer/soundcard/MIDI
Korg Zero 8 mixer/soundcard/MIDI
I don't recall congress actually 'declaring' war...
---------
Going back to the heading of this thread, i think forge meant "buying the supreme court " by putting conservative shills in the positions of chief justice, and justice respectively, and by using their favors returned to balance the power of the judicial system in favor of a neo con agenda.
please elaborate... where is this so called proof? got link?Or are you worried that they are simply "political prisoners" swept away to the equivelent of a gulog? That theory has already been proven incorrect.
please, praytell, enlighten us with your indoctrination. Don't use any evidence to back up your statements.These are battle-hardened killers, murders, jihadists, etc.
---------
Going back to the heading of this thread, i think forge meant "buying the supreme court " by putting conservative shills in the positions of chief justice, and justice respectively, and by using their favors returned to balance the power of the judicial system in favor of a neo con agenda.
i think you're oversimplifying dramatically, sorry. And that, you're either with us or your against us mentality is really obtuse. Shirley you must understand that the rest of the world is really sick of being bullied into submission by the US government... WTO, numerous coup de tas on foreign sovereign soil, unilateral diplomacy, hypocrisy at its finest. There's only so much people can take without retaliation. To look at someone and label them a terrorist without delving into the roots is as unfortunate as grouping hippies, fags, peace or animals activists, etc, into that fold. Our times are so reminiscent of the 50's it's not even funny how much of a mirror image it is (rampant conservatism, labeling people communists -> terrorists at your discretion, the start of the cold war with no end in sight). These are all symptoms of the power and control of fear. Don't flag wave just to do. Have some of your own thoughts, and read between the lines.. seperate yourself from the sheeple..is that he thinks the US is randomly going around and grabbing civilians and putting them in jail. He does not believe in "terrorism". He thinks this is a made-up label which the evil United States has invented in order to abuse foreigners.... He thinks that the only real "terrorists" are the leadership of the USA.... and that they should be taken down.
I'm trying to figure out how countries/people that are mean in nature are the good guys, and the ones trying to stop it are the bad guys.
Saddam is in fact a murderer. He has been linked to thousands of murders. That is a fact. If you don't believe it, then you are simply telling yourself differently.
Osama bin dickhead is a murderer. I don't give a fuck what your religion says, you don't get to fly airplanes into building and kill people because you upset about something.
Have the isrealies used those nukes your so scared of? NO
Have we used nukes since ww II? NO
would saddam or bin laden use them? YES
If someone blows up a car is that good? NO
Those poor poor terrorists.........we treat them so badly..........are you kidding? What makes a person stick up for the most dangerous people in the world?
is having children wrap themselves with a bomb to go and blow up a store or other building ok FOR ANY REASON? NO
Here's one.........what percentage of people would like to see the berlin wall go back up?
I'm so glad that in the last week we have gone from being friends on this forum to being divided and enemies........
Saddam is in fact a murderer. He has been linked to thousands of murders. That is a fact. If you don't believe it, then you are simply telling yourself differently.
Osama bin dickhead is a murderer. I don't give a fuck what your religion says, you don't get to fly airplanes into building and kill people because you upset about something.
Have the isrealies used those nukes your so scared of? NO
Have we used nukes since ww II? NO
would saddam or bin laden use them? YES
If someone blows up a car is that good? NO
Those poor poor terrorists.........we treat them so badly..........are you kidding? What makes a person stick up for the most dangerous people in the world?
is having children wrap themselves with a bomb to go and blow up a store or other building ok FOR ANY REASON? NO
Here's one.........what percentage of people would like to see the berlin wall go back up?
I'm so glad that in the last week we have gone from being friends on this forum to being divided and enemies........
-
Hatchets McGee
- Posts: 251
- Joined: Sat Jun 17, 2006 12:23 pm
its funny how one side of the argument, cant or refuses to produce facts, evidence, sources...for any of their numerous & extreme statements.
heres a paper , for their benefit...:
War on the World
The United States Project for Global Hegemony
Foreword
The Workers' Party of Ireland joined with millions of people throughout the world in opposing US and British plans for a war of aggression against Iraq. This war took place at a time when the United States was simultaneously engaged in aggression in Latin America, actively seeking oil concessions in Asia and Africa and issuing threats against Cuba, the DPR of Korea, Iran, Syria and various other sovereign states throughout the world.
These provocations occur at a time when, through the process of globalisation, capitalism represents a renewed and continuing threat to the livelihood of millions and to the freedom of independent sovereign states to control their own political, social, economic and cultural affairs. Power has shifted to a US-centred unipolarity. The United States has a massive
military arsenal and proposes to develop further weapons of mass destruction. It is the undisguised ambition of Bush and his neo-conservative ideologues to establish unchallenged US global dominance.
These changed conditions may give rise to an understandable but nonetheless unjustifiable pessimism in the face of US economic and military might. But empires wax and wane. The war in Iraq has raised public consciousness of the pernicious role of the USA in world affairs.
There is hope for the future but that hope depends on a proper analysis of global conditions and the current trends in capitalism. It also relies on the expression of a clear political and ideological response that is capable of forming the basis of a programme of political action, not solely in opposition to US attempts at global hegemony, but also for the
transformation of society and the world.
G. Grainger
International Committee
The Workers’ Party of Ireland
Background to War: The Developing World and the Struggle for Progress
In 1964 at Geneva the developing countries formulated their demands for the international economic order. The concept of a new international economic order was officially launched at the IV Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries in Algiers in 1973 and was formulated in 1974 in the UN General Assembly Declaration on Establishing the New International Economic Order. At that time developing countries highlighted the wide gap between economically developed and under-developed countries.
They were acutely aware that national independence would remain incomplete unless economic independence was achieved. It was clear that developing countries had suffered myriad socio-economic difficulties arising from centuries of backwardness, colonial domination and exploitation by foreign monopolies. In short it was recognised that continuing under-development was a direct result of domination by the industrial capitalist world. While 70 per cent of the population of Asia, Africa and Latin America had only 30 per cent of the world income they were also the source of 80 per cent of the raw material and agricultural exports of the world. However, despite the richness of their resources, their share in the world industrial product was less than 7 per cent.
The assertion of economic independence by the developing countries took a number of forms, involving an insistence on national sovereignty over natural resources, raw materials and primary commodity exports. This battle was at its most acute when, in 1973, the Organisation of Petroleum Producing Countries [OPEC] took the decision to raise the price of crude oil. These countries also proclaimed the need to establish equity in international
economic and commercial relations between developing countries and the developed capitalist world. The task of socio-economic transformation in the developing countries required the democratisation and modernisation of education, the expansion and improvement of medical and health care facilities and the nationalisation of key industries and utilities to prevent the outflow of profit and to secure control over the economy. The creation of a viable state sector, the funding of education, health and social welfare facilities, the assertion of control over primary commodity exports, all effected a challenge to the existing world economic order and its political adherents.
The Rise of the New Right
The 1970s were also accompanied by political demands in the capitalist countries for fiscal restraint. There was a concerted attack on public spending and the trade union movement. Cutbacks in education, health and social spending were commonplace. In 1976 the British Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, approached the International Monetary Fund for a loan. Strict control over inflation and a marked reduction in public spending were among the conditions for assistance. In Ireland the 1973-77 coalition government of the Fine Gael and Labour parties presided over rising unemployment, cutbacks in public spending, sell-off of natural resources, and calls for wage restraint.
The providers of funds for loans to countries in crisis were not imbued with the spirit of international solidarity or humanity. They were strictly in the business of profit and increasingly loans were tied to ever more stringent conditions. This coincided with the growing influence of monetarism as a school of economic thought. Friedman and his acolytes argued that government intervention in the economy should be minimised and that a change in the money supply directly affected and determined production, employment and price levels. Friedman and Hayek were advocates of the unrestrained so-called "free market". Hayek, a long time enemy of socialism and state planning, believed in the erosion of trade union powers and the privatisation of the money supply. He considered that only "free markets" powered by self-interested individuals could produce a rational economy and intelligently organised social behaviour.
There was a strong distaste for equality and social justice implicit in this philosophy. Hayek declared: " ... a spontaneously working market, where prices act as guides to action, cannot take account of what people in any sense need or deserve, because it creates a distribution which nobody has designed, and something which has not been designed, a mere state of affairs as such, cannot be just or unjust. And the idea that things ought to be designed in a ‘just’ manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have...."
The monetarist philosophy was closely associated with the military coup in Chile, which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende with the backing of the United States and the CIA and with the subsequent violent repression, mass killing and military dictatorship. In 1979/1980 two important politicians of the new right came to power. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were both imbued with the philosophy of the monetarist economists and set about the task of putting the theory into practice. Although each adopted different monetarist approaches both rejected the concept of full employment and embarked on an attack on the concept of the welfare state. Both were in favour of privatisation, smashing the trade union movement, and massive cutbacks in public spending. The concepts of equality, social justice and the redistribution of wealth were
rejected.
The coming to power of Thatcher and Reagan reinforced the enthusiasm of the neo-conservatives for their world-view. Neo-liberalism became the new economic orthodoxy supplemented by a conservative social policy. In reality the ultimate economic performance was poor. Industrial infrastructure declined and collapsed. Workers wages stagnated. The US national debt increased. In Britain there was a massive transfer of assets from the public
to the private sector and control of key industries & national utilities - communication, power and transport - was placed in private hands. Taxation was reduced; dividend and foreign exchange controls removed; the trade union movement was subjected to ideological and physical assault; civil and political liberties were threatened; and inequality and poverty increased.
The uncompromising philosophy of neo-liberalism was promoted globally. By the early 1990s developing countries that had previously believed that their under-development was due to colonial domination and exploitation by foreign monopolies were being told that their problems were due to the insufficient practice of capitalism and that IMF loans were conditional upon adoption of the capitalist model of development and the rigorous imposition of structural adjustment programmes regardless of the hardship imposed on their people or the sacrifice of national sovereignty.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and many of the Socialist countries greatly assisted the spread of the doctrines of free market capitalism. Laissez faire economics now became the dominant global ideology marketed by some of the most powerful states in the world. Developing countries which had been able to trade with the Soviet Union and Socialist countries found their options diminished. There were fewer powerful states able to project and promote a different world view and to challenge the pervasive influence of global capitalism. Developing countries which had embarked on a programme of national independence and socio-economic transformation based on a socialist model of development no longer had the protection of powerful and influential friends. The international balance of power was dramatically changed and there was a shift to a US centred unipolarity. Nowhere was this more acutely demonstrated than the diplomatic battle to wage war on Iraq. Reasoned argument, a balanced contemplation of the issues and the evidence, international legal norms, humanitarian considerations and the objections of the majority of the world's states and peoples counted for naught. Civilisation gave way to barbarity. This is the vision of America's unipolar world.
United States Policy towards Iraq
On 8th February 1963, in the course of a fascist coup, the Ba'ath party came to power in Iraq. This coup was characterised by its extreme brutality towards the progressive and revolutionary forces which had played a leading role in the struggle against colonialism and monarchical rule and which had fought to defend the gains of the July 1958 Revolution. Since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958 the Iraqi Communist Party had always sought to consolidate and advance the gains made at that time. Despite repression and execution of members carried out by the Ba'athist government, the Communist Party of Iraq, in order to defend the interests of workers and national sovereignty took part in a national government under the Ba'athists. When the crisis was overcome the Ba'athists reneged on their pledge to work with the communists and other progressives. They concocted accusations that the communists were organising cells in the armed forces. The Ba'ath Party used this accusation as a pretext to arrest, torture and murder many communists.
It is now clear and well documented that the CIA was directly involved in these activities and supplied to the Iraqi regime the names and addresses of Iraqi communists and progressives for execution. As the US created, nurtured and supported Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban, so it was with Saddam Hussein.
By 1985 Iraq was the world's leading importer of arms. The British government and the US, both entirely cognisant of the nature of the Iraqi regime, were major suppliers of arms to Iraq. Neither government was bothered by the fact that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. Indeed both the US and Britain are long-standing supporters of murderous dictatorships across the globe. To this day both these governments support one of the most oppressive racist states in the Middle East, a state with a long record of invasion and occupation of neighbouring states, human rights violations and which possesses weapons of mass destruction, namely, Israel. Despite this and despite numerous UN resolutions the US has not demanded the disarmament of Israel. On the contrary, it has repeatedly used its veto to block any UN action against Israel even to the extent of blocking UN human rights
monitors.
The author Dilip Hiro has asked the question: "As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then"? He supplies the answer: "Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory". He points out that the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents during the Iraq-Iran war and that a US Defence Intelligence Agency Officer actually toured the battlefield with Iraqi officers where he saw zones marked off for chemical contamination.
Although the US continually refers to the use of poison gas against the Kurds at Halabja, it does not mention that when this atrocity was revealed Washington refused to condemn it. Even after this the US still did not stop the sale of American military equipment and technology to Iraq.
The 2003 Anglo-American war against Iraq was an unjust and unnecessary war. It had nothing to do with the war against terrorism, nor the protection of human rights. It certainly had nothing to do with the liberation of Iraq. The US Survey Team Report, issued on 2nd October 2003, confirms this. Months later, no weapons of mass destruction - the pretext for this illegal war - have been found. The peoples of the world were always aware that the US and Britain would go to war. The UN was never more than a fig leaf for them. The idea that UN approval was an important factor in their consideration is mere cant. The U N was only worthy of consideration if it was prepared to do the bidding of Bush and his fellow Crusader, Blair.
The headline in the leading article in the London Independent on Sunday on 16th March 2003 put the position succinctly: "America wants war, all the rest is window dressing".
There has never been any doubt that the US intended to attack and invade Iraq, with or without the sanction of the United Nations. In his State of the Union Address on 28th January 2003 Bush made a declaration of aggression against Iraq. In a speech riddled with rhetoric, false sentiment, jingoism and lies, Bush left it clear that a war was inevitable. The spineless toadying of Blair and his thoroughly disingenuous approach to the United Nations demonstrates contempt for diplomacy and international law.
After 12 years of rigorous sanctions and persistent UN inspections, we were still expected to believe that Saddam Hussein continued to possess massive amounts of chemical and biological weapons, without a shred of proof being produced. Is it not reasonable to expect that if the Iraqi government had such weapons of mass destruction they might have used them in an attempt to survive? Is it not unusual that with Iraq being overrun by foreign troops they are still unable to find these weapons? Is it not the reality that this was a pretext deliberately contrived and utilised to justify this imperialist war of plunder?
In an article published in The Guardian newspaper on 29th November 2001 Hans von Sponeck, UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq, from 1998 and Denis Halliday who held the same position from 1997 to 1998 wrote: "The UK and the US have deliberately pursued a policy of punishment since the Gulf War victory in 1991. The two governments have consistently opposed allowing the UN Security Council to carry out its mandated responsibilities to assess the impact of sanctions policies on civilians. We know about this first hand, because the governments repeatedly tried to prevent us from briefing the Security Council about it. The pitiful annual limits, of less than $170 per person, for humanitarian supplies, set by them during the first three years of the oil-for-food programme are unarguable evidence of such a policy ... Despite the severe inadequacies of the permitted oil revenues to meet the minimum needs of the Iraqi people, oil revenues earned from 1996 to 2000 were diverted by the UN Security Council, at the behest of the UK and US governments, to compensate outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. If this money had been made available to Iraqis, it could have saved many lives".
These policies led to the death of 5,000 - 6,000 children every month in Iraq - imposed by the very people who are now trying to convince the world that this war was for the benefit and welfare of the Iraqi people.
Wars for Oil
In 1917 Britain invaded Mesopotamia and occupied Iraq. Following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate over Mesopotamia in 1920. Resistance to British control was brutally suppressed. In 1921 the British Colonial Office created an artificial border across southern Iraq, carving out the nation of Kuwait.
From the outset, the US expressed close interest in Iraqi oil. In 1931 the Turkish Petroleum Company was reconstituted as the Iraq Petroleum Company in which British and US companies had a substantial interest. In 1941 Britain intervened militarily in Iraq to overthrow the government of Rashid Ali Gailani. In 1951 Dr Mohammed Mossadegh came to power in neighbouring Iran. He soon made clear his intention that Iran would exercise control over its oil resources and nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Within two years Mossadegh was deposed and the infamous Shah of Iran was installed in his place with the active support and assistance of the CIA. The US helped the Shah establish SAVAK, the notorious and brutal secret police.
The US is the largest importer of Iraqi oil and the seizure and control of Iraq's acknowledged 112 billion barrels of oil reserves and its 250 billion of potential reserves represents a significant coup. In doing so the US hopes to satisfy the requirements of its oil thirsty economy and to neutralise the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC].
An examination of the backgrounds and close links to the oil industry of the leading dramatis personae in the US administration is also enlightening. In 1995 Dick Cheney became CEO of Halliburton Company, a Dallas based oil giant. This company, in turn, owns Brown & Root Services, a company which specialises in providing logistics for the US military around the world.
George Bush, Senior, moved to Odessa, Texas in the late 1940s and he became involved in the oil industry. He recognised the implications of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This move had the effect of increasing Iraq's oil reserves from 11% to 20% of the world total. It was this factor, rather than the Iraqi incursion per se, which motivated the 1st Gulf War.
George Bush Jnr., followed his father into the oil business. He started his own oil and gas company in the 1970s, setting up Arbusto Energy. This venture was not a success and in 1983 it was saved from failure when it was purchased by Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation. Spectrum was, in turn, acquired by Harken Energy Corporation in 1986. Bush and his partners received more than $2m of Harken stock and he became a director of, and a paid consultant to, Harken. In June 1990 Bush sold two-thirds of his Harken stock for a 200% profit. Just one week later Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings.
The real motive for this war might therefore be gleaned by an examination of a report commissioned by James Baker, the former US Secretary of State under George Bush Snr and submitted to Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, in April 2001 - five months before the terrorist attack on September 11. This report makes interesting reading. It advocates a policy of using military force against an enemy such as Iraq to secure US access to, and control over, the oilfields of the Middle East. It suggested: "Iraq remains a destabilising influence to ... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". The document indicates that the US is facing the biggest energy crisis in its history and that the energy sector is in a critical condition. It notes that US allies in the Gulf have become less inclined to lower oil prices and that Iraqi oil reserves represent a major asset that can quickly add capacity to world oil markets and inject a more competitive tenor to oil trade. Finally, it recommends the use of military intervention as a means of resolving America’s energy crisis.
It is no coincidence that the United States is also implicated in the abortive attempts to overthrow the popular President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. The US buys approximately 1.5 million barrels of oil per day from Venezuela. Chavez is a popular President who has sought to introduce progressive constitutional, political, economic and social reform in his country to the benefit of its poor. Venezuela has also lobbied OPEC to introduce production cuts in order to boost oil prices. Chavez also attempted to forge links with other progressive forces in Latin America, including socialist Cuba. All this proved too much for the US and, in measures reminiscent of its deep involvement in the overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile and its repeated attempts to intervene in the internal affairs of Cuba, it has engaged with the rich and powerful in Venezuela in an attempt to overthrow the popular government of the marginalized and poor.
The Build-Up To War:
Leading Characters of the US New Right
Richard Perle was Chair of the Defence Policy Board, appointed by Donald Rumsfeld. In March 2003 Perle was exposed in the New Yorker magazine for his involvement in a group which invests in companies involved in defence and "homeland security" defence contracts and the vast profits to be made in the post-war reconstruction of Iraq. He is also a member of the Board of Advisors of the so-called Foundation for Defence of Democracy. This is a right-wing, pro-Israel group. He is a Board member of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs and has long-standing contacts with the Israeli government and Israeli business interests. He was previously a former assistant secretary of defence for international security policy in the Reagan administration and has been criticised for receiving substantial payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company. He has been a paid lobbyist both for Turkey and Israel. Perle has served as a director of Autonomy, a company carrying out work for the US Defence Department producing intelligence software and which has openly stated that war sells more software.
Perle is one of the major neo-conservative figures behind Bush. He has actively advocated a perpetual global war in pursuit of US interests and a revised UN Charter which would effectively endorse a "new set of security arrangements". It is Perle who pushed the spurious allegations of the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. He has also conceded, in effect, that the weapons of mass destruction argument was no more than a pretext, stating: "For many
months our senior administration officials were persuaded that we had to talk narrowly of weapons of mass destruction because regime change was not authorised under the United Nations Charter ... there would have been lawyers who will say that regime change has not been contemplated under the United Nations Charter. And the answer to that is that we need to revise the United Nations Charter."
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Defence Secretary, is another of the hawkish figures in the Bush regime. He has been an open advocate of the war against Iraq. At the University of Chicago he was the protégé of Albert Wohstetter, the conservative nuclear strategist. In the 1970s Wolfowitz was an opponent of detente with the Soviet Union. He is an unrepentant proponent of US unilateralism and war. These figures represent a dangerous threat to
international peace and security and international law.
In an article in the Sunday Business Post on 1st December 2002 the author and journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote: "The National Security Strategy delivered by President Bush to Congress on 21st September had a briefer formulation: 'a distinctively American internationalism'. The stage is set for pre-emptive interventions, far more blatant than the old CIA-organised coups of earlier decades. ... The basic aims of American international strategy have changed barely at all since the end of the Second World War.The difference is in the degree of frankness with which the brute realities of world domination are disclosed".
The Workers' Party of Ireland joined the tens of millions of people worldwide in condemning and opposing this Anglo-American war of aggression against Iraq. The US unleashed this war in an attempt to re-colonise and establish direct US control over Iraq and its natural resources; to bolster and protect the repressive Zionist state of Israel; to consolidate its influence in the region and to further its quest for unchallenged global hegemony.
Manufacturing the Evidence
In January 2001, the outgoing Secretary of Defence, William Powell, told Bush: "Iraq no longer poses a military threat to its neighbours". Scott Ritter - a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and a self-declared Republican and Bush voter in 2000, has clearly stated that Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities were destroyed in the years after the Gulf War and that since that time Iraq had been prevented from obtaining the ingredients needed to make new weapons.
The US and Britain have long insisted that they have solid evidence that Iraq has restocked its chemical and biological weapons. They say that this has been revealed by intelligence from spy satellites, spies and defectors. Where is it? Why have expert and experienced inspectors not found these weapons in 12 years of inspections? Why did the inspection teams under the control of Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei find no such evidence? Why have the US and Britain not produced the evidence they say they have? Why did the British government need to rely on a 12 year old plagiarised and doctored post-graduate thesis and why did the US government need to rely on a satellite photograph, which has been effectively rubbished by Hans Blix, if there was genuine evidence that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction? And why, most importantly, has no such evidence since been found? To suggest that there is a genuine basis for the belief that Iraq had a stockpile of chemical, biological weapons and a nuclear capacity flies in the face of powerful evidence to the contrary (evidence reinforced by the interim report of the US Survey Team) and must cast serious doubt on the motives of those forces which argued for a war against Iraq and their accomplices.
Equally spurious was the charge that Saddam Hussein supported al-Qaeda. Even the most cursory understanding of the Ba'ath ideology and the broadly secular nature of Iraqi society exposes the falsity of this proposition.
In his State of the Union Address Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who "with great potential wealth will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States". Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves and it was the deeply repugnant Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State from 1973 to 1976 and latterly appointed by Bush to head an inquiry into the events of September 11, who said: "Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs".
The 2003 War in Perspective: The War on Iraq and Principles of International Law
The United States of America, armed with the planet's most numerous and devastating weapons of mass destruction, together with the compliant Tony Blair, contrived and initiated a war of aggression against Iraq, contrary to the wishes of the United Nations and the peoples of the world. The mightiest superpower on earth, having failed to bully, bribe and buy the votes of sovereign nations on the Security Council to secure their compliance, launched a war against some of the poorest people in the world - a people already devastated by international sanctions, the 1991 Gulf war, constant bombardment and the murderous tyranny of the Iraqi regime. Having demonstrated contempt for the UN the US embarked on yet another war in pursuit of global hegemony.
There can be no equivocation about this war. It was illegal, unnecessary and entirely contrary to the norms and principles of international law. The warmongers failed to rally broad international support for their enterprise. The United Nations and the peoples of the world were against this war.
The development and growth of international law has been based primarily on the establishment and preservation of world peace. The fundamental objective of the United Nations is the maintenance of international peace and security.
The idea of prohibiting wars of aggression was set out in a number of documents of the League of Nations, including the draft Treaty on Mutual Assistance adopted by the League's Assembly in 1923 and the Declaration on Aggressive Wars adopted by the Assembly in 1927 in which aggressive war was described as "an international crime".
The Treaty of Paris [the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 27th August 1928] was the first multilateral international treaty which contained the principle of prohibiting aggressive wars. This principle was further developed in the Charters of the Nuremberg and Tokyo International Military Tribunals. On 11th December 1946, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the United Nations General Assembly confirmed that the principles contained in the UN Charter and the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal are principles of existing international law.
The U.N. Charter stipulates that the primary objective of the United Nations is the maintenance of international peace and security. Article 2(4) of the Charter also provides that all members of the United Nations shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. This provision is now regarded as a fundamental principle of customary international law and, as such, binding on the international community.
The 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States made clear that no state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state.
The principle was further elaborated in the Declaration on Principles of International Law adopted in 1970, which states that a war of aggression constitutes a crime against the peace. This Declaration prohibits, inter alia, any action constituting a threat to use force or the direct or indirect use of force against another state and further prohibits the military occupation of the territory of a state as a result of the use of force in violation of the UN Charter. The 1970 Declaration recalled the duty of States to refrain from military, political, economic or other form of coercion aimed against the political independence or territorial integrity of any state - an approach further endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly when it approved the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States in 1974.
The United Nations was, as set out in its Charter, explicitly created to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war". By virtue of the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations a state or states may use armed force against other states in two cases only:
1. When participating in measures taken in compliance with resolutions of the Security Council for preventing or avoiding the threat to peace and suppressing acts of aggression or other violations of peace - These are measures taken by the United Nations Organisation.
2. When executing the right of individual or collective self-defence in the event of an armed attack. It is only in these second circumstances that a state, whether acting alone or in an alliance with other states, can act against the aggressor without the express sanction of the UN.
When a state takes it upon itself to displace a regime of which it disapproves by force of arms this is clearly aggression prohibited by international law. Accordingly, any attack by the United States or its allies against Iraq which was not expressly sanctioned by the United Nations and which was not on foot of an armed attack by Iraq on the United States, and, which was, in any event, unnecessary and disproportionate, is in violation of the established norms and principles of international law and constitutes an international criminal act. By permitting and facilitating the US war machine the Irish government was complicit in that crime. It is not in doubt that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. The United States was well
placed to know.
The USA and the Violation of Human Rights
In late March 2003 the US State Department released its latest global report on human rights. With that special hypocrisy and shameless arrogance reserved for an imperial power the US condemned "stress and duress" interrogation techniques by others as a form of torture. It makes no reference to the al-Queda suspects killed in US custody in Afghanistan nor to those held indefinitely, without trial and without access to lawyers, at Guantanamo Bay.
The hypocrisy is further typified by the manner in which the US treated Iraqi prisoners of war. They complained and alleged a breach of the Geneva Convention when they suggested that the Iraqi authorities paraded US prisoners of war but did precisely the same thing themselves. They began to dream up devices to circumvent the Geneva Convention and to ship Iraqi prisoners to Guantanamo Bay where they would be deprived of human rights and access to any form of justice as have the al-Queda and Taliban prisoners before them. As George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian on 25.3.'03: "Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that ‘it is against the Geneva Convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them’...This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life".
At a time when the US professes to espouse democratic rights throughout the world, bearing in mind the dubious circumstances of the last US Presidential election, its blatant disregard for democratic rights and elections in Yugoslavia and its attempt to undermine the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, the US characterisation of the Pakistani government which operates as a military dictatorship and which banned key parties from participation in the 2002 elections as "reasonably representative" would be remarkable were it not for the fact that the US has a long and disreputable history of supporting brutal, repressive regimes across the globe. This report also states, without the slightest hint of irony, that there were no political killings during the year by Israel.
The Media and the War
The Iraq war once again highlighted the role and power of the media, and the Murdoch-controlled media in particular, in pursuing the overtly right-wing, neo-liberal and expansionist policies of the US government and US big business. The central importance of the Murdoch media in preparing a population for war by parroting Bush/Blair speak on 'weapons of mass destruction'; by attacking the 'failure of the UN' to deal with Saddam Hussein; by undermining and belittling the UN weapons inspectors; by gratuitously attacking the French and German presidents and people; by demonising not only Saddam Hussein but the entire Iraqi people, cannot be forgotten. That many other media organisations, including the BBC, willingly and deliberately acted as conduits for government propaganda is to their eternal shame.
The cosy relationship of the media and the military is further demonstrated by the practice of 'embedding' journalists. This practice, where journalists get to live out some John Wayne fantasy by being in the front line with 'our boys' further erodes any public confidence in mainstream media. (Can we imagine the government and establishment outcry if journalists were to be 'embedded' in industrial strikes, factory sit-ins, or anti-globalisation demonstrations?) The other side of the media coin was the attempted news blackout both inside Iraq and from Iraq by the US/UK military and the physical and murderous US attacks on al-Jazeera.
The mainstream media also, for the most part, sought to sanitise the war. There were, however, notable journalistic exceptions. On 27 March 2003 the Irish Times recorded: "There were body parts and pools of blood on the pavements of ash-Shaab, a working class suburb of north-west Baghdad yesterday, after a US aircraft is believed to have fired two missiles into a busy shopping and residential area". Two nights earlier US aircraft had attacked the residential area of A'Adhamiya.
Robert Fisk, one of the most impartial and experienced journalists working in the Middle East, reported that even the walls in the Al Noor hospital were shaking as the survivors of the market slaughter struggled for survival. The US has targeted journalists for death as it did in the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia. It is noteworthy that of all the journalists/ camera crew/ photographers killed in Iraq by the US that none were 'embedded'.
The Post-War World
Post-War Iraq
And what of post-war Iraq? Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence, proposed the establishment of a US protectorate in Iraq similar to the imperial mandate exercised by Britain after its invasion and occupation of Iraq in 1917. These proposals fail to take into account the religious, ethnic, social and political diversity of the Iraqi people. They fail to understand popular resentment of occupation and imperial control.
Iraq is devastated, not only by the current war, but by the effects of the Iraq-Iran war, the 1st Gulf war and 12 years of crippling sanctions. The civilian infrastructure, power stations, water treatment plants, hospitals, schools require vital and immediate investment. The US Agency for International Development has drawn up plans for reconstruction. The vast majority of the contracts will go to US firms. One of the main beneficiaries will be the Texan oil services company Halliburton, previously headed by Dick Cheney, US Vice President.
The US has ordered 17 banks in the US to hand over $1.7bn in frozen Iraqi government assets and has requested eight other countries to seize some $600 million and hand it to the US. The White House has threatened to prevent foreign banks doing business in the US if those banks refuse to turn over these funds to American control. Ultimately, the US will turn a tidy profit on this war.
On 9th April 2003 Cheney spoke from the White House. He spoke of his sorrow at the deaths of the Anglo-American troops "in defence of our country'. He expressed his condolences to the embedded journalists killed in the conflict, and he told the world that the oil fields had been protected. There was not one word of regret for the innocent men, women and children maimed and killed by the Anglo-American murder machine.
The military-industrial complex that has already profited from the destruction of this war, as it does from all wars, will profit further from re-stocking the arsenals of death. Their corporate friends will profit from the reconstruction. As usual the US will reap the benefits and the rest of the world, including the impoverished Iraqi people, will pay. Under these plans the United Nations will be reduced to a glorified aid agency while the US remains firmly in control. The Bush regime has made that clear. The National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, stated: "It would only be natural to expect that ... having given life and blood to liberate Iraq, the coalition would have the leading role".
The US proposes a period of direct US colonial administration while they put in place a US client, an Iraqi Hamid Karzai - a man synonymous with the US government’s ambition to install compliant subordinates throughout the globe. The world does not hear much of Afghanistan now after the US war against that impoverished state. We do not yet know the full extent of the Afghan casualties or the damage to its infrastructure. We do, however, know that there is no democracy in Afghanistan, that there is still a fundamentalist anti-woman clique in control instead of the secular society which existed before the US installed the Taliban regime. We know also that the Americans have their pipeline - the real reason for that war.
The US and the UN
There is another major cause for concern - the blatant attempt by the US not merely to sideline, but to destroy, the authority of the United Nations.
The Workers' Party of Ireland, in our document entitled "Internationalism in the 21st
Century" adopted by the Annual Delegate Conference dated 18th November 2000,
stated: "Fundamental to the objectives of the United Nations was a recognition of the sovereignty and independence of the member states...It also became clear that the concept of self-determination was not confined to political independence but also included the rights of peoples to determine their own political structures; to use, exploit and proclaim permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth, resources and economic activities and to govern the control of foreign investment within each national jurisdiction...The United Nations Organisation has played a major role in developing international law, fostering peace and co-operation among peoples and countries and establishing constructive mechanisms for the resolution and settlement of disputes... The voice of small nations and liberation movements expressed in the United Nations General Assembly eloquently proclaiming the goals and principles of self-determination, decolonisation, independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the non-use of force in international relations and respect for the UN Charter and principles of international law came into conflict with the plans and strategies of the neo-colonialist and imperialist powers...As far back as the Reagan administration the United States engaged in an attempt to sabotage and downgrade the role of the United Nations and international agencies...Simultaneously, the US was defaulting in its subscription
payments to the United Nations."
The agreement at Bretton Woods which established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund created a global monetary system which tied national currencies to the US dollar and provided the basis for US domination and control. While technically the IMF and World Bank were regarded as specialised agencies of the UN, in practice the power was and is held by the world's richest nations, particularly the US. Every President of the World Bank has been from the US. Instead of assisting and promoting development the World Bank and the IMF became bailiffs for America's largest banks, chasing poor developing countries caught in a web of spiralling debt. Through the use of structural adjustment programmes, which imposed severe restrictions on countries seeking further loans, these institutions placed private corporate interests in control of whole national economies.
The Unipolar World
The economic global power realignment consolidated by the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation under the leadership of the US has been underpinned by the vast military power of America. Economic globalisation, the corporatisation of the world order, the subordination of national economies and natural resources to US interests, the continuing indebtedness of the developing world and inequitable trade relations, the increasing spread of US military bases worldwide daily reinforces the reality of US power.
Power over issues of education, health and welfare, over matters of life and death, is transferred from sovereign nations to multinational corporations and power elites in the unrepresentative and undemocratic Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group.
Charles Derber in his book People Before Profit writes: "There are now more than 45,000 corporations worldwide, with 300,000 affiliates. But the top 200 global companies ... dominate the world economy and are the heart of global business. ... Their profits exploded 224 per cent between 1983 and 1997, a far faster rate than the 144 per cent growth in the world economy as a whole during the same period. Their sales are bigger than the combined economies of 180 of the 190 countries of the world, and eighteen times the combined income of the world's 1.2 billion poorest people. The sales of the top 200 account for more than 25% of the entire output of the world economy."
In September 2000, President Fidel Castro, following his participation in the United Nations "Millennium Summit" addressed a crowd at New York"s Riverside Church. He told the crowd: "... humanity is about to begin the 21st century in extremely difficult and extremely troubling conditions ... in more than 100 countries, the per capita income is lower than it was 15 years ago. In the Third World there are 1.3 billion poor people. In other words, one out of every three inhabitants lives in poverty. More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World. ... More than 840 million adults are still illiterate and the vast majority live in the Third World. ... Life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa is barely 48 years. That is 30 years less than in the developed countries. ... A full 99.5 per cent of all maternal deaths take place in the Third World ... More than 11 million boys and girls under five years of age die every year in the Third World from diseases that are largely preventable. That means more than 30,000 every day, 21 every minute ... And all of this is happening at a time when, throughout the world 800 billion dollars are put into military spending, 400 billion are spent on narcotic drugs, and a trillion dollars are invested in commercial advertising. By the end of 1998, the Third World's external debt amounted to 2.4 trillion dollars, that is, four times the total in 1982 ... Between 1982 and 1998, these countries paid over 3.4 trillion dollars for debt servicing, in other words, almost a trillion dollars more than the current debt. Far from decreasing, the debt grew by 45 per cent in those 16 years ... Despite the neo-liberal discourse on the opportunities created by the open-trading system the underdeveloped countries, with 85 per cent of the world's population, accounted for only 34.6 per cent of the world exports. That is less than in 1953, despite the fact that their population has more than doubled. ... Money is no longer used primarily in investments for the production of goods; it is used in currencies, stocks and financial derivatives in the desperate pursuit of more money, directly, through the most sophisticated computers and software and not through productive processes as was historically the case. This is what the much trumpeted and infamous process of neo-liberal globalization has brought about".
As Derber points out, between 1960 and 1980 average per capita growth globally grew 83 per cent, while in the period of neo-liberal globalisation it fell to 33 per cent and the gap in personal income between the developed and developing worlds tripled between 1960 and 1993.
In his book, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, Philip Bobbitt, who served as a senior advisor at the White House and held several senior posts at the National Security Council writes: "The United States can benefit ... because we are well placed to thrive in a globalised political economy. Indeed a globalised society of market states plays into and enhances American strength to such a degree that it worries some states that the United States will become so dominant that no other state will be able to catch up with it. In many quarters, globalisation is so deeply identified with the United States that it is anxiously perceived as an American cultural export".
The Socialist Response
The social democrats cannot address the issues raised by globalisation nor the US quest for global hegemony since they have effectively endorsed the neo-liberal project and refuse to challenge the existing political and social order by taking the means of production into public ownership. The leadership of the social democratic parties are content to work with and for the interests of capital.
We must recognise that the greater the move towards globalisation, the greater the need for an international socialist movement capable of articulating a comprehensive response. This will involve a detailed analysis and constant evaluation of the situation in each country and region; an assessment of the possibilities arising from the problems and contradictions inherent in global capitalism and an ability to make the necessary adjustments to deal with circumstances as these develop, taking into account the information acquired from the experience of the working class, new forms of social struggle and changing processes of capital accumulation.
The threat to the social and economic conditions of workers and small farmers and the escalation of imperialist war has sharpened the ideological struggle and provides new conditions for building class consciousness and preparing workers for political action.
The fight for democracy, the battle to establish control over the institutions and events which control the day-to-day lives of working people remains an inseparable part of the struggle for socialism. It is, as Lenin counselled, the task of Communist and Workers' parties to be ahead of all in raising, accentuating and solving every general democratic question.
What is to be Done?
It is ever more important to reassert the dynamic of socialism as a viable alternative world vision. It is time for a co-ordinated ideological counter-attack. It is the duty of the Communist and Workers' parties to proclaim again the vitality of Marxism as a critical theory; an unparalleled critique of capitalism and exploitation; an analytical device for the investigation and evaluation of current political, social and economic conditions and, above all, a programme for political action and the transformation of society and the world.
Ideological struggle is not conducted in the abstract. It is necessary to analyse and assess current developments in capitalism; to enunciate a reasoned response and to relate this critique to the actual conditions and struggles experienced by working people and the real possibilities for change. We must repeatedly make clear that neo-liberalism and laissez faire capitalism, far from encouraging growth and development as is suggested by its proponents, hinder progress and innovation and impoverish the peoples of the world.
Socialist internationalism remains a fundamental plank in the programmatic platform of Communist and Workers' parties. This principle involves active solidarity with the socialist countries, with genuine liberation and social movements, with fraternal parties and progressives throughout the world and is an enduring weapon in the struggle against imperialism and the battle for peace, democracy, national independence and socialism.
In a world that is increasingly globalised in terms of communication it becomes necessary to articulate a global socialist presence. This will entail the co-ordination of day-to-day struggles; the exchange of information; regular and productive conferences and meetings and theoretical seminars on issues of mutual concern and the practical organisation of research and organised political activity.
It is the task of the Communist and Workers' parties to develop a programme and strategy, taking into account the conditions in each region, which promotes and advances the interests and demands of the working class and which provides a basis for united mobilization around common campaigns. It was Lenin who made clear the responsibility of the revolutionary party: " ... the real task of a revolutionary socialist party: [is] not to draw up plans for refashioning society, not to preach to the capitalists and their hangers-on about improving the lot of the workers, not to hatch conspiracies, but to organise the class struggle of the proletariat and to lead this struggle, the ultimate aim of which is the conquest of political
power by the proletariat and the organisation of a socialist society." [V.I
Lenin: "Our Programme"; Collected Works, Vol. 4, pp 210-211].
The Workers’ Party of Ireland
heres a paper , for their benefit...:
War on the World
The United States Project for Global Hegemony
Foreword
The Workers' Party of Ireland joined with millions of people throughout the world in opposing US and British plans for a war of aggression against Iraq. This war took place at a time when the United States was simultaneously engaged in aggression in Latin America, actively seeking oil concessions in Asia and Africa and issuing threats against Cuba, the DPR of Korea, Iran, Syria and various other sovereign states throughout the world.
These provocations occur at a time when, through the process of globalisation, capitalism represents a renewed and continuing threat to the livelihood of millions and to the freedom of independent sovereign states to control their own political, social, economic and cultural affairs. Power has shifted to a US-centred unipolarity. The United States has a massive
military arsenal and proposes to develop further weapons of mass destruction. It is the undisguised ambition of Bush and his neo-conservative ideologues to establish unchallenged US global dominance.
These changed conditions may give rise to an understandable but nonetheless unjustifiable pessimism in the face of US economic and military might. But empires wax and wane. The war in Iraq has raised public consciousness of the pernicious role of the USA in world affairs.
There is hope for the future but that hope depends on a proper analysis of global conditions and the current trends in capitalism. It also relies on the expression of a clear political and ideological response that is capable of forming the basis of a programme of political action, not solely in opposition to US attempts at global hegemony, but also for the
transformation of society and the world.
G. Grainger
International Committee
The Workers’ Party of Ireland
Background to War: The Developing World and the Struggle for Progress
In 1964 at Geneva the developing countries formulated their demands for the international economic order. The concept of a new international economic order was officially launched at the IV Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries in Algiers in 1973 and was formulated in 1974 in the UN General Assembly Declaration on Establishing the New International Economic Order. At that time developing countries highlighted the wide gap between economically developed and under-developed countries.
They were acutely aware that national independence would remain incomplete unless economic independence was achieved. It was clear that developing countries had suffered myriad socio-economic difficulties arising from centuries of backwardness, colonial domination and exploitation by foreign monopolies. In short it was recognised that continuing under-development was a direct result of domination by the industrial capitalist world. While 70 per cent of the population of Asia, Africa and Latin America had only 30 per cent of the world income they were also the source of 80 per cent of the raw material and agricultural exports of the world. However, despite the richness of their resources, their share in the world industrial product was less than 7 per cent.
The assertion of economic independence by the developing countries took a number of forms, involving an insistence on national sovereignty over natural resources, raw materials and primary commodity exports. This battle was at its most acute when, in 1973, the Organisation of Petroleum Producing Countries [OPEC] took the decision to raise the price of crude oil. These countries also proclaimed the need to establish equity in international
economic and commercial relations between developing countries and the developed capitalist world. The task of socio-economic transformation in the developing countries required the democratisation and modernisation of education, the expansion and improvement of medical and health care facilities and the nationalisation of key industries and utilities to prevent the outflow of profit and to secure control over the economy. The creation of a viable state sector, the funding of education, health and social welfare facilities, the assertion of control over primary commodity exports, all effected a challenge to the existing world economic order and its political adherents.
The Rise of the New Right
The 1970s were also accompanied by political demands in the capitalist countries for fiscal restraint. There was a concerted attack on public spending and the trade union movement. Cutbacks in education, health and social spending were commonplace. In 1976 the British Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, approached the International Monetary Fund for a loan. Strict control over inflation and a marked reduction in public spending were among the conditions for assistance. In Ireland the 1973-77 coalition government of the Fine Gael and Labour parties presided over rising unemployment, cutbacks in public spending, sell-off of natural resources, and calls for wage restraint.
The providers of funds for loans to countries in crisis were not imbued with the spirit of international solidarity or humanity. They were strictly in the business of profit and increasingly loans were tied to ever more stringent conditions. This coincided with the growing influence of monetarism as a school of economic thought. Friedman and his acolytes argued that government intervention in the economy should be minimised and that a change in the money supply directly affected and determined production, employment and price levels. Friedman and Hayek were advocates of the unrestrained so-called "free market". Hayek, a long time enemy of socialism and state planning, believed in the erosion of trade union powers and the privatisation of the money supply. He considered that only "free markets" powered by self-interested individuals could produce a rational economy and intelligently organised social behaviour.
There was a strong distaste for equality and social justice implicit in this philosophy. Hayek declared: " ... a spontaneously working market, where prices act as guides to action, cannot take account of what people in any sense need or deserve, because it creates a distribution which nobody has designed, and something which has not been designed, a mere state of affairs as such, cannot be just or unjust. And the idea that things ought to be designed in a ‘just’ manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have...."
The monetarist philosophy was closely associated with the military coup in Chile, which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende with the backing of the United States and the CIA and with the subsequent violent repression, mass killing and military dictatorship. In 1979/1980 two important politicians of the new right came to power. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were both imbued with the philosophy of the monetarist economists and set about the task of putting the theory into practice. Although each adopted different monetarist approaches both rejected the concept of full employment and embarked on an attack on the concept of the welfare state. Both were in favour of privatisation, smashing the trade union movement, and massive cutbacks in public spending. The concepts of equality, social justice and the redistribution of wealth were
rejected.
The coming to power of Thatcher and Reagan reinforced the enthusiasm of the neo-conservatives for their world-view. Neo-liberalism became the new economic orthodoxy supplemented by a conservative social policy. In reality the ultimate economic performance was poor. Industrial infrastructure declined and collapsed. Workers wages stagnated. The US national debt increased. In Britain there was a massive transfer of assets from the public
to the private sector and control of key industries & national utilities - communication, power and transport - was placed in private hands. Taxation was reduced; dividend and foreign exchange controls removed; the trade union movement was subjected to ideological and physical assault; civil and political liberties were threatened; and inequality and poverty increased.
The uncompromising philosophy of neo-liberalism was promoted globally. By the early 1990s developing countries that had previously believed that their under-development was due to colonial domination and exploitation by foreign monopolies were being told that their problems were due to the insufficient practice of capitalism and that IMF loans were conditional upon adoption of the capitalist model of development and the rigorous imposition of structural adjustment programmes regardless of the hardship imposed on their people or the sacrifice of national sovereignty.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and many of the Socialist countries greatly assisted the spread of the doctrines of free market capitalism. Laissez faire economics now became the dominant global ideology marketed by some of the most powerful states in the world. Developing countries which had been able to trade with the Soviet Union and Socialist countries found their options diminished. There were fewer powerful states able to project and promote a different world view and to challenge the pervasive influence of global capitalism. Developing countries which had embarked on a programme of national independence and socio-economic transformation based on a socialist model of development no longer had the protection of powerful and influential friends. The international balance of power was dramatically changed and there was a shift to a US centred unipolarity. Nowhere was this more acutely demonstrated than the diplomatic battle to wage war on Iraq. Reasoned argument, a balanced contemplation of the issues and the evidence, international legal norms, humanitarian considerations and the objections of the majority of the world's states and peoples counted for naught. Civilisation gave way to barbarity. This is the vision of America's unipolar world.
United States Policy towards Iraq
On 8th February 1963, in the course of a fascist coup, the Ba'ath party came to power in Iraq. This coup was characterised by its extreme brutality towards the progressive and revolutionary forces which had played a leading role in the struggle against colonialism and monarchical rule and which had fought to defend the gains of the July 1958 Revolution. Since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958 the Iraqi Communist Party had always sought to consolidate and advance the gains made at that time. Despite repression and execution of members carried out by the Ba'athist government, the Communist Party of Iraq, in order to defend the interests of workers and national sovereignty took part in a national government under the Ba'athists. When the crisis was overcome the Ba'athists reneged on their pledge to work with the communists and other progressives. They concocted accusations that the communists were organising cells in the armed forces. The Ba'ath Party used this accusation as a pretext to arrest, torture and murder many communists.
It is now clear and well documented that the CIA was directly involved in these activities and supplied to the Iraqi regime the names and addresses of Iraqi communists and progressives for execution. As the US created, nurtured and supported Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban, so it was with Saddam Hussein.
By 1985 Iraq was the world's leading importer of arms. The British government and the US, both entirely cognisant of the nature of the Iraqi regime, were major suppliers of arms to Iraq. Neither government was bothered by the fact that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. Indeed both the US and Britain are long-standing supporters of murderous dictatorships across the globe. To this day both these governments support one of the most oppressive racist states in the Middle East, a state with a long record of invasion and occupation of neighbouring states, human rights violations and which possesses weapons of mass destruction, namely, Israel. Despite this and despite numerous UN resolutions the US has not demanded the disarmament of Israel. On the contrary, it has repeatedly used its veto to block any UN action against Israel even to the extent of blocking UN human rights
monitors.
The author Dilip Hiro has asked the question: "As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then"? He supplies the answer: "Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory". He points out that the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents during the Iraq-Iran war and that a US Defence Intelligence Agency Officer actually toured the battlefield with Iraqi officers where he saw zones marked off for chemical contamination.
Although the US continually refers to the use of poison gas against the Kurds at Halabja, it does not mention that when this atrocity was revealed Washington refused to condemn it. Even after this the US still did not stop the sale of American military equipment and technology to Iraq.
The 2003 Anglo-American war against Iraq was an unjust and unnecessary war. It had nothing to do with the war against terrorism, nor the protection of human rights. It certainly had nothing to do with the liberation of Iraq. The US Survey Team Report, issued on 2nd October 2003, confirms this. Months later, no weapons of mass destruction - the pretext for this illegal war - have been found. The peoples of the world were always aware that the US and Britain would go to war. The UN was never more than a fig leaf for them. The idea that UN approval was an important factor in their consideration is mere cant. The U N was only worthy of consideration if it was prepared to do the bidding of Bush and his fellow Crusader, Blair.
The headline in the leading article in the London Independent on Sunday on 16th March 2003 put the position succinctly: "America wants war, all the rest is window dressing".
There has never been any doubt that the US intended to attack and invade Iraq, with or without the sanction of the United Nations. In his State of the Union Address on 28th January 2003 Bush made a declaration of aggression against Iraq. In a speech riddled with rhetoric, false sentiment, jingoism and lies, Bush left it clear that a war was inevitable. The spineless toadying of Blair and his thoroughly disingenuous approach to the United Nations demonstrates contempt for diplomacy and international law.
After 12 years of rigorous sanctions and persistent UN inspections, we were still expected to believe that Saddam Hussein continued to possess massive amounts of chemical and biological weapons, without a shred of proof being produced. Is it not reasonable to expect that if the Iraqi government had such weapons of mass destruction they might have used them in an attempt to survive? Is it not unusual that with Iraq being overrun by foreign troops they are still unable to find these weapons? Is it not the reality that this was a pretext deliberately contrived and utilised to justify this imperialist war of plunder?
In an article published in The Guardian newspaper on 29th November 2001 Hans von Sponeck, UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq, from 1998 and Denis Halliday who held the same position from 1997 to 1998 wrote: "The UK and the US have deliberately pursued a policy of punishment since the Gulf War victory in 1991. The two governments have consistently opposed allowing the UN Security Council to carry out its mandated responsibilities to assess the impact of sanctions policies on civilians. We know about this first hand, because the governments repeatedly tried to prevent us from briefing the Security Council about it. The pitiful annual limits, of less than $170 per person, for humanitarian supplies, set by them during the first three years of the oil-for-food programme are unarguable evidence of such a policy ... Despite the severe inadequacies of the permitted oil revenues to meet the minimum needs of the Iraqi people, oil revenues earned from 1996 to 2000 were diverted by the UN Security Council, at the behest of the UK and US governments, to compensate outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. If this money had been made available to Iraqis, it could have saved many lives".
These policies led to the death of 5,000 - 6,000 children every month in Iraq - imposed by the very people who are now trying to convince the world that this war was for the benefit and welfare of the Iraqi people.
Wars for Oil
In 1917 Britain invaded Mesopotamia and occupied Iraq. Following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate over Mesopotamia in 1920. Resistance to British control was brutally suppressed. In 1921 the British Colonial Office created an artificial border across southern Iraq, carving out the nation of Kuwait.
From the outset, the US expressed close interest in Iraqi oil. In 1931 the Turkish Petroleum Company was reconstituted as the Iraq Petroleum Company in which British and US companies had a substantial interest. In 1941 Britain intervened militarily in Iraq to overthrow the government of Rashid Ali Gailani. In 1951 Dr Mohammed Mossadegh came to power in neighbouring Iran. He soon made clear his intention that Iran would exercise control over its oil resources and nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Within two years Mossadegh was deposed and the infamous Shah of Iran was installed in his place with the active support and assistance of the CIA. The US helped the Shah establish SAVAK, the notorious and brutal secret police.
The US is the largest importer of Iraqi oil and the seizure and control of Iraq's acknowledged 112 billion barrels of oil reserves and its 250 billion of potential reserves represents a significant coup. In doing so the US hopes to satisfy the requirements of its oil thirsty economy and to neutralise the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC].
An examination of the backgrounds and close links to the oil industry of the leading dramatis personae in the US administration is also enlightening. In 1995 Dick Cheney became CEO of Halliburton Company, a Dallas based oil giant. This company, in turn, owns Brown & Root Services, a company which specialises in providing logistics for the US military around the world.
George Bush, Senior, moved to Odessa, Texas in the late 1940s and he became involved in the oil industry. He recognised the implications of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This move had the effect of increasing Iraq's oil reserves from 11% to 20% of the world total. It was this factor, rather than the Iraqi incursion per se, which motivated the 1st Gulf War.
George Bush Jnr., followed his father into the oil business. He started his own oil and gas company in the 1970s, setting up Arbusto Energy. This venture was not a success and in 1983 it was saved from failure when it was purchased by Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation. Spectrum was, in turn, acquired by Harken Energy Corporation in 1986. Bush and his partners received more than $2m of Harken stock and he became a director of, and a paid consultant to, Harken. In June 1990 Bush sold two-thirds of his Harken stock for a 200% profit. Just one week later Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings.
The real motive for this war might therefore be gleaned by an examination of a report commissioned by James Baker, the former US Secretary of State under George Bush Snr and submitted to Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, in April 2001 - five months before the terrorist attack on September 11. This report makes interesting reading. It advocates a policy of using military force against an enemy such as Iraq to secure US access to, and control over, the oilfields of the Middle East. It suggested: "Iraq remains a destabilising influence to ... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". The document indicates that the US is facing the biggest energy crisis in its history and that the energy sector is in a critical condition. It notes that US allies in the Gulf have become less inclined to lower oil prices and that Iraqi oil reserves represent a major asset that can quickly add capacity to world oil markets and inject a more competitive tenor to oil trade. Finally, it recommends the use of military intervention as a means of resolving America’s energy crisis.
It is no coincidence that the United States is also implicated in the abortive attempts to overthrow the popular President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. The US buys approximately 1.5 million barrels of oil per day from Venezuela. Chavez is a popular President who has sought to introduce progressive constitutional, political, economic and social reform in his country to the benefit of its poor. Venezuela has also lobbied OPEC to introduce production cuts in order to boost oil prices. Chavez also attempted to forge links with other progressive forces in Latin America, including socialist Cuba. All this proved too much for the US and, in measures reminiscent of its deep involvement in the overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile and its repeated attempts to intervene in the internal affairs of Cuba, it has engaged with the rich and powerful in Venezuela in an attempt to overthrow the popular government of the marginalized and poor.
The Build-Up To War:
Leading Characters of the US New Right
Richard Perle was Chair of the Defence Policy Board, appointed by Donald Rumsfeld. In March 2003 Perle was exposed in the New Yorker magazine for his involvement in a group which invests in companies involved in defence and "homeland security" defence contracts and the vast profits to be made in the post-war reconstruction of Iraq. He is also a member of the Board of Advisors of the so-called Foundation for Defence of Democracy. This is a right-wing, pro-Israel group. He is a Board member of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs and has long-standing contacts with the Israeli government and Israeli business interests. He was previously a former assistant secretary of defence for international security policy in the Reagan administration and has been criticised for receiving substantial payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company. He has been a paid lobbyist both for Turkey and Israel. Perle has served as a director of Autonomy, a company carrying out work for the US Defence Department producing intelligence software and which has openly stated that war sells more software.
Perle is one of the major neo-conservative figures behind Bush. He has actively advocated a perpetual global war in pursuit of US interests and a revised UN Charter which would effectively endorse a "new set of security arrangements". It is Perle who pushed the spurious allegations of the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. He has also conceded, in effect, that the weapons of mass destruction argument was no more than a pretext, stating: "For many
months our senior administration officials were persuaded that we had to talk narrowly of weapons of mass destruction because regime change was not authorised under the United Nations Charter ... there would have been lawyers who will say that regime change has not been contemplated under the United Nations Charter. And the answer to that is that we need to revise the United Nations Charter."
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Defence Secretary, is another of the hawkish figures in the Bush regime. He has been an open advocate of the war against Iraq. At the University of Chicago he was the protégé of Albert Wohstetter, the conservative nuclear strategist. In the 1970s Wolfowitz was an opponent of detente with the Soviet Union. He is an unrepentant proponent of US unilateralism and war. These figures represent a dangerous threat to
international peace and security and international law.
In an article in the Sunday Business Post on 1st December 2002 the author and journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote: "The National Security Strategy delivered by President Bush to Congress on 21st September had a briefer formulation: 'a distinctively American internationalism'. The stage is set for pre-emptive interventions, far more blatant than the old CIA-organised coups of earlier decades. ... The basic aims of American international strategy have changed barely at all since the end of the Second World War.The difference is in the degree of frankness with which the brute realities of world domination are disclosed".
The Workers' Party of Ireland joined the tens of millions of people worldwide in condemning and opposing this Anglo-American war of aggression against Iraq. The US unleashed this war in an attempt to re-colonise and establish direct US control over Iraq and its natural resources; to bolster and protect the repressive Zionist state of Israel; to consolidate its influence in the region and to further its quest for unchallenged global hegemony.
Manufacturing the Evidence
In January 2001, the outgoing Secretary of Defence, William Powell, told Bush: "Iraq no longer poses a military threat to its neighbours". Scott Ritter - a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and a self-declared Republican and Bush voter in 2000, has clearly stated that Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities were destroyed in the years after the Gulf War and that since that time Iraq had been prevented from obtaining the ingredients needed to make new weapons.
The US and Britain have long insisted that they have solid evidence that Iraq has restocked its chemical and biological weapons. They say that this has been revealed by intelligence from spy satellites, spies and defectors. Where is it? Why have expert and experienced inspectors not found these weapons in 12 years of inspections? Why did the inspection teams under the control of Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei find no such evidence? Why have the US and Britain not produced the evidence they say they have? Why did the British government need to rely on a 12 year old plagiarised and doctored post-graduate thesis and why did the US government need to rely on a satellite photograph, which has been effectively rubbished by Hans Blix, if there was genuine evidence that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction? And why, most importantly, has no such evidence since been found? To suggest that there is a genuine basis for the belief that Iraq had a stockpile of chemical, biological weapons and a nuclear capacity flies in the face of powerful evidence to the contrary (evidence reinforced by the interim report of the US Survey Team) and must cast serious doubt on the motives of those forces which argued for a war against Iraq and their accomplices.
Equally spurious was the charge that Saddam Hussein supported al-Qaeda. Even the most cursory understanding of the Ba'ath ideology and the broadly secular nature of Iraqi society exposes the falsity of this proposition.
In his State of the Union Address Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who "with great potential wealth will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States". Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves and it was the deeply repugnant Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State from 1973 to 1976 and latterly appointed by Bush to head an inquiry into the events of September 11, who said: "Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs".
The 2003 War in Perspective: The War on Iraq and Principles of International Law
The United States of America, armed with the planet's most numerous and devastating weapons of mass destruction, together with the compliant Tony Blair, contrived and initiated a war of aggression against Iraq, contrary to the wishes of the United Nations and the peoples of the world. The mightiest superpower on earth, having failed to bully, bribe and buy the votes of sovereign nations on the Security Council to secure their compliance, launched a war against some of the poorest people in the world - a people already devastated by international sanctions, the 1991 Gulf war, constant bombardment and the murderous tyranny of the Iraqi regime. Having demonstrated contempt for the UN the US embarked on yet another war in pursuit of global hegemony.
There can be no equivocation about this war. It was illegal, unnecessary and entirely contrary to the norms and principles of international law. The warmongers failed to rally broad international support for their enterprise. The United Nations and the peoples of the world were against this war.
The development and growth of international law has been based primarily on the establishment and preservation of world peace. The fundamental objective of the United Nations is the maintenance of international peace and security.
The idea of prohibiting wars of aggression was set out in a number of documents of the League of Nations, including the draft Treaty on Mutual Assistance adopted by the League's Assembly in 1923 and the Declaration on Aggressive Wars adopted by the Assembly in 1927 in which aggressive war was described as "an international crime".
The Treaty of Paris [the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 27th August 1928] was the first multilateral international treaty which contained the principle of prohibiting aggressive wars. This principle was further developed in the Charters of the Nuremberg and Tokyo International Military Tribunals. On 11th December 1946, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the United Nations General Assembly confirmed that the principles contained in the UN Charter and the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal are principles of existing international law.
The U.N. Charter stipulates that the primary objective of the United Nations is the maintenance of international peace and security. Article 2(4) of the Charter also provides that all members of the United Nations shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. This provision is now regarded as a fundamental principle of customary international law and, as such, binding on the international community.
The 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States made clear that no state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state.
The principle was further elaborated in the Declaration on Principles of International Law adopted in 1970, which states that a war of aggression constitutes a crime against the peace. This Declaration prohibits, inter alia, any action constituting a threat to use force or the direct or indirect use of force against another state and further prohibits the military occupation of the territory of a state as a result of the use of force in violation of the UN Charter. The 1970 Declaration recalled the duty of States to refrain from military, political, economic or other form of coercion aimed against the political independence or territorial integrity of any state - an approach further endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly when it approved the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States in 1974.
The United Nations was, as set out in its Charter, explicitly created to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war". By virtue of the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations a state or states may use armed force against other states in two cases only:
1. When participating in measures taken in compliance with resolutions of the Security Council for preventing or avoiding the threat to peace and suppressing acts of aggression or other violations of peace - These are measures taken by the United Nations Organisation.
2. When executing the right of individual or collective self-defence in the event of an armed attack. It is only in these second circumstances that a state, whether acting alone or in an alliance with other states, can act against the aggressor without the express sanction of the UN.
When a state takes it upon itself to displace a regime of which it disapproves by force of arms this is clearly aggression prohibited by international law. Accordingly, any attack by the United States or its allies against Iraq which was not expressly sanctioned by the United Nations and which was not on foot of an armed attack by Iraq on the United States, and, which was, in any event, unnecessary and disproportionate, is in violation of the established norms and principles of international law and constitutes an international criminal act. By permitting and facilitating the US war machine the Irish government was complicit in that crime. It is not in doubt that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. The United States was well
placed to know.
The USA and the Violation of Human Rights
In late March 2003 the US State Department released its latest global report on human rights. With that special hypocrisy and shameless arrogance reserved for an imperial power the US condemned "stress and duress" interrogation techniques by others as a form of torture. It makes no reference to the al-Queda suspects killed in US custody in Afghanistan nor to those held indefinitely, without trial and without access to lawyers, at Guantanamo Bay.
The hypocrisy is further typified by the manner in which the US treated Iraqi prisoners of war. They complained and alleged a breach of the Geneva Convention when they suggested that the Iraqi authorities paraded US prisoners of war but did precisely the same thing themselves. They began to dream up devices to circumvent the Geneva Convention and to ship Iraqi prisoners to Guantanamo Bay where they would be deprived of human rights and access to any form of justice as have the al-Queda and Taliban prisoners before them. As George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian on 25.3.'03: "Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that ‘it is against the Geneva Convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them’...This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life".
At a time when the US professes to espouse democratic rights throughout the world, bearing in mind the dubious circumstances of the last US Presidential election, its blatant disregard for democratic rights and elections in Yugoslavia and its attempt to undermine the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, the US characterisation of the Pakistani government which operates as a military dictatorship and which banned key parties from participation in the 2002 elections as "reasonably representative" would be remarkable were it not for the fact that the US has a long and disreputable history of supporting brutal, repressive regimes across the globe. This report also states, without the slightest hint of irony, that there were no political killings during the year by Israel.
The Media and the War
The Iraq war once again highlighted the role and power of the media, and the Murdoch-controlled media in particular, in pursuing the overtly right-wing, neo-liberal and expansionist policies of the US government and US big business. The central importance of the Murdoch media in preparing a population for war by parroting Bush/Blair speak on 'weapons of mass destruction'; by attacking the 'failure of the UN' to deal with Saddam Hussein; by undermining and belittling the UN weapons inspectors; by gratuitously attacking the French and German presidents and people; by demonising not only Saddam Hussein but the entire Iraqi people, cannot be forgotten. That many other media organisations, including the BBC, willingly and deliberately acted as conduits for government propaganda is to their eternal shame.
The cosy relationship of the media and the military is further demonstrated by the practice of 'embedding' journalists. This practice, where journalists get to live out some John Wayne fantasy by being in the front line with 'our boys' further erodes any public confidence in mainstream media. (Can we imagine the government and establishment outcry if journalists were to be 'embedded' in industrial strikes, factory sit-ins, or anti-globalisation demonstrations?) The other side of the media coin was the attempted news blackout both inside Iraq and from Iraq by the US/UK military and the physical and murderous US attacks on al-Jazeera.
The mainstream media also, for the most part, sought to sanitise the war. There were, however, notable journalistic exceptions. On 27 March 2003 the Irish Times recorded: "There were body parts and pools of blood on the pavements of ash-Shaab, a working class suburb of north-west Baghdad yesterday, after a US aircraft is believed to have fired two missiles into a busy shopping and residential area". Two nights earlier US aircraft had attacked the residential area of A'Adhamiya.
Robert Fisk, one of the most impartial and experienced journalists working in the Middle East, reported that even the walls in the Al Noor hospital were shaking as the survivors of the market slaughter struggled for survival. The US has targeted journalists for death as it did in the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia. It is noteworthy that of all the journalists/ camera crew/ photographers killed in Iraq by the US that none were 'embedded'.
The Post-War World
Post-War Iraq
And what of post-war Iraq? Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence, proposed the establishment of a US protectorate in Iraq similar to the imperial mandate exercised by Britain after its invasion and occupation of Iraq in 1917. These proposals fail to take into account the religious, ethnic, social and political diversity of the Iraqi people. They fail to understand popular resentment of occupation and imperial control.
Iraq is devastated, not only by the current war, but by the effects of the Iraq-Iran war, the 1st Gulf war and 12 years of crippling sanctions. The civilian infrastructure, power stations, water treatment plants, hospitals, schools require vital and immediate investment. The US Agency for International Development has drawn up plans for reconstruction. The vast majority of the contracts will go to US firms. One of the main beneficiaries will be the Texan oil services company Halliburton, previously headed by Dick Cheney, US Vice President.
The US has ordered 17 banks in the US to hand over $1.7bn in frozen Iraqi government assets and has requested eight other countries to seize some $600 million and hand it to the US. The White House has threatened to prevent foreign banks doing business in the US if those banks refuse to turn over these funds to American control. Ultimately, the US will turn a tidy profit on this war.
On 9th April 2003 Cheney spoke from the White House. He spoke of his sorrow at the deaths of the Anglo-American troops "in defence of our country'. He expressed his condolences to the embedded journalists killed in the conflict, and he told the world that the oil fields had been protected. There was not one word of regret for the innocent men, women and children maimed and killed by the Anglo-American murder machine.
The military-industrial complex that has already profited from the destruction of this war, as it does from all wars, will profit further from re-stocking the arsenals of death. Their corporate friends will profit from the reconstruction. As usual the US will reap the benefits and the rest of the world, including the impoverished Iraqi people, will pay. Under these plans the United Nations will be reduced to a glorified aid agency while the US remains firmly in control. The Bush regime has made that clear. The National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, stated: "It would only be natural to expect that ... having given life and blood to liberate Iraq, the coalition would have the leading role".
The US proposes a period of direct US colonial administration while they put in place a US client, an Iraqi Hamid Karzai - a man synonymous with the US government’s ambition to install compliant subordinates throughout the globe. The world does not hear much of Afghanistan now after the US war against that impoverished state. We do not yet know the full extent of the Afghan casualties or the damage to its infrastructure. We do, however, know that there is no democracy in Afghanistan, that there is still a fundamentalist anti-woman clique in control instead of the secular society which existed before the US installed the Taliban regime. We know also that the Americans have their pipeline - the real reason for that war.
The US and the UN
There is another major cause for concern - the blatant attempt by the US not merely to sideline, but to destroy, the authority of the United Nations.
The Workers' Party of Ireland, in our document entitled "Internationalism in the 21st
Century" adopted by the Annual Delegate Conference dated 18th November 2000,
stated: "Fundamental to the objectives of the United Nations was a recognition of the sovereignty and independence of the member states...It also became clear that the concept of self-determination was not confined to political independence but also included the rights of peoples to determine their own political structures; to use, exploit and proclaim permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth, resources and economic activities and to govern the control of foreign investment within each national jurisdiction...The United Nations Organisation has played a major role in developing international law, fostering peace and co-operation among peoples and countries and establishing constructive mechanisms for the resolution and settlement of disputes... The voice of small nations and liberation movements expressed in the United Nations General Assembly eloquently proclaiming the goals and principles of self-determination, decolonisation, independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the non-use of force in international relations and respect for the UN Charter and principles of international law came into conflict with the plans and strategies of the neo-colonialist and imperialist powers...As far back as the Reagan administration the United States engaged in an attempt to sabotage and downgrade the role of the United Nations and international agencies...Simultaneously, the US was defaulting in its subscription
payments to the United Nations."
The agreement at Bretton Woods which established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund created a global monetary system which tied national currencies to the US dollar and provided the basis for US domination and control. While technically the IMF and World Bank were regarded as specialised agencies of the UN, in practice the power was and is held by the world's richest nations, particularly the US. Every President of the World Bank has been from the US. Instead of assisting and promoting development the World Bank and the IMF became bailiffs for America's largest banks, chasing poor developing countries caught in a web of spiralling debt. Through the use of structural adjustment programmes, which imposed severe restrictions on countries seeking further loans, these institutions placed private corporate interests in control of whole national economies.
The Unipolar World
The economic global power realignment consolidated by the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation under the leadership of the US has been underpinned by the vast military power of America. Economic globalisation, the corporatisation of the world order, the subordination of national economies and natural resources to US interests, the continuing indebtedness of the developing world and inequitable trade relations, the increasing spread of US military bases worldwide daily reinforces the reality of US power.
Power over issues of education, health and welfare, over matters of life and death, is transferred from sovereign nations to multinational corporations and power elites in the unrepresentative and undemocratic Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group.
Charles Derber in his book People Before Profit writes: "There are now more than 45,000 corporations worldwide, with 300,000 affiliates. But the top 200 global companies ... dominate the world economy and are the heart of global business. ... Their profits exploded 224 per cent between 1983 and 1997, a far faster rate than the 144 per cent growth in the world economy as a whole during the same period. Their sales are bigger than the combined economies of 180 of the 190 countries of the world, and eighteen times the combined income of the world's 1.2 billion poorest people. The sales of the top 200 account for more than 25% of the entire output of the world economy."
In September 2000, President Fidel Castro, following his participation in the United Nations "Millennium Summit" addressed a crowd at New York"s Riverside Church. He told the crowd: "... humanity is about to begin the 21st century in extremely difficult and extremely troubling conditions ... in more than 100 countries, the per capita income is lower than it was 15 years ago. In the Third World there are 1.3 billion poor people. In other words, one out of every three inhabitants lives in poverty. More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World. ... More than 840 million adults are still illiterate and the vast majority live in the Third World. ... Life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa is barely 48 years. That is 30 years less than in the developed countries. ... A full 99.5 per cent of all maternal deaths take place in the Third World ... More than 11 million boys and girls under five years of age die every year in the Third World from diseases that are largely preventable. That means more than 30,000 every day, 21 every minute ... And all of this is happening at a time when, throughout the world 800 billion dollars are put into military spending, 400 billion are spent on narcotic drugs, and a trillion dollars are invested in commercial advertising. By the end of 1998, the Third World's external debt amounted to 2.4 trillion dollars, that is, four times the total in 1982 ... Between 1982 and 1998, these countries paid over 3.4 trillion dollars for debt servicing, in other words, almost a trillion dollars more than the current debt. Far from decreasing, the debt grew by 45 per cent in those 16 years ... Despite the neo-liberal discourse on the opportunities created by the open-trading system the underdeveloped countries, with 85 per cent of the world's population, accounted for only 34.6 per cent of the world exports. That is less than in 1953, despite the fact that their population has more than doubled. ... Money is no longer used primarily in investments for the production of goods; it is used in currencies, stocks and financial derivatives in the desperate pursuit of more money, directly, through the most sophisticated computers and software and not through productive processes as was historically the case. This is what the much trumpeted and infamous process of neo-liberal globalization has brought about".
As Derber points out, between 1960 and 1980 average per capita growth globally grew 83 per cent, while in the period of neo-liberal globalisation it fell to 33 per cent and the gap in personal income between the developed and developing worlds tripled between 1960 and 1993.
In his book, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, Philip Bobbitt, who served as a senior advisor at the White House and held several senior posts at the National Security Council writes: "The United States can benefit ... because we are well placed to thrive in a globalised political economy. Indeed a globalised society of market states plays into and enhances American strength to such a degree that it worries some states that the United States will become so dominant that no other state will be able to catch up with it. In many quarters, globalisation is so deeply identified with the United States that it is anxiously perceived as an American cultural export".
The Socialist Response
The social democrats cannot address the issues raised by globalisation nor the US quest for global hegemony since they have effectively endorsed the neo-liberal project and refuse to challenge the existing political and social order by taking the means of production into public ownership. The leadership of the social democratic parties are content to work with and for the interests of capital.
We must recognise that the greater the move towards globalisation, the greater the need for an international socialist movement capable of articulating a comprehensive response. This will involve a detailed analysis and constant evaluation of the situation in each country and region; an assessment of the possibilities arising from the problems and contradictions inherent in global capitalism and an ability to make the necessary adjustments to deal with circumstances as these develop, taking into account the information acquired from the experience of the working class, new forms of social struggle and changing processes of capital accumulation.
The threat to the social and economic conditions of workers and small farmers and the escalation of imperialist war has sharpened the ideological struggle and provides new conditions for building class consciousness and preparing workers for political action.
The fight for democracy, the battle to establish control over the institutions and events which control the day-to-day lives of working people remains an inseparable part of the struggle for socialism. It is, as Lenin counselled, the task of Communist and Workers' parties to be ahead of all in raising, accentuating and solving every general democratic question.
What is to be Done?
It is ever more important to reassert the dynamic of socialism as a viable alternative world vision. It is time for a co-ordinated ideological counter-attack. It is the duty of the Communist and Workers' parties to proclaim again the vitality of Marxism as a critical theory; an unparalleled critique of capitalism and exploitation; an analytical device for the investigation and evaluation of current political, social and economic conditions and, above all, a programme for political action and the transformation of society and the world.
Ideological struggle is not conducted in the abstract. It is necessary to analyse and assess current developments in capitalism; to enunciate a reasoned response and to relate this critique to the actual conditions and struggles experienced by working people and the real possibilities for change. We must repeatedly make clear that neo-liberalism and laissez faire capitalism, far from encouraging growth and development as is suggested by its proponents, hinder progress and innovation and impoverish the peoples of the world.
Socialist internationalism remains a fundamental plank in the programmatic platform of Communist and Workers' parties. This principle involves active solidarity with the socialist countries, with genuine liberation and social movements, with fraternal parties and progressives throughout the world and is an enduring weapon in the struggle against imperialism and the battle for peace, democracy, national independence and socialism.
In a world that is increasingly globalised in terms of communication it becomes necessary to articulate a global socialist presence. This will entail the co-ordination of day-to-day struggles; the exchange of information; regular and productive conferences and meetings and theoretical seminars on issues of mutual concern and the practical organisation of research and organised political activity.
It is the task of the Communist and Workers' parties to develop a programme and strategy, taking into account the conditions in each region, which promotes and advances the interests and demands of the working class and which provides a basis for united mobilization around common campaigns. It was Lenin who made clear the responsibility of the revolutionary party: " ... the real task of a revolutionary socialist party: [is] not to draw up plans for refashioning society, not to preach to the capitalists and their hangers-on about improving the lot of the workers, not to hatch conspiracies, but to organise the class struggle of the proletariat and to lead this struggle, the ultimate aim of which is the conquest of political
power by the proletariat and the organisation of a socialist society." [V.I
Lenin: "Our Programme"; Collected Works, Vol. 4, pp 210-211].
The Workers’ Party of Ireland
Last edited by Hatchets McGee on Sun Jul 02, 2006 8:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
