George Orwell’s 1984 seems more pertinent and alive than ever upon a recent reading. Chapter 9 of his great book includes excerpts from a fictional manifesto of rebellion by the primary enemy of the ruling party, Emanuel Goldstein. Some of the excerpts are quite striking (in a “now-more-than-ever” kind of way):

Chapter III: War is Peace

“War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.”

“…in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at…”

“In the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character.”

“The primary aim of modern warfare […] is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.”

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.”

“In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat.”

“War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.”

To complete the trilogy of dystopian future novels, it is also worth revisiting Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. These two novels predict a narcotic entertainment culture and dawn of violent reality television, respectively. Collect all three!