jaylar
Winston pauses in his reading of Goldstein’s Book, and when he returns it is to Chapter 3; War is Peace
“The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century.”
It is remarkable that George Orwell saw, in 1948, the three powers; the American, (Oceania)Russian, (Eurasia) and Chinese (Eastasia);
Orwell saw them as permanently at war; but defined as ” 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.”
The Book explains that there needs to be this War hysteria which grips most people while the actual battles involve; “… 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…”
The reader, pulling back from the book, and looking out the window, feels these words with a powerful clarity. For this is war today; incursions by Seal Teams, the SAS, and other ‘Special Ops’ occurring in places as insignificant as Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq.
