WAR IS PEACE!
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY!
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH!

 

April 5^th 1984  

To the future…

            I am writing from the past, a time of everlasting war, a time of despair and loneliness, a time of death and hatred, a time of conformity and oppression, a time of terror and pain, a time where Big Brother rules and your privacy consists of the 5 cubic centimeters within your skull.  But even that is not private.  The thought police regulate all thoughts.  If Thoughtcrime is committed the consequence is death.  Day to day, people are vaporized, and erased from history because of Thoughtcrime.

            Today, I awoke to the vexation of the telescreen.  It created a terrible ear piercing noise, which rang inside my ears.  Soon I heard a voice coming from the screen.  A lady’s voice shouting, “Thirty to forty group!”  I hopped up in front of the telescreen.  The lady with a scrawny but muscular body, yelled, “Arms bending and stretching!”  I tried, but the back pain was too harsh.  Then she called on me and scolded me for not touching my toes.  Harder I tried, until the pain was almost unbearable.  I wanted to scream! 

            Then I remembered my dream I had of my mother.  She was an abundantly radiant person with magnificent hair.  My father I remember, a tall thin man with neat dark clothes.  However, they disappeared when I was ten or eleven with others during one of the first great purges of the fifties.  But the past was always cloudy and unclear to me as it was rewritten many times.  The only history that was true was what I remembered, but even that was unclear. 

Suddenly, I was somewhere else in the dream.  Standing there on dark ashy concrete, I saw a landscape of an old pasture, with a trail leading through.  Mole holes were scattered throughout the land.  Elm trees swayed in the gentle breeze of the wind.  Underneath the elm trees, a shady stream rolled by in absolute peacefulness and harmony.  For the moment, everything was perfect, and that’s when I awoke to the screaming of the telescreen.

Finally the activity was over, and I headed for work.  Today seemed different.  I did not know why, it just did.  Then I remembered what happened at the Two Minutes Hate the other day. 

Everything was normal.  I walked into the building and found my seat near a sandy haired woman, and close to a friend named O’Brien.  I was watching the screen, a hideous monstrous machine screeched and made booming noises and then the Hate started.  A man’s face appeared people yelling “Traitor!  Traitor!”  Easily recognizable to the people of Oceania, the man whom everyone did know as a traitor, Emmanuel Goldstein.  I could never look at him; I received a painful mixture of emotions when I did.   I began shouting with the crowd, “Traitor! Traitor!”  Within the second minute of hate, people began throwing things at the screen.  Distinctly, I remember a brown haired woman sitting behind me throwing a Newspeak dictionary in great anger.  Her face was bright red, and her teeth grinding, causing her eyes to squint.  Others looked similar.  My anger I only could hold so long until I too started throwing things at the screen.  The face faded, and a new face one of great power and authority appeared.  His name carried within it a mysterious calm, Big Brother.  The screen switched to the three slogans of the party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

A small chant began to raise in the crowd.  A rhythmical chat of “B-B! … B-B! … B-B!” repeatedly, very slowly, with long pauses between the Bs.  It seemed as though the chant lasted as long as the two minutes hate.  I chanted with the rest, it is impossible not to.  But then for a second I looked over at O’Brien, only to see for a split second him too looking at me.  From that moment I knew he too was against Big Brother.  For the split second we looked at each other I knew!

After recalling what happened at Two Minutes Hate, I had only one thought in mind as I headed towards the dull grayish building where I worked.  Down with Big Brother I thought.  Down with Big Brother!  Down with Big Brother!

And so I write to the future, a time when thought is free, when men are different and do not live alone, to a time when truth exists and history cannot be rewritten.  From the age of communism, war and terror, greetings!

                                                                        -Winston Smith