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Hermes Thoth
03-18-2007, 11:40 AM
Some excerpts from
the wikipedia entry

on

The Theory And PRactice of Oligarchichal Collectivism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldstein's_book)

That "book inside a book" from the book winston was lent in 1984, when he was growing in his thoughtcriminalhood.

This is our world. Orwell had big ones to write this, but then again, Truth is part of the strategy (http://www.justplainpolitics.com/showthread.php?t=3279)



The new High group, the Inner Party, enjoyed and guarded their privileges as a collective group, not as a mass of individuals. Old-style Socialists failed to perceive that when the Party took over, property was actually concentrated in far fewer hands than had been the case under capitalism. They thought that since there were not now any individual owners, the expropriated property had become public property so that Socialism had in fact been established. In reality, economic inequality had been made permanent, for the sole concern of the Party was to maintain its own power — not to distribute wealth to all citizens. (As will be discussed in Chapter 3 of The Book, the Party deliberately creates poverty so that the masses must struggle to stay alive: thus they will not have the leisure to start thinking for themselves.)

The Party does not have to fear that the superstate of Oceania will be overthrown from without, despite the endless conflicts with rival superstates Eurasia and Eastasia: all three states are too evenly matched for any of them to successfully invade the other. The proletarian masses of Oceania itself will not rise up against the Party, for they are denied any standards of comparison and are thus not even aware that they are suppressed. The sole potential threats against the rule of the Party are therefore "the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and skepticism in their own ranks".


The pyramidal social structure of OceaniaThe pyramidal structure of the society of Oceania is reviewed: The top leader is Big Brother, a semi-divine figure that The Book strongly suggests is not at all a real person, but rather a phantom created by the Party to serve as a focusing-point for love and fear. Under Big Brother comes the Inner Party, numbering less than two per cent of the total population (The Book explicitly states that the Inner Party never numbers more than 6 million). If Big Brother is dismissed as a state-crafted phantom, the Inner Party are the real rulers, in firm control of everything (according to the former classification, they are the High). The Inner Party controls the larger Outer Party, the servicemen who execute the orders of the Inner Party (the Outer Party are thus the Middle). Outside the Party altogether are the "proles" or proletarians, the masses numbering perhaps 85% of the population (the Low).


...


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

Hermes Thoth
03-18-2007, 03:29 PM
From

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/go-goldstein.html)

By Emmanuel Goldstein



By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern had become obvious to many observers. There then rose schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine, of course, had always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put forward there was a significant change. In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now, however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not yet in positions of command, but merely hoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.

The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which had hardly existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclical movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. And this vision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually profited by each historical change. The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations-not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.

It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.

Hermes Thoth
03-18-2007, 03:42 PM
Hey! This passage describes dixie and many others!


The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

uscitizen
03-18-2007, 07:56 PM
Still trying to figure out that olig... word...

AnyOldIron
03-19-2007, 03:39 AM
Oligarch - government by the few for the few.