War is Peace

Background: This is a compiled list of passages from Emmanueal Goldsteins treatise on oligarchal collectivism as found in the text 1984. Hopefully the quotations in this passage will help you to make sense of the meaning of this section as a whole.

WAR IS PEACE:
(Quotation Summary)

“It is 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 differences.” (186)
“With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death.” (187)
“Moreover, the labor of the exploited people round the equator (what they are fighting for) is not really necessary to the world’s economy.” (188).
“The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.” (188)
“Ever since the end of the nineteenth century the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society.” (188).
“When the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared.” (189).
“But it was also clear that an all around increase in wealth threatened the destruction-indeed, in some sense was the destruction- of a hierarchical society.” (189).
“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.” (191).
“It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.” (191)
“War … accomplishes the necessary destruction…in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labor of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again… but this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.” (192).
“An inner party member may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink.” (192)
“The two aims of the party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.” (193).
“There are therefore two great problems which the party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.” (193)
Parties goal: Surround one of the other super powers and simultaneously, without the prior knowledge of the other party, set off enough weapons to annihilate said country. Then, do the same thing to the other super power.
3 key tenants: “Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of a semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.” (197).
“Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character. In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat.” (197)
“Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down.” (198)
“They (the party) are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.” (198)
“The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another.” (199).
“The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of 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.” (199).
“A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.” (199).

Therefore: WAR IS PEACE