Mi sono quindi appuntato una serie di passaggi chiave, che ricopio anche qui.
THE
TELESCREEN
The
instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no
way of shutting it off completely.
Behind
Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about
pig-iron and the overfullfilment of the Ninth Three-Year-Plan. The telescreen
received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the
level of a very low whisper, would be picked up bu it; moreover, so long as he
remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could
be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you
were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the
Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even
conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.
TWO MINUTES
HATE
But what
was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody,
although every day, and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the
telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed,
ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were –
in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there
were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day enver passed when spies
and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought
Police.
LA REALTA’
GIORNALIERA DELL’UOMO
Today there
were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex
sorrows.
LA
CORREZIONE DEI VECCHI LIBRI
And a few
cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very
hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was
engaged in producing garbled versions – definitive texts, they were called – of
poems which had become ideologically offensive but which for one reason or
another were to be retained in the anthologies.
NEWSPEAK - LA
DISTRUZIONE DELLE PAROLE – LA LINGUA CHE PARLIAMO OGGI
You don’t
grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the
only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?
SEX
Sexual
intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like
having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect
way it was rubbed into ever Party member from childhood onwards. … All children
were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in
Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was
not meant altogether seriously, by somehow it fitted in with the general
ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it
could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this
was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so.
THE PROLES
If there
is hope, wrote
Winston, it lies in the proles.
If there
was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those
swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the
force to destroy the Party ever be generated.
It was not
desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was
required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever
it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations.
And even when they became discontented, as the sometimes did, their discontent
led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on
petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.
But if
there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put
into words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings
passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.
L'ILLUSIONE
DEL BENESSERE
How could
you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average
human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only
evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the
instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that
at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly
characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but
simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.
‘Was life
better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for
all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few
scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age
with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a
work-mate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression of a long-dead
sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all
the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision.
FAKE NEWS E
LA PERCEZIONE DELLA REALTA’
Not merely
the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was
tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
And what was terrifying was not only that they would kill you for thinking
otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that
two and two make for? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is
unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind,
and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
Freedom
is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else
follows.
And when he
told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born, and long
before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all,
what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more of a shock
to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember
that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with
Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently
she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. … He argued
with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in
forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia
and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck here as
unimportant. ‘Who cares?’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s always one bloody war
after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.’
THE THEORY
AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM BY EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN
WAR IS
PEACE
In one
combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and
have been so for the past twenty-five years. Was, however, is no longer the
desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades os 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 externd even to boiling and burying alive, are looked
upon as norma, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the
enemy, meritorious.
In the
early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich,
leisured, orderly and efficient – a glittering antiseptic world of glass and
steel and snow-white concrete – was part of the consciousness of nearly every
literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed,
and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed
to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars
and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on
the empirival habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly
regimented society. … From the moment 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. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger,
overwork, dirt, illiteracy and disease could be eliminated within a few
generations. And if fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a
sort of automatic process – by producing wealth which it was sometimes
impossible not to distribute – the machine did raise the living standards of
the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. But it was
also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction –
indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. … In the
long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and
ignorance.
Nor was it
a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output
of goods. … Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in
practice the onl way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The essential
act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but the products of
human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouting into the
stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, material which might
otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long
run, too intelligent.
Efficiency,
even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania
except the Thought Police.
The war,
therefore, it we judge by the standards of previous wars, is merely an
imposture. … But thought it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the
surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental
atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. … The war is waged by each ruling
group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or
prevent conquest 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.
IGNORANCE
IS STRENGHT
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.
All the
beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterise our time
are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true
nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any
preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the
proletarian nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue
from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding
and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of
grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become
dangerous is the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate
them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer
important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions
the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They
can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party
member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the
most unimportant subject can be tolerated.
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping
short, as thought 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. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy
in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete
as that of a contortionist over his body.
THE
PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK
The
intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not
ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For
the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes
necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a
political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct options
as automatically as a machine-gun spraying forth bullets.
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