Iran went Communist? Oh dear, I wouldn't be surprised if India intervened solely to get the Zoroastrians out.
For all this talk of Ireland, Northern Ireland seems oddly absent in all this. What happened to them when Oceania took over in Britain?Snip
Thanks. I wasn't sure what to do with NI to be honest. I didn't know how this might play out regarding stuff like the religious strife that led to the Troubles.I`m in Belfast and could help out with NI. However, your depiction of the South after the rise of Ingsoc makes perfect sense.
So they are in a state of abused infantilizing? In which rapture and abhorrence are mixed togethet, like a twisted milkshake.I think what that speaks to is perhaps something juvenile and immature of a person that has never been allowed to develop. Becoming one's self is a journey which requires growth, experience, exposure and the willingness to be wrong or understand when we're wrong to be right (whatever that may mean for the individual). Winston Smith doesn't really have that. I would summarize Winston Smith early in the story as a perpetual pubescent and that stage of development has stagnated, stifled and rotted for decades into a middle aged man.
Winston lives a paranoid but sheltered and controlled existence. While his journey does reflect some inward developments, the emphasis is external: Winston versus the State. That is a result of Oceania and it's society setting the terms for it, but nonetheless that is the state of affairs. The inward change he has is his love. And I can excuse all the hate projection that proceeds it because Winston Smith doesn't really have emotions of his own initially. He has a psychology, possibly psychosis but there's no individual emotion. Or rather, there's no honest, true emotions that he grows, develops, reflects on and expresses. He wouldn't even know the words or definitions to understand them. He is very analytical because the State prevents emotional understanding. Winston is initially projecting an imitation of emotion. The one real emotion he discovers as his own individual, real emotion is love.
I would summarize the dynamics of any of the characters (Winston, Julia, O'Brien, etc) as kids roleplaying and trying their best. They hold the trappings of an adult, but they're just playing up to something forever beyond them. There's no real maturity or wisdom in any human being in Oceania because there's no inner, individual being that's allowed to grow in Oceania. Winston is on the path but the Party always destroys it.
Torture until they had all the information they could squeeze out of them then kill them. Don't really see any other possibility.Plenty of thought criminals, agents of Goldstien or expendable proles to go around. Just dress them up in the correct uniform and drug them so they don't say anything.
What would Oceana do if they did actually manage to capture a real NATO soldier though?
These are very excellent questions.I would be interested in hearing about American relations with the Oceanian regime and the UK government/monarchy in exile in Ottawa and also Ian Smith's Rhodesia vis a vis the INGSOC regime. What happened to British popular music in Oceania? Did the members of the Beatles and their families ( plus many familiar ones) flee to Ireland or the States? I can picture the Fab Four moving to Dublin as it is across from Liverpool and they are of Irish extraction as well.
More or less. I would look at it as a persistent immaturity, posturing to maturity and denial of maturity reinforced by both the State and the inner person as crafted by the State.So they are in a state of abused infantilizing? In which rapture and abhorrence are mixed togethet, like a twisted milkshake.
Author's note: I'm not Irish, I just saw this as a possible outcome of the Party taking power.
When the Party rose to power and isolated its territory from the rest of the world, the power dynamic in Europe and across the world had shifted. There was now a second threat to the NATO aligned countries of Western Europe. France, the Netherlands and Denmark were all within range of military assault by Oceanian forces if the Cold War went hot. The prospect of attack from two directions was a chilling likely one to NATO's commanders. The French, Dutch, and Danes all enacted mandatory military service policies.
The effects in the wider world were just as startling. The sun had set on an empire that spanned a quarter of the globe when the century began. Colonies were cut off from London's directives and independence movements seized their chance. Some took over peacefully, others by force. America, the USSR, and the world's newest rising power, India, became heavily involved in regions that were once ruled by the British crown. One such instance was the pro-Soviet coup in Tehran which led to Iran becoming part of the Warsaw Pact.
One particular result of the Party's takeover was Ireland becoming a NATO member in 1959. The Emerald Isle received multiple waves of refugees fleeing Oceania after the Ingsoc regime manifested, integrating them into Irish society. Talks began with Dublin and Washington about military cooperation in the mid 1950s and the idea of joining NATO was openly discussed. The Irish met all requirements for membership in the alliance and became the last member to join it in the 1950s.
Ireland instituted a 'national service' policy not long after and integrated its command structure into the NATO umbrella. This didn't meet much resistance from the Irish public given the threat posed by Oceania. Its military underwent a complete overhaul, with its aircraft, tanks, and ships all being updated. Training was streamlined, and a special forces command based off the SAS and Green Berets was created. Patrols in the Irish Sea were constant, escorting Oceanian refugees whenever possible and keeping a lookout for any signs of hostile military activity.
In the meantime, Ireland benefitted from integrating the thousands of highly educated Britons fleeing Big Brother. Doctors, engineers, architects and professors were all given jobs as soon as possible. The standard of living underwent a significant and sustained rise throughout the decades. All the while, the threat posed by Oceania was never far from people's minds. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a single question was on the minds of the Irish public.
"When?"
In 2004, when that question finally got an answer, Ireland played a major part in the fall of the Ingsoc government. Special forces units sabotaged communications relays. Irish aircraft pulverized tank columns and ammo dumps. And its soldiers took town after town, with the capture of Liverpool being celebrated by the burning of the Party flag by members of the Twenty Fourth Infantry Battalion.
I'm familiar with theories that most of what the Party tells the citizens of Oceania about the outside world is false, but it seems like the gist of it was that most of the rest world was, in fact, some sort of deserted wasteland, and that at most maybe Eurasia and Eastasia also controlled small, isolated pockets of civilization but without the large scale wars reported in the "official" news. This story is different in that it has the events of the novel taking place in what otherwise resembles the actual post-WWII world. Did the Inner Party maintain any clandestine contacts with other governments, and was anyone willing to support them as a useful bulwark against NATO (kind of like OTL China's support of North Korea)? Or did the Inner Party all doublethink themselves into believing that other governments didn't exist anyway? Also, are Winston and Julia still alive somewhere, and had they completely succumbed to love of Big Brother by the time that the country is liberated?
I have to say, I'm a bit skeptical that the Big Brother regime would be able to pull this off for very long in a world where technology, long-distance travel, and mass communication are still developing at their OTL pace outside Oceania. Would the Party really be able to keep people from tuning into radio broadcasts from outside Oceania, for example? Though I suppose they could always try to pass off any inconvenient revelations as propaganda by Goldstein's organization and/or Eurasia or Eastasia (depending on who they're officially fighting).