Towards the end of "1984" there is a long section where O'Brien, a Party insider, is torturing Winston the minor bureaucrat, who has committed the crime of, well, mostly just knowing too much about how the system works.
The empire of Oceania is saturated in phony "patriotism" over a war that probably doesn't even exist. Surveillance, state kidnapping, and torture are taken for granted. With the nation in a constant state of raging war fever, anyone that looks "foreign" will get rounded up and executed.
O'Brien has Winston on the rack, and he alternatively brainwashes and tortures Winston. Winston will eventually be liquidated, but first he must be saved and taught love Big Brother.
The Party's main problem is to keep the middle and lower classes hungry and fearful, and to make sure that the products of automation don't supply them with comfort and leisure. And here O'Brien says quite explicitly that war is essential to create income inequality, that this is the actual purpose of war:
The primary aim of modern warfare... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods.....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
But eliminating poverty would be a
good thing right? What's the problem?
...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....wealth would confer no distinction... the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
See?
The ruling one percent of the Inner Party would be swept aside if the masses were not kept stupefied by want and hunger. In 1984, the Inner Party is only 1 or 2% of the population, the Outer Party is about 15% of the population, while >80% of the population are Proles. The Outer Party is a lower middle class bureaucrat class which is constantly under surveillance. Because Outer Party members have access to some resources, education, and government knowledge, individuals are regarded as potential threats to the integrity of the Party. Members of the Outer Party are liquidated for infractions that would be ignore if committed by a Prole.
But torture and purges aren't enough to keep the great masses of people in line. How can they be controlled? By keeping them too poor and hungry and overworked to have time for restless ideas.
O'Brien continues to explain the fundamental strategy of the Inner Party - that people will work all right, they'll work like dogs, but they will be the working poor who will never use the goods they produce:
Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare......
Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare......The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent......
See? War is ritualized waste, the constant destruction of wealth, all to serve the goal of keeping the majority of people poor and ignorant.
But what if there isn't a good shooting war available? What about a cold war arms race?
Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.
Yes, that certainly sounds familiar!
How much waste is desirable? Well pretty much all the waste the system can bear without actually collapsing.
In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs
of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured 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.
But what about the middle class? Wasn't there a large middle class a few decades ago? Surprisingly, O'Brien concedes this point:
By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter--set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'.
We are approaching this point, where things that were taken for granted, like drinkable water and a decent public education, are being taken away seemingly as an ideological goal. What practical purpose is served by destroying our infrastructure? I could understand a policy of neglect, but the GOP has an obsessive ideological nihilism.
But why would masses of people be willing to see the things they produce destroyed and the fruits of their labor lost?
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.
Exactly! People would not spend their lives digging holes and filling them just for the privilege of being exiled to the economic underclass. Is there some way to make the happy to do this? O'Brien says happiness is irrelevant.
What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.
For me, that sure sounds like the Fox news model. The constant "orgiastic triumph" is in their daily declarations of humiliating defeats for Obama, an inept coward who is constantly retreating. Then they have to create conspiracy theories to explain why Obama keeps beating them. And that's where the "credulous and ignorant fanatic" comes in.
How does this wartime hysteria translate directly into power?
The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
Yep, that sounds like corporate driven media and government. Don't recycle or the terrorists win!
Notice that Fox pushes for a different war in a different country practically every week of the year. Clearly, they see the strategic need for eternal war. Hey Nixon got reelected even though he lost Vietnam. Dubya got reelected even though he did not exactly "win" Iraq. And in "1984," Oceania (America and Britain) are at war with either Eurasia and Eastasia, or both. Exactly who Oceania is at war with is likely to change from week to week, and, in reality (if such a thing exists), it would hardly matters since all three are nearly identical dictatorships.
It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. ....It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he 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. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
We could go on and on comparing current events to "1984" but here's a short list of themes:
Patriotic wartime nationalism
Xenophobia
State restrictions on sex
Pervasive propaganda and indoctrination
Paranoia
Loss of the middle class
Constant surveillance
Routine use of torture
A government dedicated to preserving a rigid class system ruled by a 1% elite.
All of these can be seen today, and it doesn't seem to be random. It's often been said "1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual." Or is it?