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O'Brien has a nice little monologue in Part III Chapter III where he explains some of his (read: the Party's) ideas on power and human suffering. He asserts that for a human to exert power over another human, the suffering of the latter is required. After all, "unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?" What a baffling idea that is. How the heck, I asked myself, could causing suffering do anything for power? Doesn't that just motivate hatred against the one exerting the power?  Here are some possible answers: If you ensure that the person you want to control is suffering, you can be sure that what you are doing to them and/or making them do is different from what they want to have happen to them or do. Thus, you know that the power you exert over them is causing the things they do and the things that happen to them. So, suffering is a roundabout and twisted way of affirming your power, more so than a means of establi...

 In Part III we get to see the long-anticipated revelation occur: Winston discovers just to what extent his words and actions have been tracked by the Thought Police. But Orwell delivers us this realization in a striking way. We find along with Winston that not only are we dead when the hidden telescreen reveals itself, we were dead from the very beginning. That sounds like the Ingsoc rhetoric of manipulating one's own knowledge of the past, but in this instance we must concede that our vision of all past events relating to opposing the Party are completely wrong. I have compiled a short list of the actions Winston has done that betray his thought-crime below: Buy a diary from Mr. Charrington. Write lots of anti-Party stuff in there. Buy a paperweight from Mr. Charrington. Rent Mr. Charrington's upstairs room to continue his affair with Julia. Go to O'Brien's house (with Julia!) to be inducted into the Brotherhood. Pick up a copy of the book . Read the book . Winston ge...

We read Chapter 1 of Goldstein's book along with Winston so that we could have an important facet of Oceanic society articulated to us: that there are no laws. No rules, no legal framework, nothing. ..That sounds strange now that I say it, and maybe there are technically rules, but even if there were, it's not like that would make any difference. Every situation is handled in the exact way that concentrates the most power in the hands of the Inner Party. An important application of this rule is that "thought-criminal" does not describe someone who has thought thoughts that are against the Party. A thought-criminal is one who has done that, but also is not a member of the ruling class and now has the potential of resisting or rebelling against the class order. This might be obvious - the Thought Police are only going to go after those who endanger the class order, as that is the singular goal of the Party. So, now that we are clear on what a thought-criminal is, let us...