Orwell: 2+2=5

When I sit down to write a book,

I do not say to myself,

"I'm going to produce a work of art."

I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose,

some fact to which I want to draw attention,

and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship,

a sense of injustice.

- -

Two and two.

Four.

- Again? -Four.

Good. There are people who'll tell you

the answer's five.

Usually, they're called government.

Great leaders.

It becomes very important to them

that the people should believe that the answer's five.

They'll tell you lies.

They'll torture you.

They'll kill you.

At the moment of death,

you must still insist that the answer

is four.

April 18th, 1984.

Nobody keeps a diary today.

Because to do so would be punishable by death.

I don't care anymore.

I found this old book by chance.

I'm going to set down what I dare not say aloud to anyone.

This, in 1984, is London,

chief city of Airstrip 1,

a province of the state of Oceania.

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six,

I knew that when I grew up, I should be a writer.

I had the lonely child's habit

of making up stories

and holding conversations with imaginary persons.

I knew that I had a facility with words

and a power of facing unpleasant facts,

and I felt that this created a sort of private world

in which I could get my own back

for my failure in everyday life.

I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels.

- -

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives

without knowing something of his early development.

His subject matter

will be determined by the age he lives in.

At least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages

like our own.

When I was not yet 20,

I went to Burma, in the Indian Imperial Police.

In an outpost of empire like Burma,

the class question appeared at first sight

to have been shelved.

Most of the white men in Burma were not of the type

who in England would be called gentlemen,

but they were white men in contradistinction

to the other and inferior class,

the natives.

In the free air of England,

that kind of thing is not fully intelligible.

In order to hate imperialism,

you've got to be part of it.

But it is not possible to be part of such a system

without recognizing it as an unjustifiable tyranny.

Even the thickest-skinned Anglo-Indian is aware of this.

Every native face he sees in the street

brings home to him his monstrous intrusion.

- -

But I was in the police,

which is to say that I was part of the actual machinery

of despotism.

When I came home on leave in 1927,

I was already half determined to throw up my job,

and one sniff of English air decided me.

For five years, I have been part of an oppressive system

and it left me with a bad conscience.

Innumerable remembered faces,

faces of prisoners in the dark,

of men waiting in the condemned cells,

of subordinates I had bullied

and aged peasants I had snubbed,

of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist

in moments of rage

haunted me intolerably.

No book is genuinely free from political bias.

The opinion that art

should have nothing to do with politics

is itself a political attitude.

[female vocalist singing in French]

I had reduced everything to the simple theory

that the oppressed are always right

and the oppressors are always wrong,

a mistaken theory, but the natural result

of being one of the oppressors yourself.

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure

becomes flagrantly artificial. That is,

when its ruling class has lost its function,

but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.

But to be corrupted by totalitarianism,

one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.

Tonight, I wanted to take a few minutes

to discuss a grave threat to peace.

The threat comes from Iraq.

It arises directly from the Iraqi regime's own actions,

its history of aggression,

and its drive toward an arsenal of terror.

We're at war with the people of Eurasia,

the vile and ruthless aggressors

who have committed countless atrocities

and who are guilty of every bestial crime

a human being can commit.

They've laid waste to our land,

destroyed our factories, looted our homes,

massacred our children and raped our women!

When Iraq finally admitted having these weapons in 1995,

the quantities were vast.

Less than a teaspoon of dry anthrax,

a little bit... about this amount.

This kind of thing happens everywhere,

but it is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification

in societies where only one opinion

is permissible at any given moment.

The organized lying

practiced by totalitarian states

is not, as is sometimes claimed,

a temporary expedient of the same nature

as military deception.

It is something integral to totalitarianism,

something that would still continue

even if concentration camps and secret police forces

had ceased to be necessary.

Totalitarianism demands, in fact,

the continuous alteration of the past

and, in the long run, probably demands a disbelief

in the very existence of objective truth.

How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?

Four.

And if Big Brother

were to say not four but five,

then how many?

Four.

How many fingers, Winston?

Stop it! Anything! Five!

-Stop the pain! -No, Winston.

That is no use. You are lying. You still think you see four.

But it's five!

Two and two do not always make four, Winston.

Sometimes they make five.

Again, how many fingers am I holding up?

August 26, 1946.

A few showers in the afternoon.

Otherwise a beautiful day.

When the breeze drops, the midges were so bad

as to make it almost impossible to work.

One is actually breathing them into one's nostrils,

and the irritation is maddening.

I was born into what you might describe

as the lower upper-middle class.

People in this class owned no land,

but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God

and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook

by going into the professions and the fighting services

rather than into trade.

To belong to this class,

when you were at the 400-pound-a-year level,

was a queer business,

for it meant that your gentility

was almost purely theoretical.

Small boys used to count the plum stones on their plates

and foretell their destiny by chanting,

"Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law."

Theoretically, you knew all about servants

and how to tip them,

although in practice,

you had one, at most two, resident servants.

Theoretically, you knew how to wear your clothes

and how to order a dinner,

although in practice,