The new Russia-China alignment: Orwell's three super-states prediction in formation stage?

Eliyahu Tulshinski

July 11, 2023

Communist China President Xi Jinping last week accelerated his nation's increasing military and economic cooperation with the “former” communists running Russia, carrying out joint naval drills, and proclaiming “long live [their] friendship.”

The New Indian Express reported on the warming ties and their implication for global politics.

Beijing and Moscow have ramped up economic cooperation and diplomatic contacts in recent years, with exchanges only growing closer since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year.

On Monday, Xi met Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of the Federation Council – the Russian parliament's upper house – at the Great Hall of the People, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Xi said the development of relations between the two countries was "a strategic choice made by both countries based on the fundamental interests of their respective countries and peoples", according to CCTV.

"Both sides also need to strengthen communication and collaboration within multilateral mechanisms such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the BRICS countries, lead the correct direction of global governance reform, and safeguard the common interests of emerging market countries and developing countries," the statement continued. [Emphases added].

Not everyone surprised

The warming ties might take by surprise those who accepted the State Department claim that the alleged Sino-Soviet split was genuine and now find the US apparently left in the cold by the tightening alliance.

Those familiar with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, though, would well have expected to see alliances between what he labels the three super-states, led by by China, Russia, and the US.

The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting . . .

Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait.

Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa.

Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet. [Emphases added; pp. 234-235].

The above map, posted to Wikipedia’s ’1984′ entry, delineates the borders of Orwell's three super-states and depicts the “disputed” areas over which the super-states battle.

Endless, contrived wars

Orwell's readers would also expect those alliances to alter periodically as, he explains, their conflicts exist for public consumption, with no super-state actually trying to defeat another.

In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war . . . To understand the nature of the present war — for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war — one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination . . .

Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling . . .

It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas [which] are constantly being captured and recaptured . . . but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. [Emphasis added; pp. 235-238].

So why fight?

If the “controlled conflicts” between the super-states are not intended to attain a lasting conquest, what is the purpose of the wars? To block the progress and expansion of wealth that would naturally accompany an industrial and technological revolutions in peacetime, explains Orwell.

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) 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 has been latent in industrial 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 . . . [Emphases added; pp. 239].

Can't be rich without the poor

And why would hard core socialists oppose increasing and spreading wealth? Apparently equality in power and finance are not communist goals, and are actually loathsome to communists, according to the author who himself learned about socialism, Marxism and communism first-hand, having fought for the Soviet-backed Republican Faction in the Spanish Civil War.

[I]t 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 a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which WEALTH, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while POWER remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, 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. [Emphases added; pp. 238-239].

Cult of scarcity

Orwell emphasizes that scarcity, and not merely an absence of wealth, is key to the totalitarian scheme, in which “inner party” members suffer less from scarcity than “outer party” members who in turns suffer less than non-party members.

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 . . .

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'. [P. 242].

Rabbi Dovid Smith, Esq., terms the belief in and fear of scarcity as a “cult of scarcity,” which only has an impact when the masses believe the necessities of life cannot be provided in abundance through a proper economic and political system. He equates the fear with an allegiance to a pagan cult.

The choice is between the G-d of abundance and the cult of scarcity. It is the cult of scarcity that births the ideology of public health [in which individual health is put aside for the health of others under the belief that there are not sufficient resources to treat each person's health needs individually].

Whereas the G-d of abundance treasures the primacy of human life, the cult of scarcity always points to humanity as the problem [claiming] that there is not enough time, love, money, water, air, space, oil, ozone, and on and on,

Deception that works

Keeping the wars going, even as people find bits and pieces of the stories surrounding the wars to be factually inaccurate, requires a good bit of “doublethink,” in which a person accepts gross contradictions and outright falsehoods as fact. Describing the extraordinary ability of the elite class running a totalitarian regime to create the atmosphere for doublethink, Orwell informs us that the higher rank one achieves, and thus the more they are exposed to the regime's lies, the more fervent their belief in its genuineness.

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 . . . [Emphasis added; P. 243].

The doublethink continues, according to Orwell, even as it becomes obvious that there's something “off” about the war.

But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous . . . The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. [Pp. 250-251].

The real enemy

Doublethink even allows one to ignore their own observation that the warring regimes target their own populations more than they target their supposed adversaries. As their fellow citizens, and they themselves, suffer from the regime's clampdown on individual freedom, they will, in Orwell's estimate, continue supporting their government and its wars.

In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. [Emphasis added; pp. 251-252].

Please see our previous articles on Russian and Chinese deception: