"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 angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognise their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. 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. The very word 'war' therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous, war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the neolithic age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same of the three super-states, instead of fighting with each one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, free for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This - although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense - is the meaning of the Party slogan: Peace is War."
George Orwell, 1984 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Martin Secker & Warburg, 1983), p. 173. "Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in the remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book [i.e., The theory and practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein], in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of a faint breeze of the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already." (ibid.).
