1994

And I want to conquer the world,
Give all the idiots a brand new religion

~Bad Religion, I wanna Conquer the World

First, a bit of background. For those keen enough to read the appendix on newspeak you might notice that The Party and Oceana are mentioned in past tense, specifically as if they no longer existed. Emanuel Goldstein specifically states that none of the superstates can be conquered (ch. 3 of his book). It's mentioned that with Newspeak the very idea of rebellion may one day be removed (pg. 46), so how could such a thing happen? Well every regime can be toppled somehow (see: Soviet Union), heck, if stories about the CIA are to be believed, it can be done with just a few people. So, without further delay, my guide to the downfall of big brother.

"The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it."
~John Dickinson

The first part of overthrowing Oceana is most important, but most dependent on luck. An entire novel could be devoted to explaining these first steps but I'll stick to the overview for now. The first thing to do is, in fact, finding a way to worm out of the system. Proles are, by design, far too sedated to carry out revolution in the necessary manner and party members are under too much surveillance. The simplest way to exit the party would be to fake your own death, rocket bombs make a convenient excuse if you can produce a body (minitruth might have dummies for use in propaganda films). In coastal regions suicide by drowning is possible and if performed on a day with rough waters finding a body would be nigh impossible. The next step would be to hide out in the countryside under a new identity, of course using a purchased prole home for a secret base simply wouldn't do. If the time and effort can be put in discreetly a network of tunnels would be great for a revolutionary hideout as you could just collapse the entrance to avoid be discovered and you could have loads of unviewable space to work with.

No matter how powerful, one man/woman cannot overthrow a world power single-handedly, therefore you need others, but its not a matter of numbers here, its a matter of ability. If the party realizes whats going on this early, they'll bring down the thought police hard on top of you. The people you need are good at their needed task, and most importantly, subtle. Julia is a great example of what is important for an operative as shown by her first meetings with Winston, (book II ch 1-2). However she ended up being busy with the whole "death" thing so she herself isn't an option. However it would be no great stretch of imagination to believe that there are others of her caliber. It's just a matter of getting them on your label (in a manner of speaking). Of course such people are either closeted dissidents or spies, one simply must tell the two apart and from those who exist in the former category, you shall find all the army you need. To recruit such people, if they haven't been found out yet, you can simply convince them to follow your example of escaping the system. If they have been caught, well... good luck with that. Well that's basically all for starting the coming Revolution, now for the important bits.

"Success always comes when preparation meets opportunity"
~Henry Hartman

Now the previous chapter was just preparation. The is the first real phase of taking over the world, Expand. A truly latchkey element is in this phase is the ability to change the appearance of your operatives (as discussed in pg 143), this would allow you to give an operative a new identity if discovered and, most importantly, infiltrate the ministries. The most likely place to find the necessary equipment (not counting the Brotherhood) would be the Ministry of Truth. They probably have to alter the look of actors for making the forged pictures (pg 41) and therefore so can you. However to get your hands on it you will need people on the inside. Its important for this task that you recruit certain people without extracting them, it can also help give your agents a way into the other Ministries. Infiltrating, corrupting, and debasing the four Ministries is the most important objective of the phase as it will give you a foothold needed to expand. Of the four Ministries The Ministry of Love is the most important, they conduct all the surveillance. If there is any real threat of your organization being discovered it is from them. By planting agents within the Ministry of Love you can keep other Operatives from being compromised and, as a bonus, you can eventually begin extracting potential recruits even after the Thought Police catch them. Not to mention that telescreen access will give you lots of information and communication needed to run the organization. Next up, The Ministry of Plenty, they aren't too important yet and won't be until the final phase, however you can make sure to send some surplus supplies to other places as needed such as home base. The Ministry of Truth can of course be very useful here, by altering the media you can loosen the hold of Propaganda on the people, however you want to remain subtle here for the moment so the party won't notice your influence yet. The big focus with manipulating the media should be thought, get the people to start really thinking and they will be more likely to see the truth of Big Brother, all the better for getting more manpower. The Ministry of Peace has little to do inside Oceana itself, but they are essential to the bigger picture. You see, even if you take over Airstrip 1 there is a big threat that the rest of Oceana,or perhaps another state, will try to take it back, and while you might have the people on your side, they will have more resources. The Ministry of Peace will to give you the chance to "ship off" some of your Agents to other provinces of Oceana. Make sure that you can absolutely and completely trust the Agents you send to be able to spread the Organization elsewhere (and/or keep constant contact with said Agent while he does). It may make sense to oversee it yourself, but your home province is the biggest priority, if things fall apart in the US, you can still try to avoid having your own branch exposed. If your Organisation does get exposed, you have two choices: 1. Commence phase 3 immediately, 2. go into hiding for a few years and don't come back until all memory of your plot is gone (simply put, game over man).

"Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."
~Sun Tzu

Now that the Operatives of your revolution are in place, it's time to begin putting things in motion. This is Phase 2, Exploit. Your first task is to eliminate any major threats that remain, the largest of which is the other two Superstates (as stated above). To deal with them you must infiltrate the other states. First go after whoever Oceana is "allied" with at the time, they should have less defense at the borders (less being a relative term here) and you'll have an easier time sneaking an agent into a foreign city. Now, the biggest problem with this is how get your agent to fit in in another country. The only people who know things like the language are the citizens. And having someone who doesn't know is an obvious sign that they're a spy. However civilians in disputed areas are, sometimes, citizens of said country. Therefore they should know at least most of the local customs and dialects. So just put an agent in said regions under the guise of a frontline soldier. Find out the needed information and pass it onto the needed agents while disguising them as foreigners. Once they are in, the strategy is largely the same as before because each state has an almost identical system (as stated in Goldstein's book). The only good way to get into the remaining state though, is to wait for alliances to change. This usually takes about four years but, if you have gotten deep enough you can manipulate the Ministry of Peace's strategies in such a way as to trigger this earlier. Namely make sure that Oceana forces get into a good position to turn the tables on whoever is their ally at the time. On the topic of military despite what the above quote states you should make sure to prepare for the possibility of violence in the last parts of the plan. The best way to do this is to take control of as much of their weapons as possible. For example, putting in your agents as the officers in charge of a floating fortress would give you a great advantage. Also make sure to sabotage their weapons development programs, or better yet, take all the new weapons for yourself! They might lack creativity, but every advantage should be used. Lastly, Emmanuel Goldstein makes multiple references to the fact that the three superstates all posses Nuclear Weapons. It's unlikely that they would use them on their own territory but, if they do, you are in deep trouble (Game Over man, Game Over!). Your number one priority should be to eliminate any capacity the superstates have for nuclear warfare, namely by sabotaging their nukes. There are a number of ways to go about this each with advantages and disadvantages. First you could disable the rocket ignition, but that might cause it to go off in the silo later, that would be bad. You could replace the warhead with something that isn't radioactive, but the lack of radiation might be noticed. Or you could have agents in position to abort the launch, but that costs manpower and there's a very very large opening for things to go wrong. The only remaining obstacle is the military itself, and perhaps what's left of the Ministry of Love. The remainder of phase two should be spent on subverting and crippling them at every possible opportunity. One way to do so would be to imbalance the constant military stalemate, one reason it persists is that no one is willing to make a risky move, now you can make sure that they do. If said risky move works, the enemy state loses forces and this "inadvertently" results in the one thing that will mess with war morale the most, cross-cultural interaction resulting from armies reaching normally uncontested regions. And to deal with the Ministry of Love you could do a large number of things, such as organizing mass breakouts, but the best thing to do is misdirect them, incriminate spies, high ranking party members, or even Thought Police as Thought Criminals. This will remove elements who may resist the coming revolution, it will break their resolve in The Party, and it may just humiliate The Ministry of Love if you can keep the details from being altered. With all these pieces in place, your finally ready to enter the final stretch.

"Many of the world's troubles are not due just to Russia or communism. They would be with us in any event because we live in an era of revolution-the revolution of rising expectations."
~Adlai E. Stevenson

Now here we are, everything is in place, and it is time to begin burning this rancid institution to the ground. This is phase 3, Exterminate. Ever since the Expand phase, you men have been working subtly within the Ministry of Truth to rouse seditious thoughts within the populace, now it is time to drop the act and get things going into overdrive. Replace the 5 minutes of hate videos with propaganda supporting you and calling out Big Brother. But for that you need a name, its nice to come up with something a little more creative than "The Resistance" but whatever you do, don't pick a name that makes your organization sound like a group of terrorists. Name like The Black Hand (Serbian) or the Assassins (Turkish) are very bad, besides, the people probably don't have a clue what the French Resistance was anyway, so it's OK. You can also do the same with Hate week speeches, be it a 10 minute rant about Big Brother's oppression, or something as simple as "They're taking away the Gin" can get the public's attention. Just make sure to have your men on scene with weapons to act as security and to extract the speaker immediately, Big Brother probably won't be happy about such a transgression. Also make sure that all telescreens are tuned in to the speech, and that no one covers it up later. On the topic of Minitruth, try to shut down all attempts to "correct" news articles and make sure to replace them with the unaltered facts. And lastly you can hijack the telescreens entirely to broadcast news on the revolution, the truth of whats going on around them, and to publicly announce the end of telescreen surveillance. Just make to keep Big Brother from being able to find the source of the problem. And begin handing out supplies liberated from Miniplenty to raise their spirits. If by now people haven't taken the first step and risen up by now, then just get one of your men dressed as a civilian to start revolting, the others should fall in with your tune shortly after. At first you should encourage people to protest nonviolently, indiscriminate destruction is not good PR. Allowing Big Brother to take the first shot is. And if they don't, hell, that was easy; but they probably won't so once they do, it'll be time to start acting out in an official capacity. Start making appearances for the protesters, and remember to look your best, several years cooped up in a tunnel complex is probably has left you rather pale. Also start spreading you logo around (remember, your supposed to be the good guys) on all your stuff. Once the shooting begins, start putting all that military tech to good use, especially that Floating Fortress I mentioned earlier, and lots of Helicopters. A good idea would be to rig speakers to the Helos to spout the good word to the people (that is to say, your word). Give out your surplus weapons to the locals and see if you can ham together a functioning militia, any soldiers you've turned to the cause will help you here. Make sure that loyalists get the message that any violent opposition to the revolution will be met with extreme prejudice Also sodding quintuple check that those nukes won't go off! Make sure to focus your efforts on one location first, namely Airstrip One (New Scotland, anyone?) when people the world over watch and see that the people here are met with all the resistance of a cardboard box, they will rejoice and join the rise of your new regime. Assuming that the earlier phases were done thoroughly enough, the states should fall without too much trouble. From there make sure to keep up with the inertia of the revolution and sway public opinion enough to make sure that your rule is solidified.

...cause I

wanna be

Anarchy!

~The Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK

And that's it, for good or for ill you have now obliterated not one, but three totalitarian regimes and taken over the entire freaking Earth. Hopefully now you can lead mankind into a new age of prosperity.

And from there, we may yet look to the stars, and find new hope, and a fresh start,

for the Imperium of Man.