Diary Entry
A story like this should never be told. Ones home should be a sanctuary, not a prison. Neighbours and colleagues should be friends, not enemies. There should be love, instead of hate. Therefore, let this be a lesson for the future generations. Let them learn to value the freedom of speech and act. The power of love and friendship, and if necessary: let them fight to retain these things. Ignorance is not strength. It is helplessness. Helplessness, darkness, and most of all, it is weakness. To prevent such ignorance to ever happen again, here is my story:
My name is Winston Smith. I believe it is the year 1984, but no one is really sure of that. I am a member of the outer party of INGSOC. I live in Oceania and I work for the Ministry of Truth.
No one can be sure exactly of how it started, or even when. All we know is that when we were children: we served the Party. When we were adolescents, we served the party. And then when we came of age: our future expectations and goals were to serve the party. And today that is still what we do. There is nothing above or beyond, nothing more or nothing less. The party is everything, and we are nothing.
War is not power. War is destruction. War is the inability to stand up for your own rights and opinions and beliefs. War destroys everything. In our time, we are unaware of love, thus making it very hard for us to practise it. And the true question is: how to end a war when love is nowhere to be found?
Freedom is not slavery. If there is anything we should value, it is freedom. The ability to make our own choises, to have feelings, even! All of these are denied to us now. Every aspect of our being is controlled, only our thoughts are somehow private.
Often I wonder how long I will be able to stand it. It appears sometimes as if the other people do not at all share my thoughts: do they not see how bad the world is in which we are forced to live? Do they not miss the ability of choice, of emotion at all? Do they even posssess emotion? Earlier I was certain O'Brien, from work, was like me. It wasn't in his words, but rather in the look in his eyes that betrayed him. But now I even doubt that, too. Perhaps I was just seeing things I wanted to see, and had I lost grip of reality. This brought me to the question: what is reality? If the party can control everything: what made us certain that they were not in fact controling reality too? We couldn't know; perhaps we had such an altered view of this world, because of them. Perhaps reality was different, and not at all like this. Who would know?
I will continue to keep this diary, for the future. For you, for everyone else who will ever read this. To give you strength when you are going through the same thing as I am,or to make you aware of all that is wrong in the totalitarian regime of the Party, and for those who are reading this while they are already in a better world: to make you see how much you should value that other world, that true utopia. Remember us, the slaves of the freedom that belongs only to the party, the ignorants that give the government strength, and the victims of a war that is supposed to be considered as peace. Remember this, and value your own life.