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Oceania
Oceania was founded following an anti-capitalist revolution, which, while intended to be the ultimate liberation of its proletariat, soon ignored them It is stated that Oceania formed after the United States merged with the British Empire. The text, however, does not indicate how the Party obtained the power it possesses or when it did so. The state is composed of "the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, including the British Isles, Australasia and the southern portion of Africa". Oceania's political system, Ingsoc (English socialism) uses a cult of personality to venerate the ruler, Big Brother, as the Inner Party exercises day-to-day power.
Analysis:
The super states of Nineteen Eighty-Four are recognizably based in the world Orwell and his contemporaries knew while being distorted into a dystopia. Oceania for example, argues the critic Alok Rai, "is a known country", because, while a totalitarian regime set in an alternate reality, that reality is still recognisable to the reader. The state of Oceania comprises concepts, phrases and attitudes that have been recycled--"endlessly drawn upon"--ever since the book was published. They are also though, argues the critic Craig L. Carr, places where "things have gone horribly and irreparably wrong".
Each state is self-supporting and self-enclosed: emigration and immigration are forbidden, as are international trade and the learning of foreign languages. Winston suspects, also, that the war exists for the Party's sake, and questions if it is taking place at all, and that the bombs which daily fell on London could have been launched by the Party itself "just to keep people frightened", he considers.
The reader is told, through Winston, that the world has not always been this way, and indeed, once was much better; on one occasion with Julia, she produces a bar of old-fashioned chocolate--what the Party issued tasted "like the smoke from a rubbish fire"--and it brought back childhood memories from before Oceania's creation.
Craig Carr argues that, in creating Oceania and the other warring states, Orwell was not predicting the future, but warning of a possible future if things carried on as they did. In other words, it was also something which could be avoided. Carr continues:
It is altogether easy to pick up Nineteen Eighty-Four today, notice that the year that has come to symbolize the story is now long past, realize that Oceania is not with us, and answer Orwell's warning triumphantly by saying, 'We didn't!' It is easy, in other words, to suppose that the threat Orwell imagined and the political danger he foresaw have passed.
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