This is my cover for what the world looks like in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, based partially off the information from
Nineteen Eighty-Four Graphics.
The timeline diverges in 1950 when the Korean War escalates into a nuclear exchange between the USA and the USSR and their respective allies.
It isn’t exactly known what happened afterwards (partially due to the machinations of the Minitru and its counterparts), but here’s a rough outline:
The governments of the USA (Washington was leveled by Soviet nukes, causing a power vacuum after the entire chain of succession was vaporized), UK and British Dominions were overthrown by Socialist movements within them, which proceeded to merge into the English Socialist Party of the newly formed Oceania (which soon absorbed a highly destabilized/collapsing Latin America, Iceland and the European colonies in Africa south of the Congo). Initially, the to-be Ingsoc Party intended to realize their lofty and utopian goals; in the early 1960’s, however, a more totalitarian-leaning faction of the Party led by Oswald “Big Brother” Moseley (who remained socialist ITTL but retained his totalitarian tendencies) violently seized the reins of power, purged their liberal counterparts (89% of all Party members at the time, with the remaining 11% becoming the Inner Party by the time the novel takes place), and transformed Oceania into the Hellhole we all know and love.
Meanwhile, during the initial chaos following the nuclear exchange, the Soviet Union managed to conquer mainland Europe; not just the land of the countries that were part of NATO,
all of it. "Glorious Uncle" Stalin’s successor, Lavrentiy Beria, would not only continue the former’s policies, but expand them, and reorganized the SSRs so that they weren't all based off of major ethnic groups; Beria renamed the country the Eurasian Union sometime in the late 1950’s.
With the world’s superpowers distracted, China (ruled by the KMT) would launch wars of expansion into the Koreas, Japan and Indochina for their resources, manpower and (in Japan's case) industry, to help fuel/kickstart Chiang "the Marshall" Kai Shek's version of OTL’s Great Leap Forward. In 1961, he declared the Republic of East Asia, and proceeded to join the ongoing war between Oceania and Eurasia as its own side. (Despite what the Minitru and its counterparts say, there aren't any shifting alliances of 2 superstates against the third; it's always just been a 3-way battle royale since 1962.)
And it is a battle that will likely drag on, at least until the pollution and inevitable resource shortages caused by constant war production causes the whole thing to grind to a stop, thanks to the Ingsoc, Novbol and Selfdeath Parties' true goal: holding on to power for power's sake until the end of time. In reality, however, no matter how much the Inner Parties apply Doublethink to the situation, I'd say they've only got until the mid-21st century
at most before everything (not just Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia and their respective Parties, but
human civilization itself) crashes and burns.
View attachment 667432
The golden pixels scattered throughout the superstates are each Province's chief city/regional capital.
Go ahead and criticize me if you want, but this is my first map post on this site, so please be mindful of that.
A continuation of my last post, here's my headcanon for the history of Oceania:
Ingsoc can find its roots in the various socialist movements within the United States of America and the British Commonwealth. Society in these countries weren’t all that great in the early 20th century, with America being economically ruled by giant capitalist companies who were trying to squeeze every last drop of productivity from the population as they could; work lasted up to 12 hours per day, leaving little time for people to see their families, do their hobbies, and simply live. Unlike OTL, Roosevelt simply fails to become president, and the capitalists continue business-as-usual monopolizing everything from steel to lumber to the water people drink. Because of this, no matter how much they tried, the worker’s unions had little success or support to push legislation through congress to improve their health, safety, and wages (mostly due to the fact that by 1940, every member of congress was bought out by the very companies the unions were fighting against).
Things weren’t quite as bad in Britain, where the workers were at least allowed to form their own political organization, the Labor Party. However, they were constantly sidelined by their Conservative and Liberal counterparts within Parliament not only in Britain itself but also its Dominions, even as the conditions of the working class visibly deteriorated.
Another factor to Ingsoc‘s eventual rise is that of race. The Anglosphere was predominantly European in ethnicity and background, however there was a sizable minority of Africans in the American south, who were being used as a source of labor cheaper than even their white counterparts, not helping that their ancestors were slaves before the first civil war. A more glaring misdeed, however, was the situation in the Dominion of the Union of South Africa, where despite making the majority of the population, native Africans were treated as second-class citizens under the English and Dutch-descent Boers.
Due to these factors, tensions between the ruling elite and the common people rose throughout the first half of the 20th century. There was a brief hope for change when the Bolsheviks took over Russia, however when it quickly devolved into a dictatorship, that hope quickly evaporated. The situation only got worse with the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the 2nd Great War, the latter of which made the inhumane toil the corporations and trusts subjected the working man to mandatory by law, and they kept it that way even after Japan surrendered in 1945.
Ultimately, everything came to a head when the 3rd Great War erupted in Korea in 1950, specifically when it went nuclear in 1953 as the Red Army approached Paris. The resulting devastation in Britain, America and parts of Canada sent the western allies’ economies into the gutter, and their societies were thrown into upheaval. In the US, the Soviets had wiped the capital of Washington off the map through heavy atombombing, killing not only the President but his entire line of succession, creating an all-out power vacuum. Seizing the moment, the Workers’ Party of the USA had their militia storm government buildings in all major cities (the military was stranded in Europe, and therefore were helpless to events back home), and by 1955 had secured their rule over the States.
In the Commonwealth nations, where there was still law and order, the public blamed the ruling Conservative-Liberal coalition government for the devastation caused by the nuclear exchange, and were soon voted out and replaced by the Labor Party and its counterparts. Almost immediately, the capitalist giants of the Anglosphere found themselves surrounded not only by their own laborers but a hostile government, as were the racist institutions in South Africa and the former CSA; within a few years, they were thoroughly torn down and brushed under the rug of history.
Now that their goals had been accomplished, the socialist parties were now faced with the question of where to go next. Fortunately, the answer came on November 20th, 1957, when Lavrentiy Beria declared the reorganization/merging of the USSR, its East European puppets and its occupied territories into the Eurasian Union, and denounced the western socialists as “fake” and "too lenient", declaring that they were to be swept away by the strength of the newly rebranded Neo-Bolsheviks. The “false” socialists promptly banded around this cause to survive and eventually defeat the Neo-Bolsheviks in Moscow. To better organize their efforts, on May 30th, 1958, the British Commonwealth member nations and the United States of America officially merged into the Union of Oceania, and the various socialist parties of those countries merged into the English Socialist Party. (‘English’ as in the cultures of the Anglosphere as a whole, not just England by itself.)
The government of Oceania was organized into Provinces, based off of the countries that formerly occupied the land that was now Oceania (bar the assimilation of Alaska into Canada and the reunification of Ireland), and the Provincial governments were governed by the federal government. The federal government was composed of 3 main branches: the Ministry of Plenty, which supervised the redistribution of wealth and products, both industrial and agricultural; the Ministry of Truth, which was intended to give the Proles (proletariat sounded too Russian) accurate, up-to-date information about the war and other ongoing events; and the Ministry of War, which controlled the Oceanic Proles’ Free Army, Navy and Air Force. The 3 ministers in charge of them were subservient to the Worker’s Congress (think the politburo), seated in New York City. In turn, the Congress was subservient to the Supreme Chairman, the first of whom the WC elected to that position being Oswald Mosley.
However, this system of centralized government was short-lived. As Oceania was forming, to its south Latin America was collapsing into anarchy. Due to border security issues, the WC decided to intervene in 1960 to restore order. The same would happen in the former European colonies in Africa from Congo southwards in 1963. This is where they ran into a problem: not all of the colonies (which were swiftly integrated into South Africa) had belonged to the British; Angola and Mozambique were Portuguese and Congo was Belgian in former ownership; not to mention that Latin America was culturally Spanish (Portuguese in the case of Brazil), and were distinctly un-English. The solution, devised by John F. and Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, was to decentralize rule to the Provincial level. Each province would have its own Congress and 3 ministries, run locally both in its operations and the people the Party would recruit to man them, while the federal government would take on a more supervisory role. Not only did this reduce administrative stress, but it also helped the Proles everywhere in the country not feel like they were being ruled from some Far-off land.
Unfortunately, the brothers Kennedy would never be credited for their genius, in fact they, as well as nearly all of the other founding members of the Party, would disappear completely from the historical record.
You see, Oswald Mosley, the
de facto leader of the largest country to ever exist, was likely the biggest control freak to've ever lived; though the rest of the English Socialist Party didn’t realize it in 1958, they had given a tyrant along the likes of Stalin, Beria and Hitler the keys to the Union. Shortly after the annexation of Latin America, Mosley initiated a “shakedown” of the Party, and from then until 1965 a whopping
89% of Party membership was arrested, tried and convicted of crimes against “the revolution” (most of which were likely fabricated), and executed. Some of those purged, such as Gus Hall and Lawrence Sharkey, had legitimate reasons to be eliminated, however Mosley also purged liberal socialists, such as the Kennedys, moderate socialists like the trio of Aaronson, Rutherford and Jones, hardcore socialists like Emmanuel Goldstein, and… well, anyone who wasn’t an absolute sycophant towards him and his personal version of English Socialism. All efforts and contributions of the purged were subsequently attributed to the Supreme Chairman.
Once the purges were complete, Mosley began vilifying everything socialism stood for, claiming to be doing so for socialism’s sake. The Ministry of Truth was converted into a massive propaganda machine, spewing outright lies for the Proles to consume. The idea was to make them too distracted by their own lives and entertainment to be interested in politics, and for the most part it worked. The Ministry of Plenty’s operations were rerouted to wasting physical materials so that the standards of living wouldn’t rise, and give the Proles more impetus to overthrow him and his lackeys, the newly-dubbed Inner Party. The Ministry of War was rebranded as the Ministry of Peace.
To top off the paragraph above, in 1969, Mosley added a fourth branch to the government: the Ministry of Love. This ministry and the Thought Police warrant their own discussion, but the short of it is that Oswald wanted everyone in Oceania to love him from the moment they were born to the day they died, no exceptions or martyrs allowed. Most of the ministry’s operations were focused on the Outer Party, the mass of bureaucrats formed in the wake of the purges of the early ‘60’s who, despite carrying out most of the Party's actual work, were very,
very disproportionately targeted for vaporization, re-education and unperson-ment.
Mosley also...
reorganized the provinces within Oceania:
Columbia, Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia were merged into the province of Bolivia, named after Simon Bolivar; Argentina, Chile and Uruguay were merged together to form River Plate (
Rio de la Plata[?]).
Paraguay and the Guyanas were assimilated into Brazil.
The rest of Central America was reintegrated back into Mexico, as they’d been a part of the country when it first became independent.
Britain, the ancestral homeland of all the Anglo-Saxon cultures, was renamed Airstrip One; Ireland Airstrip Two; New Zealand Airstrip Three.
Lastly, the province of America (the former continental USA) was split apart; everything east of the Mississippi River became the province of Atlas, everything from there to the Rio Grande and Rocky Mountains became the province of Missouri, and the remaining third became the province of California.
I could go on with the ways society was torn down and distorted by Mosley, or Big Brother, as he came to…
insist everyone call him. (e.g., Newspeak, the Anti-Sex League, the eradication of all pre-existing holidays and their replacement with Hate Week) But I know you already know most of it, so I'll address the elephant in the room: Why did Oswald Mosley create one of the 3 mothers of all nightmare regimes to ever exist [in fiction]?
The answer is simple: Big Brother had wanted power not for luxury or for pleasure, but for its own sake. Worse, what he believed, and what he managed to convince the rest of the Inner Party, to be the ultimate way to express that power was by controlling every physical and psychological aspect of another person’s life; specifically, by
making them suffer. He made a speech about it to his fellow Inner Ingsoc Party members at one time, and I think it explains it best:
“Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, Comrades, what kind of world we must create to maintain it? It will be a world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will only grow more merciless as it refines itself. …
…Everything else we shall destroy — everything. The sex instinct will be eradicated, and we shall abolish the orgasm. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. There will be no husbands or wives or friends. There will be no progress, except progress towards more pain. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards us, the Party. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science, no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life, no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. There will be no concepts such as freedom, liberty, mercy, or love, except of course love towards us. But always, there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. My fellow Congressmen, if you want a picture of the future, it is a future of eternal victory over man itself!”
-Oswald “Big Brother” Mosley, at the National Party Congress in Bogota, 1973
Big Brother would die in 1980, but this would be carefully buried from the eyes of the Proles and Outer Party, as he was "too powerful a propaganda tool to dispense with,"
as our fellow alternatehistory.com user troy put it. Despite this, the Party has been going on without him ever since, determined to make his "dream" reality...
...
Ask me any questions you have about this, and I'll gladly answer. I'll even put down headcanon for Eurasia and Eastasia if you'd like!