Becoming Oceania

I am not pretty sure whether it is the book I've read or the cigarettes I've consumed that's keeping me up at this time of the day. It's around four in the morning, but lest do I care.

Tacloban is becoming Oceania, I first thought. By Oceania I mean not the continent down under, but the setting of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. Slowly becoming, beginning with the subtle changes the City Government is doing. Now a highly urbanized city, Tacloban is expectd to grown more prosperous in the coming months or years, depending on the actions the leaders would take. What I have observed however is that, along with the progress, the governing body is slowly erasing the memories of the past, beginning with demolished landmarks, bureaucratic reorganization, and so on.

Nineteen Eighty-Four tells about a dystopic totalitarian state where INGSOC, the ruling Party, takes charge of its citizens not just through providing goods, making the people work, but more importantly, controlling the way they think. To think agains the Party is a crime, a thought crime, and a person accused of a thought crime is punished by immense torture, afterwards reborn to love and obey the principles of the Party. What struck me though is that the Party controls Oceania by reinventing history, for "he who controls the present controls the past." By being a citizen of Oceania, one is denied of remembering the past, and should only believe to what the Party has instilled.

To some extent I would like to believe in th Party slogan mentioned above. Looking at the fate of my hometown I could say that a lot has changed, yet there are too little memories to cherish. The citizens ar provided with too many responsibilities to take care of, too many issues to tackle, and too many problems to solve, leaving no room to reminisce. At the same time, the fragments of the past are slowly being eliminated and replaced with things regarded to be more practical and functional, as these things are implied to be needs. By thinking less, people would start to forget, and soon they would be too senile to remember even what just happened a few seconds back.

If the past could be indeed reinvented, then those who would tend to remember what they saw, felt or heard may be caught, tried and punished, presumably if they had thought of something that would put the government in bad light. Lucky that Tacloban is no totalitarian society (yet), and that no Thought Police exists, otherwise I would have been caught and vaporized at this moment. However, just like the Party, the City Government is reinventing the past by feeding its people with conveniences. It would not take long before the citizens would start to pay back: soon will they be slaves, existing to function, devoid of the memories that would have kept their souls, or at the very least, their sanities intact.

I am guilty of a thought crime. Thought Police, come and get me.