Eric Blair's Nineteen Ninety-four (Central TL)

The Nineteen Ninety-four (1950) written by the Eric Blair of the Central-victory universe is of particular allohistorical interest, given how well-studied his counterpart's work is in most timelines (and given how many hellish TLs it reflects). From our TL it's an AH of an AH of an AH, requiring very delicate description. The author is technically the same man, but warning of a tyranny in the style of Stalinism or fascism would be redundant in Japan-allied Blackshirt Britain and also meaningless in a TL where the Second Great War was between late-Wilhelmine Germany and Trotskyite Russia.

Blair's death in January 1950 happened under the eyes of secret policemen--the writer arrested by Blackshirt thug boss Stanley Jones, interrogated under antisocialist Labour underling Michael Aaronson, and briefly released by James Burnham's British man-on-the-ground Max Rutherford. Rutherford quickly betrayed him once he heard his exiled boss's work on managerialism and mirroring power blocs might get dragged into Britain's dangerously overheated politics. Their names make it into the rumpled draft secreted by his allies: he can name them since this is a direct warning, not Orwell's work about England no longer being England.[1] 1994 was issued by Secker & Warburg's secret press, picked up in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and New York.

Writing from a starved, insane, bombed-out dictatorship that had joined and lost two Great Wars, 1994 isn't a warning of sanctioned violence or naked lies, of camps and exploitation, of secret-police forgery and sabotage--that had all already happened by 1949. Blair's Winston has more of a spine and knows the consequences of speaking up, Julia is less hedonistic and more aware of hypocrisies, and O'Brien is much more detailed and ambitious--and still ahead of the reader as well as Smith, both brainstorming how they'd put up a fight but trapped by the author without knowing it. Unlike Orwell, Blair had to point out not what the Anglos could lose, but what they were already forgetting they'd given up.

Without Catalonia or Koestler Blair is less self-righteous, seeing better his own anticommunism and primness--the tyranny is run through Anglish (rather than German or Slavic-style syllabic abbreviations), the Sunday Roast (now from Southafrica) is an object of cultish worship, it's a mess rather than a regimented, social-engineered machine, a 50s regime figure is called "Orwell" after Blair's occasional pseudonym, etc. Outside of the novel, it was Englishness that all the world's democracy and socialism had turned against, and Blair's hopes for a Revolution against the mounting tyranny were well-dashed by 1949: any of his remaining naïveté is reserved for the descriptions of future social democracies/democratic socialists. Orwell had believed that a small, elite, evil group just wanted pure power, shot their way in, and kept it by brainwashing and violence: Blair saw from the inside how tyranny tried to build legitimacy and sustainability, seeing friends and enemies leap into the new Japan-inspired English Republicans. "How many fingers?" games and classical conditioning would've seemed comical to Blair given what he knew--while Orwell relished his hatred of systems and couldn't comprehend complicity, a broken Blair was caught while writing a list of hidden undesirables for the political police.

Much in Blair is simply reversed from Orwell: instead of the Anti-Sex League strengthening dictatorship by eradicating the Almighty Orgasm,[2] any officer or bureaucrat with something to offer has a web of concubinage to pit women against one another and even to encourage their husbands to mistreat them (and, in the absence of divorce, thereby favor the man they have to sleep with to obtain anything resembling justice). Instead of a careful self-deceiving bureaucracy it takes years to reverse orders because honchos are told so little they just keep going with what they were initially told. Instead of Newspeak (based on Basic English), leaden Anglish[3] is eliminating fancypants French-based words (while adopting paradoxes and seemingly self-contradictory concepts from Asian philosophies). The aristos who insist on saying perspire instead of  sweat are fobbed off onto the 8M-strong Army. Instead of foreshortening language prefers evasion and euphemism, or Japanese imports like the nonanswer mu. It's the superpowers that are adopting "zonal languages"—Interslav, Neo-Aryan, Nostratic, Eastasian kango, even an "Anglo-Norman" auxiliary loanwords and creoles for the exiles in France and Quebec--most all of them designed to increase social tolerance and mental flexibility. The Islander and Eastasian empires mostly facilitate pidgins and the basic vocabulary that slave-soldiers need.

Getting deeper into language, protagonists lose the will to live on false news: there's still the slavering nationalism, barb-wire security institutions in London, brazen impossibility, known untruths, and the usual state epistemological posturing. Words are emptied until the villains kill for only clichés and slogans, emotion severed from any cause, a made into a button to be pushed. Living in a dictatorship Blair is more concerned with violence against people one has no animus against: rule through porn or newspaper astrology would strike Blair as childish. Recorded nightmares are quaint, power for its own sake boring, the Two Minutes' Hate amateur. Many reviewers were irritated by the sudden ending, where Smith gives a ringing damnation of everything the Island had lost since 1922 and how humanity's true potential was going on the other side of the Channel. O'Brien silently gives Smith his sidearm and Smith kills himself, but there's little doubt that a dying and terrorized Blair had meant to shock readers into realizing that their fates were in their hands even as they couldn't strike directly at the Army and councils. Like Orwell he wanted to anger readers onto the side of humanity and refusal to submit.

As the Blackshirts and spycatchers and Wartime Emergency Councils and Ministries of Supply and Information took over a real failing Britain, they easily turned into the novel's chaotic British Party: the Second Great War was a new sort of dictatorship, without a real Leader. The militarized New-Threat Undergroup prefers cold baths, leaving the luxuries to the Countrywide Go-Betweens at the top of administration. Unlike Orwell's Outer Party, it's the Workers who have to be kept in line with distorted preaching from the Church Study Board or conscription into the Army, mines, or penal factories. State functionaries are studiously excluded from the Party, even the Lower New-Threat Groups: only block wardens have any dealing with it. The De-Traitoring Guard (the Outer Higher Body's secret enforcers) use overwhelming force hauling in suspects--or just at random, to make it look like England's under enormous threat constantly, that there really is something. The wiretaps are invisible and the Outside Higher Body (thought police) will make you confess without even keeping you up past bedtime. The "West English" (Irish) are a brutalized underclass, regularly beaten and publicly hanged for the smallest crime: they'd lost the Island two world wars with their constant rebellions: West Island is dominated by the pseudo-pagan Northern Flame much more than even underground Catholicism any more. But the state organs are typically nameless, just someone in plain clothes bearing a carnet or (extremely rarely) a warrant.

Blair makes a clever trick where characters confuse "the Island"--Britain or England are never mentioned in 1994--with Honshū. Both have fatalism and industry but few resources. "The Emperor" is a slight man in an ornate uniform, dapper, hair carefully parted, often on horseback, with a slender moustache (either Hirohito or Edward IX). Both islands are marked by a sentimentalized brutality--simpering, even, the magazines running flowery martial odes to soldiers and their weeping mothers, or to orphaned colonials pining at their mothers' graves after the latest failed feint. The drowsy village scenes, pith helmets in the jungle, and warships rounding the Capes are described in rather Edwardian terms by Blair (as is the Worker class's brutal shortsightedness and squalid smelliness).

The Party's regime has foreign-ized Britain by inviting everyone in from the Continent--Blair long denounced the wartime "allies" like Jew-baiting Reichswehr butchers or Secretary Stalin's escaped "social-fascist" mercs like Feldbin, Mielke, Grigulevich, Mercader, Beria, and Serov. Blair found the now-synarchist Azaña a particularly distasteful figure in the London cafés, and praised Ibárruri for discarding the Republicans' "bourgeois" priest-baiting and praise of violence.[4] Occult-fascist maniacs like Evola and Plantard, "brown" clerics Müller, Caggiano, Hudal, and even outright Odinists quickly enter the purged and debased Church of England. The Party interrogators are in black robes--epitomizing un-Englishness rather than any real totalitarian trend in Central-Victory Britain. Newer Islander architecture's "incomplete" rather than monolithic, though there's plenty of what appears to be "playful" Brutalism. O'Brien's "bent" sidearm is recognizable to weeaboos/Japanese slave laborers of all TLs as a wakizashi. The commandants sport lots of monocles, spiked helmets, and waxed moustaches thanks to all the French and German hardliners that came over. The aristos believe in death before dishonor and use knightly language, against the careful Anglish of the bureaucrats: the two characters talk differently, and Winston says it makes his head hurt to hear both talking to each other. In an example of typical multiversal surreality (cf. Hodgkin's Law) 1994 vaguely denounces an English civil war (that may or may not have happened in-universe) of squabbling anarchists, nun-raping shopkeepers, and vain generals ...

The wider world of 1994 is mostly detailed by an imaginary-in-the-book enemy of the state named (in a typical strange fluke) Maurice Gomberg, whose starry-eyed Book highlights the best aspects of all the superpowers, each a different flavor of socialism and democracy. Currently there's horrifying wars in the Philippines, Indonesia, West and East Africa, the Indian Ocean, and all across Central Asia. The Islander Party insists the Damncolonials are suffering immensely from the Pay-Back missiles and Mighty Shock "Great-Weapons" pouring into Paris and Berlin, or the nuclear ICBMs tracking across Greenland on the map on the omnipresent Folk-Screens. It insists that the UN's a gang of natural-born backstabbers who can't help but turn on each other, pretending they'd never been friends or allies and rewriting their own history. The Island's always been friends with Eastasia. The eternal war here is caused not by need to destroy resources but by UN superpowers' refusal to uphold their own principles, remaining colonialist (Eurafrica) or patronizing (Oceania), or blocked by bureaucratic wheel-spinning (Eurasia and Oceania). They content themselves with back-and-forth or holding the line against the worst dictatorships imaginable, hiding behind the Ruwenzori and the Altays without even inciting revolt. The Island promises its people that perpetual war must be faced so that perpetual peace may be won. Their propaganda about massive Axis victories in Westafrica, Manchuria, Kashmir, and the Moluccas just baffle Eurafricans and Eurasians--and they definitely laugh at the constant threats of punishment for UN treachery and defiance. Even Holland now yawns behind the Brest-to-Texel Atlantic Wall: Islander missiles are built for quantity rather than quality and Eurasia and Oceania supply a fresh whole antimissile system every other month now. The UN is deeply worried about the waste of resources, however.

Colchester and Norwich were nuked after Rotterdam was destroyed by Supreme Air Marshal Harris in 1951--but the Book reveals that the UN couldn't bear the brutality, with a tearful apology from the world's leaders force-beamed from NYC onto the Island's mandatory Victory Receivers and Folk-Screens. The message of shared humanity and solidarity prompted defections spiraling into an uprising among all classes that badly shook up the Party. They realized they had to control the Neo-Britisher people with thought and language as well as through surveillance and repression, to erase the history of revolt to prevent even the thought of its possibility. Gomberg reveals that the flying viewscreens are mostly from foreign powers checking out what rustbucket the Island's gonna catapult at them next. The British Pacific and Caribbean immediately defected to the Inter-Oceanic Pact, damned by the Blackshirts as traitors losing the Empire. The Island would never dare use the Bomb again, because the entire combined navies of the world--IJN included--would then keep the Channel open for the 24 hours it would need to end the blood-soaked tyranny.[5]

The Inter-Oceanic Treaty Organization is a cheerful system of welfare states, comfortable, and culturally-creative; its economy is bustling but a little stiff from its overly-helpful bureaucracy. Oceania's portrayed as very complacent in its quadrilingual democracy. It'd rather trade with the two Axis empires than fight since they're pretty outmatched on the oceans that flank it. Citizen awareness and cameras everywhere keep the police on their toes. Northamerica's a consumer republic and a blazing volcano of both high and pop culture: the Latin members are more spiritual in their ambitions. The Atlantic Union (or Westropa, centered on the Franco-Algerian Eurafrican Community) includes a reunited Red Italy plus Holland and Scandinavia as looser signatories, and signed NATO with Northamerica. It's rationalistic, urbane, and nuclear-powered, full of bullet trains and Arianes. Algerians and Senegalese living in Paris and Turin's spacious banlieues have little to fear. I'd add a lot of spiritek Teilhard-talk to make it realistic, maybe opposed by a C.S. Lewis exiled in Oceania. It has both direct democracy at the bottom level and thoughtful dirigisme at the top. The post-Trotsky Eurasian Union is rather close to a benevolent dictatorship, a tad stale socioeconomically, ethnically-divided, too preoccupied with its little councils, run by the Army and industrial combines, and with many Hohenzollerns rising in the CPE. It's a leader in science and sent a man to the Moon in 1963 (and a woman to Titan in 1993). It's a bit poor but dedicated to human potential, to technology that works with the people and places.

Afrasia has been isolationist for a while, sending out only petrol and carpets to any buyers. Given all the noblebright I have them as tolerant and dedicated to material prosperity (from the oil) and spiritual cultivation in equal measure. Southafrica has bad Spartan pretensions and nukes and is pretty Keppel-Jones, though Zulus act as the elite forces. Eastasia is barely described beyond its boundaries and holding of Malagasy, except Blair implying that SW Asia's war against it isn't clean-fought because Burmese are sneaky little--

Gomberg's Book is far less important to 1994's plot than Goldstein's is to 1984: the Central-Victory TL lacks the large superpower blocs emerging in WWII, or its managerialism or developmentalism. 1994 is more of a guidebook against the crushing of the human spirit by dictatorship, one that Blair actually lived rather than inferred. So as Gomberg's Book provides the scenario, so I shall provide the history.

The Reichswehr had gotten everything it wanted, from high-seas fleets and Ukraine to the "six-month war" it promised against the underfunded Red Army--and it had choked. After GWII USSR gets Ukraine and Belarus while Berlin held on to Hungary, Bohemia, Slovakia, and Poland as long as it can. The Red Army was passable and acceptable to the Centrals, producing a joint Soviet-Austrian-German occupation of Eastern Europe. The further right--Freikorps and Cagoulards--fled to the only fascist and revanchist country left. Postwar Britain is starved, paranoid, fascist, and believes itself divinely-descended and -appointed to run the planet. England's democrats went to France, its socialists to Germany (doing the spadework for its relatively bloodless 1968 youth revolution).

The 50s British regime stabilized and even held the "rebellious, slightly rearranged colonies" across the Pond (Northamerica) to be better than its "Greater English" system of milking the Irish and sending the Scots to administer the colonies. The British Federation's civil war was very bad in Canada, Montréal badly damaged and tank battles at the further ends of Rideau Street. I like to imagine that the Queen Mother hijacked the new vessel sharing her name and the one with the name of her new successor, leading a loyalist air/sea flotilla to France 1952 and then accompanied by a 200-ship superpower honor guard to Halifax. Southafrica had even signed into IOTO, but the United Party's 1952 loss produced a regime that was racist against even Whites, creating the wildlife-free National-run giga-ranch we know and love today.

The Balkans had voted themselves into SSRs by the early 60s and Centropa's Communists were increasingly pro-Moscow (mostly for the egalitarianism. And heavy industry). Let's say a 1967 Katanga crisis finally disrupts the Centropan empire, as the ex-French colonies attack Southafrica. By 1969 the German SSR is a mega-Räterepublik counterbalancing the RSFSR, with numerous and oft-noisy workers and soldiers--ranging from aristos to stodgy Thälmann types. Of course there's the many Spartacists; even Straßer and Schleicher can find a place in the GSSR. Eurasia is a great rainbow of communisms and even socialisms by the 80s.

Oceania comprises the Organization of American States, the British Royal Family and the Canadian Commonwealth Commission, the Pacific Union, the Caribbean Federation (minus the Bahamas and P.R.), and the Southern Oceanic Pact. Brazil and Northamerica[7] are full of new border states/territories that had been founded to bolster the frontier (and to increase local rule) when Spanish America was still being fought over by the various blocs. Iberians and exile British socialists came in to advise by 1970. Its prevalent cameras catch any police abuse. It's a tad desperate to be friendly with everyone, to separate itself from what Britain's become (and to block Irish-American Anglophobia). Oceania and Eurasia's encyclopedias insist on one big human family, studiously indicating any change to the articles. It's the Island that's defined by its hatred. Australian MPs are seen in Washington as often as in Canberra, and Northamerica's Congress often meets in Ottawa for ceremonial purposes.

Beyond being unwilling to take the Island, the Uniteds are hypocritical--they always go, "oh, XYZ was a misstep but now we know better, reversed our position on the evidence we were waiting on, apologized, and it won't happen next time. They're willing to "export democracy" to their "sister republics" whenever they get unrestful or arrest "militarists," but the giant Islander pimple remains unpopped. Many of the anti-peace rants partake of a logic that rankles many readers, that seems more totalitarian and blazingly self-righteous than what it denounces. Conservative-distributivist Islamism is rising, defining itself against the hyperpowers' gentle hypocrisy (or barking insanity), coming from the stable footholds in Islander India. Eurafrica's squeezing of West- and Centafrica for resources produces more refugees than otherwise.

The Island particularly loathes the traitors in Ottawa and Canberra and their plans to put the Duchess of York on the throne, replacing the flags of the Boar's Head (Crown) and the Hammercross (Party). Ed 9 and Hirohito are actually still alive, but being taken to ever-deeper underground cities when they're not reviewing parades. The elites squeeze some gentility from the butcher-run tropical slave empire.

The Pacific coast from Sapporo to Singapore is just coal-choked hell-factories tied together by bullet trains. The generals and admirals' power is dissipated by squabbling camarillas (none of the IJN's weapons really fit): mostly they're concerned with preventive measures against the 30s' "assassinocracy." Asiatic "self-obliteration" did cause a problem in the 60s as aging officers attacked the Royal Navy, bringing even kamikazes. The yakuza are the man domestic power, intermediary between the fascists, military, and the tricontinental zaibatsu who own extensive plantations from Mexico to Peru. China's run by the Blue Shirts and triads, but also ex-CCP officers taking "military socialism" seriously. Washington prefers to split the IJA and IJN, or pit Tokyo against London. More alarmingly, even the most bloodthirsty IJA general fighting the Vietnamese/Kampucheans/Filipinos or the most delirious politicized IJN junior officer finds the Islanders creepy--anachronisms, doublethink, and poorly-built vessels (often they're reduced to using Chinese steel when India runs out).

[1] like many ex-Reds he feared a Red England--even though TLs with the Red Army at Calais or a frightful Lunacharskyite revolution sweeping the Continent didn't mean some new SSRs: the English revolutionaries' brutal purges were against the Stalinists; J.D. Bernal's NICE wants to become its own emotionless species culling any Baselines who'd cause too much trouble with our art and "Melanesian existence"--but they'll be quantum physicists before they'd bend their knee to that passel of Frankensteins and Omegans across Water Unit TW! whether dictatorship or nightmare superscience, Soviet annexation is a fever dream of Englishmen in all TLs, restricted to the fictions of various iterations of Orwell, Amis, Frederick Forsyth, Burgess, and Constantine Fitzgibbon
[2] a theme for English writers, viz. Amis and Pullman
[3] another tweak at himself
[4] the brief Stalinist experiment and even Leninism--based as it was on H.G. Wells more than  Owen or Engels--resembled Mexico's callista excesses
[5] Blair blames "Asiatic" doublethink for letting London disavow this possibility, and keep pretending it's eternally safe from invasion (even as it threatens the workers with perpetually-imminent United attack)
[6] already it was pretending it still ruled the States as well as Canada
[7] Blair's unfamiliar enough with the US to not balk at the weird little new states—but they’re all plausible 30s and 40s movements)

many thanks to dA's mapmakers and of course RVBO; Central American districts from here