In The Face of Pain : DISCLAIMER BELOW

DISCLAIMER : I did not make this map myself, this belonged originally to "MarsBy2024OrBust", who deactivated his account and took the maps offsite. I have decided to repost this map back on site similar to what Yrotsih has done, so that others may continue to appreciate the work that Mars put into it. Once again, I am reposting this back onto the site, and the map/description is not my own work.

. . .

It was the year 1984. Three decades had elapsed since the last major world conflict, though the scars it has inflicted have long lingered after its conclusion. Large swathes of the world's hemispheres had been brought under the grasp of three superstates that had arisen from the burned embers of the old world, with many millions of people under their banners. These three were commonly referred to as Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. In the peripheries of these three titans are those that refuse to remain subordinate to the prevailing political conditions, instead choosing to pursue a existence far removed from the influences of their ideals and cling unto their aspirations to remain convicted of reaching a world whose probities are denounced by the totalitarians as naught but naive and utopian. In their eyes, a world with such foundations could not survive let alone flourish. However the polemic of the totalitarians had done nothing but enrage the conscience of the free world, those who denounced the justification of atrocities, the barbaric acts of the harbingers of destruction.

But the world had not been like this, indeed from the perspective of a contemporary observer all had changed in such a short timespan since the dawn of the 20th century; borders had been redrawn, new states had emerged and novel ideologies had come into the fold. But how did the world arrive at such a state? How did we get here? To answer such a question would require no simple answer; in order to understand the complete picture, one must look at where it all began, a time long before Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia had even existed.

The 1930s were a dynamic period of constant changes within the former United States of America. The nation was reeling from the dual burdens of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the latter an environmental catastrophe that had eclipsed the American Midwest and affected parts of the Canadian prairies. A series of droughts and dust storms arrived in three separate waves over the course of the 30s, which had produced the effect of exacerbating the economic fallout of the Great Depression — that had brought the nation to its knees — within the region. Combined with an ineffective government response to the detrimental damage that had been afflicted by the droughts led to disillusionment among those affected and turned many to the appealing tenet of the developing socialist movements of the nation, perceiving them as a flexible force capable of genuine social change in comparison to the aloofness of the government that did not produce an effective response to alleviate what has been termed as a "tragedy of the commons".

All the while, across the sea in Europe, the Second World War had started.

Back on the home front, the soaring levels of unemployment that were otherwise symptoms of the lingering Depression and the otherwise muted government responses had stirred up an increasingly popular homegrown variant of socialism that had been developed within the nation's boundaries, a new form of socialism that was formulated to be adapted to a wholly American context and primarily inspired by the Fabianists. With its origin in the mobilization of unemployed workers by the federations of trade unions that had emerged and the strategic creation of alliances that bridged the gaps between socialists, progressives, and liberals and forged those forces into one solitary united front — with their ambitions ultimately realized with the formation of the Movement for The Implementation of English Socialism, or simply abbreviated as the English Socialists and later known in Newspeak as Ingsoc. The English Socialists were an ad-hoc coalition of leftists groups throughout the nation, aiming to primarily enact far-reaching social and economic reforms as a response to the current issues that plague the nation.

Following the conclusion of the Second World War, delegates from the French Republic, the United Kingdom and the United States signed a treaty in the city of Dunkirk which marked the formation of the Pan-Oceanic Treaty for Mutual Defense. It was initially created as a system of collective security for the purposes of a shield against any possible attack by the Soviet Union, but had evolved in the following years into an economic union. Once encompassing these three states, it came to include the former nations of Canada, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Portugal and Italy. Meanwhile, the English Socialists, by supporting civil rights legislation at the height of Jim Crow and pulling away the voter base from the former Democratic Party — one of the two major political parties that had composed of the United States' two-party system at the time — had steadily able to win the hearts of more Americans and in the presidential elections of 1952 had their victory following years of campaigning — a triumph that had heralded a shift away from the system of political diarchy — and electing a socialist as president.

Although the first years into office were defined by the actions in the face of the Korean War and by the following year was marked by the advent of the Third World War in Europe, its direct cause was surrounded with unusual circumstances. In continental Europe, the advent of the war saw the devastation of Cologne, of Paris, of Brussels and of Colchester. The latter prompted the British Parliament to initiate a state of national emergency as Civil Defence Act 1948 was brought into effect. The iron curtain that had been raised not a few years earlier — that had divided the European continent in half along ideological lines — had fallen, to its collapse the release of a deluge. In continental Europe, the Soviet Armed Forces swiftly swept through West Germany, the Low Countries and France, terminating with most of Western Europe under its heel and the creation of new regimes. The Soviet Union was immediate to produce a response to the Pan-Oceanic Treaty for Mutual Defense: the formation of the Eurasian Treaty Organization — informally known as simply as the Eurasian Pact — that is therein an organization of Soviet client states that were primarily situated in Europe. Not unlike its rival though, it would soon comprise the economic affairs of its component states.

In the United States, a national emergency known formally as Proclamation 2487 was declared, which stated an unlimited national emergency under threat from the Soviet Union. Although a later clarification by responsible authorities stated that this state of emergency was a temporary measure against an immediate threat, it had swiftly become permanent and came to include the suspension of democratic institutions and processes. What had been an urgent emergency had faded away into a state of normalcy. It was meant to last for the interval of several weeks, but those weeks soon became months and even those became years, until a state of siege merely lasted as long as many remembered, or even as long as one had existed, which was apparent for the younger generations that had arrived ever since then.

Confronted with otherwise tumultuous circumstances, the member states of the Pan-Oceanic Treaty for Mutual Defense had drafted a proposal for a countermeasure concerning the alarming threat of the Soviet Union: unification. Although initially considered as an otherwise extremely unorthodox solution that some had denounced as simply outrageous, it had earned the approval of its member states and in 1958 delegates representing the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Union of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Iceland signed a treaty in New York City that had brought unification to these states. Following further talks, the proposal was carried out and thus the superstate of Oceania was born. With its etymology having primarily derived from a contemporary neologism — though often conflated with a similarly named geographical region that encompasses a large area spanning the southern Pacific Ocean, though in all likelihood this was possibly a complete coincidence — the nascent superstate sought to style itself as the liberator of millions that face oppression all around the world, a hammer that sought to shatter the chains of tyranny.

Oceania eventually expanded to eclipse the nations of South America — the former state of Brazil included — and many states would eventually see integration into the superstate proper. At the beginning, the original proposals had designed the superstate with a parliament and indeed a vast array of political parties, a continent-sprawling federation if put into words. Yet in a twist of tragedy this arrangement of affairs did not stand the test of time. The fledgling superstate was immediately mired with political instability, now having to deal with insurgencies and rebellions in former colonial possessions, where they were viewed as a neocolonialist construct and no different than the imperialists of the previous century. In Britain, the United States, South Africa and others, the domestic situation was just as tumultuous. If Oceania was to survive, it would require increasingly extreme measures; this was the backdrop behind The Party's eventual ascent, as it had been founded years prior. By the onset of the 1960s, the now ascendant Party — claiming to be the successor to the original English Socialists and bearing their ideological torch — had performed a coup with the assistance of sympathetic elements within the armed forces of Oceania as elections were suspended and all other political groups were banned. Thus, the Revolution — as this time period is retrospectively referred to in Party historiography — had begun.

Although met with intense pushback, these were swiftly met with harsher responses. The Party eventually carried out an extensive purge of its older leadership — primarily concerned with the state that the Party was carrying Oceania onto — and dissidents, anyone who criticized and opposed their rule. To this very day, the death toll largely varies, from the hundreds of thousands, to surpassing one million. This metamorphosis was largely complete by the 1970s, with the Party's sway over millions of people now having been cemented, the monolithic Ministries had been established to replace the older institutions and were now carrying out their respective duties, telescreens were entering widespread use, Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein had entered the everyday lexicon, doublethink was implemented and the first editions of the Newspeak, Novilingua and Neolengua Dictionaries had been produced. For as long the Party has said it to be, war was peace, freedom was slavery and ignorance was strength. Indeed, the three-world order that would define this dark chapter of human history had already begun to assume form as similar developments had occured in the former Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China — a move away from their ideological foundations by a totalitarian oligarchy that had cemented itself, with a clear pursuit on power and concerned with maintaining their rule and none else.

Without further ado, the section below details the state of the world in the year 1984.

In Central America, the Guatemalan government under the tenure of Rios Montt has overseen mass killings, forced disappearances and other atrocities against its Mayan population as part of an intensive counterinsurgency campaign against the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity or URNG and their allies, in what has been termed by modern scholars as the Silent Holocaust. In the Southern United States, the Revolutionary Army of the Masses or the RAM has conducted a highly successful protracted guerrilla war against Oceanian authorities, at their current hold encompassing an area from the Applachians and as south as the Floridian Peninsula. They were formed as an amalgamation of numerous underground leftist groups that had opposed the Oceanian state, denouncing that it had "degenerated into state capitalism and likewise has adopted a revisionist stance". The forces that compose the RAM have considered themselves as the true heir to the original English Socialists with many of their tactics deriving from those used by other contemporary insurgencies throughout the Americas, from Cuba to Central America and Colombia. Additionally, the effects of their campaign had stretched far and wide and were not limited to only the former United States; it had inspired a similar revolution in Grenada led by the New Jewel Movement, though it did not withstood the later Oceanian reprisal.

Across the sea in Europe, the effects of the Belgian Spring have continued to ripple through the continent. With its roots as a series of organized strikes contained within the region of Wallonia that had initially protested the acceleration of sovietization policies that was recently announced on the behalf of Belgian authorities, it had flowered into a full-scale rebellion against the Eurasian Pact and their perceived strangling grip over the continent. With the escalation of the revolt — that is now encompassing an area from Calais to Arnhem to Luxembourg — a state of siege has been declared in the neighboring nations of France, the Netherlands and Germany. In the eastern half of the continent, former Yugoslavia did not fare so well within the last four or so years. With the death of Josip Broz Tito, the country has been targeted in Operation Dinara; an invasion by the Eurasian Pact. The former nation at the time was not on good terms with the Soviet Union, with a dissension growing between these two nations decades prior and Yugoslavia ultimately excluded from the rest of the Eurasian Pact. The advent of the marshal's passing was for the Eurasian Pact an opportune moment to tow the traitorous Yugoslavians into the fold of orthodoxy once more, to expunge their heretical line of thought that was practiced and establish a new nation to supersede it that would now be made answerable to any dictat or command given by Moscow. Unsurprisingly, not all Yugoslavs are so enthusiastic on the very thought of this — the awareness of learning that your nation will be in chains for as long as you will live — and so have taken up arms in a protracted guerilla campaign.

All the while in West Asia, in what is Turkey has been the site of yet another Eurasian invasion; commonly known as Operation Baycu. In the aftermath of the invasion, the former country was reduced to a mere rump state that was contained within Central Anatolia while the western halves fell under the Straits Military Commision, with the scarlet standard of the Pact soaring against the skylines of Istanbul, Canakkale, Aydin and Izmir. In the northeast however stands the Turkish Socialist Republic, of which was carved out as the newest member state of the Eurasian Pact. Primarily centered around the city of Erzurum, the Socialist Republic was under the rule of the United Communist Party of Turkey or TBKP, formed as a merger of the formerly banned Communist Party of Turkey and the Workers' Party of Turkey, with Ismail Bilen being selected as the first General Secretary of the nascent state following the end of military rule and the transition towards a civilian administration. Following his death, he was succeeded by Behice Boran as General Secretary. In the southeast, an independent Kurdish state has been successfully founded. During this period, it was under the leadership of the Kurdistan Workers' Party.

Down south in East Africa, the Oceanian advance has begun to rapidly reverse and Oceania is starting to be expelled entirely from Tanzania and the Congo, formerly enveloping the whole of the regions during the intermezzo period of the 1960s and until the earlier years of the 70s. Particularly in East Africa where Oceanian forces have resorted to scorched-earth tactics in response to the continued string of defeats at the hands of the Tanzania People's Defense Force. In what is now Angola and Namibia, were host to the widespread use of chemical weapons — the most commonly used was mustard gas — which was primarily directed at the MPLA, UNITA and SWAPO. With the onset of these attacks, casualties estimated to have numbered in the tens of thousands have been inflicted on these groups and the reportage of these developments has earned Oceania once more the detestment of most of the leaders of the free world; as the superstates were already acceptable targets for a near endless stream of ridicule, mockery and likewise a sense of general hate, perhaps rightfully so. In that regard, it had become customary for many writers or artists in this era to have made comparisons between these geopolitical titans to apocalyptic figures from religious scripture. Period pieces on more than one occasion had Oceania likened to the Beast from the Sea and the Soviet Union to Babylon the Great.

East of Angola was Zambia, which had been formerly known as Northern Rhodesia during the colonial era; though the name "Rhodesia'' referred to the expanse that encompassed it and what is today Zimbabwe, it had become more or less commonly associated with its southern neighbor, which likewise had been referred to as Southern Rhodesia. Here, following a brutal reprisal to a string of nationwide strikes by miners, protests in what is today Lusaka had turned violent and formerly clandestine pro-independence groups had surfaced from the prior years of secretion and underground activities. In South Africa, the very heart of the Party's African branch is now being rocked by the now ascendant African National Congress and in particular its paramilitary wing, the uMkhonto we Sizwe, or MK. Viewing whatever change from Oceanian authorities as simply inconceivable and peaceful resistance as highly impractical, the ANC have turned to militancy in order to carry out their plans with the assistance of other groups for a egalitarian and independent South Africa that would indeed actually cross racial lines, whatever Party claims of a post-ideological and post-racial society nothwithstanding.

Farther north in Rhodesia, the local administration under Ian Smith, who is otherwise held aloft with the steady stream of support from Inner Party members in the African branch. In the face of the protracted bush war that has engulfed the nation, Smith has taken up the mantle of ostensibly maintaining the Party's iron grip over the region, dispatching the Minipax's security battalions and revitalizing the operations of Rhodesia's Thinkpol into an incredible scale, unleashing an unprecendented wave of terror upon the populace with harsh punishments lended for even the most trifling violations. A peculiarity within the region, with a governor of a primarily civilian background — with Smith as an important figure even before the Revolution and formerly holding a position within the Inner Party prior to his promotion as governor of Rhodesia— in comparison to the other governorates that are effectively administered as military districts. Facing the increasingly fierce administration are the Zimbabwe African People's Union or ZAPU has taken root in the southwest with the support of the Ndebele — with Joshua Nkomo as president — and the largely Shona-supported Zimbabwe African National Union or ZANU under the leadership of Robert Mugabe has taken control of lands in the northeast with support among the Shona and FRELIMO in neighboring Mozambique.

In South Asia, the Indian government has initiated a counterinsurgency campaign in order to properly deal with the Naxalites, who have initially arisen in the late 1960s as an peasant uprising situated in West Bengal has blossomed into what can be described as a region-wide quandary and as of the current year has the alleged support of the People's Republic of China, who predictively has ostensibly rebuked those claims as nonsensical. As part of a formal response to the Naxalites, the Indian government has announced the launching of a totalizing offensive to counteract the insurgency, in what has been termed as Operation Steeplechase. In continental Southeast Asia, the Invasion of Vietnam and Laos — or formally as the Southeast Asian Campaign in Chinese sources — enters into its fifth year and to a contemporary observer would seemingly have no immediate end in sight. With the assistance of the CPK in Cambodia and more recently the Communist Party of Burma, the People's Republic of China has sought to establish friendly states in the region and to quote "rectify the revisionist direction recently undertaken by the ruling heads of Vietnam and Laos and to reimplement ideological orthodoxy". The Southeast Asian Campaign has its origins within the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979, a reprisal offensive to the earlier Cambodian-Vietnamese War.

Now though, what about the superstates?

The world that which was outside the free world was the abode of the totalitarians and otherwise viewed by outsiders as the world wrapped in chains, a graveyard of hope and was perhaps the place where the sky — no matter if one had lived in Oceania, the Soviet Union, or the People's Republic — was indifferent. And the people that had lived out their lives under that sky were very much the same, almost to say they were indistinguishable. In essence, there were once hundreds of thousands of millions of people throughout the corners of the world that were all separated from each other by walls of hatred and lies. Where their quotidian activities and everyday lives are all dominated by a lingering sense of fear and distrust, that one might simply disappear one day or two, their names expunged from the state records and thrown down into the fiery depths of the memory holes, that one had simply annihilated from history altogether and never have existed at all. A word had existed in Newspeak specifically to describe this case of damnatio memoriae: unperson. The creation of unpersons was commonplace throughout the superstates, primarily utilized as a tool to swiftly remove potentially dangerous individuals from the picture if they were not sentenced to corrective labor in a joycamp.

As for how the superstates got their start in the place; we may first begin with Oceania, though one also has to look into the history of the Party itself, which is lesser known. Prior to the Revolution, the Party — whose original name has long since been forgotten — was one of the most prestigious successors to the original English Socialists of the United States, which had been dissolved not long after the creation of Oceania as an entity. In the chaotic environment that had defined the former half of the 1960s, the Party had rapidly gained traction within the political scene of Oceania, with their political platform finding multitudes of success within the hearts of minds of the people of Oceania, almost paralleling the ascent of the original English Socialists in the former United States. A steady support base had emerged that spanned the seas, spawning fraternal groups that would eventually prove to have a pivotal role in the toppling of the initial Oceanian government in the events that had transpired in the Revolution and the establishment of the Party's rule.

Following their seizure of power, a new set of policies were implemented, and to some extent these include the far-reaching language reforms that manifested in the emergence of Newspeak, Novilingua and Neolengua, that were in essence highly refined versions of English, Spanish and Portuguese, respectively. As different in the ways that these constructed languages had used to gradually reduce the size of the dictionaries with each new edition, they were all created for a shared purpose: to provide a medium of expression for the worldview that the epigones of the Party had believed in and to make all other modes of thought impossible. The Party's general philosophy is ultimately outlined within The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, or The Book as it was known by contemporaries due to its relatively nondescript appearance. Though, it was in reality not penned by Emmanuel Goldstein — which is now proven incorrect ever since Goldstein himself was revealed to have only existed as a fabrication of the Ministry of Truth, only serving as the physical manifestation of the principal enemy of the state in contrast to Big Brother — and since then held to have been co-authored by multiple Party doctrinaires and ideologues prior to the Revolution.

Many of the other policies of the Party during their reign over Oceania were the creation of the Collective Agriculture Initiatives that were coordinated and managed primarily by the Ministry of Plenty. These initiatives were nearly identical to the kolkhozes of the Soviet Union, and were found in nearly every region of Oceania, with the prime exception of the British Isles. For the average Oceanian during this time — excluding the affluent and distinguished Inner Party — their only source of entertainment relayed from the telescreens were archaic military parades, patriotic news that exalted the Party and Oceania as defenders of liberty and constantly updated on their ostensive triumphs on the battlefield over their adversaries, along the occasional folk songs that would find appeal with the older generations. This form of mass media that was known by the masses were referred to as prolefeed in Newspeak.

On another note, the contemporary Soviet Union was largely defined by the policies of the Benefactor, which is by far the most famous epithet of Georgy Malenkov given from his followers, who had been selected as Chairman of the Council of Ministers following the developments that began after the death of Joseph Stalin. Under his leadership, the Soviet Union disbanded its nuclear arsenal in the aftermath of the Third World War, reorienting the economy towards the production of consumer goods and the creation of the Eurasian Treaty Organization. In the later years his premiership was defined by several notable events such as the onset of the destructive conflict with the People's Republic of China in the late-1970s, the unveiling of the Soviet Union's flagship floating fortress, the initiation of Operation Dinara and Baycu, and much more recently the Belgian Spring. By the beginning of the 1980s, in part to a sharp decline in his health, the Benefactor had largely become reclusive and renounced public life altogether, with the matters of succession coming into question.

Still, perhaps the most fascinating relic of the Malenkov era is the Collective Communal Complex Project that was announced in the penultimate years of the 1970s and was in progress by the 1980s and ultimately abandoned to fate when all came to pass. Carried out with the aims of "the creation of sustainable socialist architecture", the project itself was centered around the construction of self-contained and self-sufficient skyscrapers that were essentially cities unto their own. As far known, there were 22 planned sites for these structures to have been built, but the three most massive and largely completed citadels are located in Western Siberia, Ukraine and Estonia respectively. These megastructures were not built with a singular and uniform layout, but had highly diverse designs that distinguished one from another. Take for example the gear-shaped citadel that is located in Western Siberia and compare it to the cylinder-shaped oppida in Estonia that additionally happens to extend deep underground instead of extending skywards like the former. Today, the withered and degraded ruins of these megastructures would remind one of the similarly gargantuan white concrete pyramids of Oceania that housed the Ministries, that similarly has also survived to become an object of interest to any tourists.

Turning away from the Soviet Union, we arrive at the People's Republic of China. Much had changed since the death of the Eternal Chairman, a posthumous epithet given to Mao Zedong. His succession following his untimely death in 1956 in an accident however was an ultimately complicated and chaotic affair, with foreign news sources referring to such with the term "confused fighting". Though what is more certain about what arrived afterwards is the adaptation of a highly aggressive and confrontational approach to foreign politics by the steady line of the Eternal Chairman's successors, which was exemplified by the invasion of Japan and the unification of Korea under the north in the mid-1960s, the creation of the country's only floating fortress, the funneling of aid for groups such as the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Communist Party of Thailand and in the 1970s, a series of border clashes with Vietnam that eventually escalated to an official open war between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the Sino-Soviet War. On the Chinese side, they have made large victories over the Soviets, the most monumental being the capture of Vladivostok.

Though, these great evils have only once grappled the world, and then never again, with the old humanistic ways of thinking prevailing and likewise the old social fiber of society that was being actively annihilated having been restored to a degree that is recognizable by some metrics. A sense of civilization triumphing over barbarity if one is keen enough to translate it into metaphorical terms. We are perhaps fortunate enough to exist in a time period where these ideas can be the subject of open discussion and criticism. Even if they existed in a fleeting period in comparison to the rest of history, these titans have made sure that they were indeed different from the cycles of tyrants that had emerged in the many decades and centuries that had passed, that they were not so foolish or so weak to allow any compromises. While they have cracked the inner workings of the human mind, mastering the field of language and controlling the range of thought and perception of reality, these have only merely stalled their inevitable demise. That is perhaps an unchanging facet of destiny that could not be altered by any circumstance, that the wheel of history will not cease its continual turning.

. . .

*Special thanks to [ShahAbbas1571]  for some of his ideas on the scenario, more specifically the different circumstances that have allowed the UAR to survive and the current situation of Iran.

*Mars's original postscript, Shah's icon doesn't appear so I added it in.