Word: eurasia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Super. In Orwell's 1984, Britain is no longer Britain. It is merely part of the superstate Oceania (the British Isles and Atlantic Islands, North and South America, southern Africa, Australasia). From 1960 on, Oceania has been ceaselessly at war, sometimes as ally and sometimes as foe, with Eurasia or Eastasia, the only other existing powers. All three of these monolithic superstates have the atom bomb; none ever uses it because continuous, wasteful, indecisive warfare has become economically essential-"to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living...
Ideologically, Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia have no quarrel; they are alike as three blackjacks. But war has turned out to be the simplest way of convincing the masses that their countries and their lives are in a state of emergency, which can only be met if all thought, as well as all government, is subject to absolute dictatorship. Hence the three great slogans that Oceania's wretched citizens read and hear every hour of their lives...
...Science magazine, Dr. Alber Wolfson of Northwestern University advances his explanation: that they are led astray by the earth's fickle geology. According to a fairly well established theory, says Dr. Wolfson, the continents were once bunched together in two main masses: "Laurasia" (North America and Eurasia) and "Gondwana" (South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia), which were separated only by shallow seas (see map). During the Cretaceous period, 60 million years ago, both masses broke up and drifted slowly apart, their light granitic rocks floating on the heavy, plastic basalt that underlies both the oceans and the land...
...Heritage. What is this Europe that once more-this time with U.S. help and encouragement-gropes for unification? It is not actually a continent; it is a relatively small peninsula of vast Eurasia. It is marked off from Asia not by geography but by its heritage: Greek art and intellect, Roman law and government, the Christian religion. It is the heir to England's Magna Charta, to France's cathedrals (and France's revolution), Italy's Renaissance and Germany's Reformation, to Don Quixote, the Divina Commedia, the Nordic sagas. Lacking a fixed geographical border...
Those bases would have to be within at least 2,000 miles of the objective, declared Army Secretary Kenneth Royall. "Even from any of the Atlantic island nations or from Japan or Alaska, frequent and intensive strategic bombing could touch only fragmentary parts of central Eurasia," he maintained...