Political Memes

I feel a thousand years old. People are mixing up George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the TV series Avatar.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Earth has been split into three large superstates: Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. These three states are in perpetual war with one another, with Oceania's alliances frequently shifting so that the current enemy and ally could change at any given moment and history is rewritten to affirm that the enemy and ally had always been in their present alignment.

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.

"There is no war in Ba Sing Se" is the Avatar line, while "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" is generally the line that gets quoted from Ninteen Eighty-Four in similar contexts.