Keeping a diary is an activity which is not illegal, since there are no laws in Oceania, however if discovered the punishment will be death or 25 years in a forced-labor camp.
A diary contains expressions of privacy, intimacy, freedom and love; such thoughts constitute "throughtcrimes," wherein the Party believed that it is a criminal act of holding unspoken beliefs or doubts that oppose or question the ruling party.
Winston has never quite accepted the principles of Ingsoc and the Party, as he believes in an unalterable past, and finds Party politics reprehensible, so in order to express his anti-Party feelings he wrote a diary which includes violent imagery, which is quite common in the age of Oceania, and reveals anti-Party feelings.
According to The Atlantic, writers overwhelmingly use Orwell's novel to describe the surveillance state—which makes it easy to forget who's really oppressed today.
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