text stringlengths 0 171 |
|---|
physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief--or perhaps |
not even a belief, merely a hope--that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was |
not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, |
perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but |
simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a |
person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and |
get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this |
guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced |
at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently |
decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was |
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. |
A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was |
between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind. |
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine |
running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. |
It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the |
back of one's neck. The Hate had started. |
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had |
flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the |
audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and |
disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago |
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading |
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and |
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned |
to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes |
of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in |
which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, |
the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against |
the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, |
sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still |
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, |
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was |
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself. |
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of |
Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, |
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a |
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile |
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles |
was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a |
sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack |
upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that |
a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible |
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less |
level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big |
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding |
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom |
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, |
he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed--and all |
this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the |
habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak |
words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally |
use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to |
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on |
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row |
after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam |
up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others |
exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the |
background to Goldstein's bleating voice. |
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable |
exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. |
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power |
of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, |
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger |
automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia |
or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was |
generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although |
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a |
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, |
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the |
general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this, |
his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes |
waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs |
acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. |
He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of |
conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its |
name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible |
book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author |
and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a |
title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one knew |
of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor |
THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if |
there was a way of avoiding it. |
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and |
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort |
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little |
sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and |
shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. |
He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and |
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The |
dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' |
and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the |
screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued |
inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the |
others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The |
horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.