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 solidlooking 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 darkhaired 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 act a part, but,
on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within
thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to
smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the
whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even
against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the
rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could
be switched from one object to another like the flame of a
blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned
against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother,
the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart
went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian
of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant
he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of
Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret
loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother
seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like
a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his
isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very
existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the
mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred this
way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent
effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in
a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from
the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid,
beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog
her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a
stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would
ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than
before, moreover, he realized WHY it was that he hated her. He
hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because
round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle
it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive
symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become
an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face changed into
that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a
Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible,
his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the
surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row
actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same
moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile
figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, blackmoustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that
it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was
saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of
words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable
individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the
three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on
the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone’s
eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandyhaired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair
in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My
Saviour!’ she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she
buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep,
slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B! . . . B-B!’— over and over again, very
slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ and the second — a
heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the
background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet
and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty
seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in
moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to
the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act
of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means
of rhythmic noise. Winston’s entrails seemed to grow cold. In the
Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general
delirium, but this sub-human chanting of ‘B-B! . . . B-B!’ always
filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was
impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control
your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive
reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which
the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him.
And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing
happened — if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O’Brien’s eye. O’Brien had stood up.
He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling
them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a
fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took
to happen Winston knew — yes, he KNEW! — that O’Brien was
thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had
passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the
thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes.
‘I am with you,’ O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. ‘I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt,
your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!’ And
then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s face was as
inscrutable as everybody else’s.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had
happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did
was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides
himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast
underground conspiracies were true after all — perhaps the
Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the
endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the
Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it,
some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that
might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard
conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls — once, even, when
two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had
looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all
guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone
back to his cubicle without looking at O’Brien again. The idea of
following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It
would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known
how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had
exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story.
But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in
which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a
belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he
sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by
automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the
smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals —
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd,
since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous
than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was
tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise
altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was
useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or
whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether
he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it,
made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the
same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he
had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all
others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not
a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge
successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they
were bound to get you.
It was always at night — the arrests invariably happened at
night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your
shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces
round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no
report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the
night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time
existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished,
annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began
writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don’t care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back
of the neck i dont care down with big brother ——
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down
the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a
knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that
whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the
knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay.
His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit,
was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards
the door.