1984 | Page 5

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
ashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audi-
ence. 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 gures 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
gure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest deler 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 Gold-
stein 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
6

face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was de-
livering 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 ll 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 demand-
ing 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 exclama-
tions of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-
satised 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 ob ject
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 in
uence 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 Po-
lice. 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 sub ject
that any