1984 | Page 6

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 eort
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 sh. Even O'Brien's heavy face was
ushed. 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
ung it at the screen. It struck
7

Goldstein's nose and bounced o; 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
ow
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
ob ject to another like the
ame 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 eort 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
ashed through his mind. He would
og
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 gure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be ad-
vancing, 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
inched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a
deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile gure melted into the face of Big
Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm,
and so vast that it almost lled 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
con dence 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
8

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 o immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had
ung 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