Orwell's Revenge (20 page)

Without words said, a wave of
understanding rippled through the crowd. Big Brother had betrayed them! Blythe had resumed his rightful position. But the Love continued exactly as before, except that the name of the great protector, the fount of all Oceanic love, had been changed. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, her shoulders hunched forward, her free hand waving in the air, had gone straight on speaking. The Fascist octopus had sung its swan song, the woman said, the jackboot had been
thrown into the melting pot. All laws had been abolished; nothing was forbidden any more, and the only arbiter of behavior would be public opinion. Oceania would be
governed by love and reason. The thing that impressed Blair in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause but
without even breaking the syntax.

She was a mean, hollow woman, a skeletal frame fleshed out with words, clothed in sallow skin and
shooting out slogans. What was she doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, she was stirring up hatred. Yes, she was talking of love, of course. Love, love, love. But in fact, she was doing her damnedest to make you hate
anyone who disagreed with her. The grating voice went on and on, and another thought struck Blair. She meant it. Not faking at all— she felt every word she was saying. She was trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that was nothing to the hatred she felt herself. If you cut her open all you'd find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy. Interesting to know a woman like that in private life. But did she have a private life? Or did she only go round from platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even
her dreams were slogans. Blair reached for Kate's hand and smelled a whiff of violets from her hair.

The cadence of the woman's speech slowed. There were to be great changes in government, she was saying. Responsibility for the network had been reassigned to the Ministry of Plenty. The authorities asked for the people's commitment, their toil, their energy; it asked them to lose their identities, and if necessary, to devote the rest of their lives to building a new and glorious future.

“Down wiv Big Bruvver!” shouted a man in a green shirt just ahead of Kate. A few people turned and stared. The man's back looked unpleasantly familiar. “ 'Ooray for Blythe!” the man shouted.

“ 'Ooray for Blythe! 'Ooray for Blythe!” other voices echoed, and soon the square was filled with shouts and cries, cheers and pleas, and gradually a deep, rhythmical chant emerged, “BLYTHE! BLYTHE! BLYTHE!”

The speech continued, in a stern, businesslike tone. The woman was lapsing into the kind of political lecture Blair had attended hundreds of times before, during which your soul writhed with boredom.

She was speaking about telescreens. It appeared that owning a telescreen was to be a new right of citizenship. It was now the official policy of Blytheism that every prole would be entitled to watch telescreen programming at least eight hours a day There would be universal service, round-the-clock entertainment. Fabulous statistics poured out of the woman's mouth. The phrase “our new, happy life” recurred several times. The crowd responded like pigs hearing the rattling of a
stick inside a swill-bucket.

Providing these things would require a great new government endeavor, the speaker admitted. Resources were limited. Radio
waves were in short supply. There was scarcity in the tunnels as well: too many wires, too little room. The telescreens for the masses could only be one-way devices, capable of receiving but not transmitting. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Plenty would meet all legitimate public needs. Her voice rose. The future was glorious. There would be equality, abundance, freedom. “One Policy!” she shouted. “One System! Universal Service!”

Only the announcement of free telescreens had drawn any land of response from the crowd. Kate looked up at Blair with a knowing smile and gave him a wink.

The woman on the platform was back at it. Hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, lackey, flunky, mad dog, . . .
the same old invective, a huge
dump of worn-out metaphors, meaningless phrases tacked together like the sections of
a prefabricated hen house. Her voice hardened.

A grave danger lay ahead. What danger, dear comrades? The danger of backsliding and corruption. Traitorous elements of the old regime would attempt sabotage. The fight against them might entail the death of hundreds of innocent people, but the cause of the revolution was just. Other elements would conspire—were already conspiring—to capture the network and seize it for their selfish private interests. They would attempt to monopolize the wires. They would charge people for telescreen films and sports programs, for all the simple pleasures that even the old Party had distributed for free. These rich men, these
lackey-flunky-mad-dog-jackal-hyena-hydra-headed capitalists, would attempt to control the network, and through the network all the land, all the houses,
all the factories, and all the money. “Cynical betrayal . . . stab-in-the-back . . .
blood-bath,” the woman was saying. The great mass of people in London would be silenced and cut off from each other, severed from
the lifeline of the network.

Then, abruptly, she was back at it again. “Defense of Democracy . . . firm stand . . . indignation of all decent peoples . . . oppressed peoples . . . racists . . . hideous outbursts of sadism . . . indignation of all disempowered elements . . .
Fascism . . . Democracy . . . Fascism . . . Democracy . . .”

It was all horribly familiar, like a
malfunctioning old gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button, and it started. It was a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again. Love, Love, Love, which somehow always meant Hate, Hate, Hate. It gave you the feeling that something had got inside your skull and was
hammering down on your brain. She didn't go into details. Left it all respectable. But what she was seeing was something quite different. It was a picture of herself smashing people's faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course. Smash! Right in the middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell, and what was a face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam. You could hear all that
in the tone of her voice.

The man in the green shirt had been fidgeting for several minutes. “Lackeys,” he muttered at last, as if unable to restrain himself any longer. And then, louder: “Lackeys of the bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the bourgeoisie! Parasites! 'Yenas!”

Nobody heard him. The speaker on the podium was droning on. Steps were already being taken to protect the public from the reactionary capitalists. Private networks had been outlawed. There was to be no private spending on advertising; the authorities would sponsor suitable public service announcements as needed. All telescreen programming would be funded by the Ministry. Whenever one view of a controversial subject was aired on the network, an opposing view would follow—the Ministry of Plenty would select a suitable one. What she really meant was Quick! Let's all grab a spanner and get together, and perhaps if we smash in enough rich faces they
won't smash our poor ones.

For a moment Blair was thinking of Kate, of how they had made love that morning, how he had explored her body, how she had cried out with pleasure. Then the woman on the podium was bellowing again, impossible to ignore. She had slipped into a familiar style, at once military and pedantic, asking questions and then promptly answering them. What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lessons—which is also one of the fundamental
principles of Blytheism—that, etc., etc. It was unbearable. And
she had this horrible habit of shrieking out a point just as your mind had begun to drift toward something more pleasant. The crowd was impassably thick; there was no escape.

“I must speak to you finally about the problem of hate,” said the woman over the grating static on the loudspeakers. “Hate! What it comes down to is Hate!” she shouted. “Hate is a sickness, a disease, a corruption of the mind! Remember, fellow citizens, the years of our oppression, the years of Hate!
The stinking corpse of Hate was the poison of our lives, the cancer of our society. Comrades, the brotherhood has abolished Hate. Hate will be liquidated.” Her voice was filled with a sort of treacly sorrow. And behind the sorrow, the same old malevolence.

“But it grieves me to report, . . .” the woman paused, as if to control her emotion, and her voice grew angry. Hate was still among us. Wealthy commercial interests were peddling hateful products at inflated prices, degrading women with prurience and pornography, harassing members of oppressed races and classes. The capitalists behind these things were corpse poisons, disgusting
offal from a rentier class. They were a direct assault on sanity and decency, and even—since their filth
poisoned the imagination—on life itself.

“Citizens, we shall banish hate!” The loudspeakers crackled, and her voice began to rise. “We shall rip hate with knives out of the bowels of our society.” And then she was off and running again. “Megalomaniac and satanic regime . . . monstrous octopus . . . revolting cynicism . . . liberated from the evil yoke . . .” Another
filthy stew of words.

One thousand Huggers rose in unison chanting, “No more Hate! No more Hate!” “Wipe 'em out! Stamp 'em out!”

“No more ate!” shouted the man in the green shirt.

The crowd picked up the chant and then abruptly began to march in place, feet stamping together in rhythm with the words. “No more Hate! No more Hate! No more Hate!” The chanting grew louder, the stamping feet stronger, the woman at the podium pounded her fist in the air, in rhythm with the shouting.

It was during the moment of disorder that a man whose face he did not see tapped Blair on the shoulder and said very close to his
ear, “Excuse me, I think you've dropped something.” Blair looked down, and somehow the press of the crowd around him brought him to his knees. Kate reached to help, and then there was a scuffle and a green shirt was beside him, where Kate should have been. For some reason Blair found that his tongue was exploring his broken teeth. And then he knew where he had seen the man in the green shirt before—outside the junk shop, among the black-coated guards and the rain of truncheons.

“Kate!” he cried struggling to his feet. He reached for her in desperation, but the press of the crowd was too thick. “Kate!” he cried again. No one noticed. A sea of bodies closed in upon him and flung him from side to side, bumping his ribs and choking him with their animal heat. He saw a tight group of people and a flash of red hair passing through the crowd, like a disturbance in long grass. He struggled forward with an almost dreamlike feeling. It was a fearful labor—it was like wading neck deep
through a viscous sea. “Kate! Kate!”

His voice was lost in the booming of the loudspeakers and the roaring of the crowd. The woman on the podium was contorted again; she gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air
menacingly above her head.

An overpowering loneliness gripped his mind. In the distance behind the speaker, the floodlights lit up the enormous pyramidal structure of the Ministry of Plenty. The concrete glittered and shimmered in the glaring white lights. Then the lights dimmed again, and shaded into colors, and suddenly there came into focus on the wall of the Ministry, in immense red letters, the three slogans of the new brotherhood:

SCARCITY IS PLENTY

WEALTH IS POVERTY

SILENCE IS SPEECH

The filtered light, bluish and cold, lit up the prisoner's tall, bony figure
with unmerciful clarity. What was most startling was the emaciation of his face. It was like a skull. Because of its thinness the mouth and
eyes looked disproportionately large.

“2714!” roared the voice from the telescreen. “2714 Stand Up!”

The man stood.

“Remain standing where you are,”
said the voice. “Face the door. Make no movement.”

The man obeyed. His bony arms hung loosely by his side like dry sticks.

The door swung open, and for a minute or so O'Brien faced the prisoner. “Leave this man alone until I'm ready for him,” he said at last. He turned and walked heavily out of the cell. In the old days O'Brien had always worn heavy boots, so that prisoners would hear him coming. Now he could barely manage a shuffle.

They had the man at last. He would confess to all his sabotage. He would explain exactly what he had done to the wires and the screens, and then he would be hanged. There was a certain satisfaction in that, but to his surprise, O'Brien felt no exultation. He was growing too old for the business—the groveling on the floor, the screaming for mercy, the bloody clots of hair, the drugs, the
delicate instruments, the gradual wearing down by sleeplessness,
solitude, and persistent questions.

O'Brien stepped into the lift and was whisked silently up to his office. Had the Party been defeated at last? It still owned the Ministries, but did Ministries matter any more? Even Blythe's meticulously choreographed reappearance had attracted little interest. The usual crowd had been rounded up for the rally, but most of the proles had ignored it. Since then, surveillance from the Ministry of Love had collapsed. O'Brien still didn't understand what had happened. Nobody in the Ministry did. All he knew was that the network had developed a will of its own.

As he entered his office, O'Brien looked stupidly at the map on the wall. The network was an ugly thing, he thought to himself for the hundredth time. There was no order to it, no discipline. It was the product of an unruly mind. The colored lines snaked here and there, intersecting all over the place. They looked as if they had just been thrown down at random.

Smith's diary lay closed in the middle of O'Brien's desk. O'Brien had never finished it. With a vague sense of foreboding, as someone invited to read about a distant and unwelcome future he would never live to see, he opened it in the middle and began to read again.