Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  Or that, at least, is the Party line; that is the teaching of English Socialism, INGSOC. But none of INGSOC is true. It is war that is coming to an end, because technical progress is now continuous. War will soon be abolished. The telescreen will abolish it.

  O’Brien stopped reading for a moment. He was sure that he had already read what was coming next. A small band of brave partisans would storm the Ministry of Love and seize control of the network.

  There would be a bloody struggle. It was all rubbish, of course. The Ministry was impregnable. He turned back to the book.

  The telescreen abolishes cultural integrity. It erases interstellar space. Culture can now cross frontiers a million times faster than a rocket bomb. Not just cultural garbage, not just films oozing sex and violence—these things are not important, and in any event are the same in every country. The culture that will now pour across national boundaries is the culture of commerce. With the telescreen, trade can reach anywhere.

  The economic motives for war will also disappear. The Party maintains that war still makes sense to win control of cheap labor. But in a world where value consists mostly of information, labor can move instantly across frontiers. The age of the telescreen is the age of the nowhere man, in a nowhere land, pouring value into nowhere plans that can be conveyed anywhere to anybody. Armed with a telescreen the human mind can escape faster than any soldier can pursue. Linking peoples and nations by telescreen offers far better prizes than taking away other peoples’ provinces or lands, or grinding them down in exploitation.

  Suppose the Party manages to start a real war anyway. Neither side will dare use atom bombs, weapons conceived in the image of the Party itself, sweeping, gross, and indiscriminate. How then will the war be fought? Nations are not in fact sheaves of corn, and anyone able to use his eyes knows that human behavior differs enormously from country to country. Sooner or later we will confront an enemy that has not only mastered but maintained the art of communicating at a distance. That enemy’s telescreened rocket bombs will rain down upon us with an accuracy never before imagined. They will land with relentless precision on our four Ministries. Perhaps, in an excess of zeal, the enemy will also decide to knock out our principal bridges and highways, our central bank, and even our electric power plants and reserves of fuel.

  Then the war will be over, and we will have lost. Without its communication system, without its electronic eyes and ears and tongue, the Party ceases to be an enemy of any account. The next war will indeed involve only small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists. But the casualties will not occur out of sight, on distant frontiers. Our dead will lie buried in the rubble of our Ministries.

  Only one kind of society can survive such an attack: a society with no central brain, no all-powerful Ministry in the heart of its capital city, no single place where all the wisdom of the state can be lost in an instant to a bomb addressed as precisely as a postcard. The only society that can survive the telescreened bomb is one in which people rule themselves.

  This, then, is how the last war will be fought, if it is fought at all. Not against individuals, nor against their possessions. It will be fought against what coordinates a nation—against its ideas, its slogans, its propaganda, the instruments of its Thought Police, and the machines of its centralized Ministries. War will be Satyagraha, a nonviolent struggle by which the enemy is defeated without being hurt. The word used to be translated as “passive resistance,” but what it really means is “firmness in the truth.” For the first time in history, war will be fought against the state itself, against what unites a people. If all that unites a people is Big Brother, war will be fought against Big Brother alone.

  O’Brien shut his eyes again. He had grown unaccustomed to reading a book of any length. For the first time in years he experienced an unpleasant feeling of solitude. He had always lived in comfort and safety, always enjoyed the luxury of complete privacy, which was reserved only to the highest-ranking members of the Inner Party. And yet now, unexpectedly, silence seemed oppressive. He found himself wishing for a gentle touch against his cheek and the sound of children laughing at their play

  CHAPTER 12

  The preparations for Love Week were unfolding all around. Processions, meetings, lectures, telescreen programs—all had to be organized. The Fiction Department of the Ministry of Truth was rushing out a series of pamphlets on the victimization of the weak. A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption and represented simply a group of cowering women and children (“oppressed peoples,” the Party called them), staring in terror at a monstrous male figure, three or four meters high, striding forward with an expressionless white face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. Encylopedias had to be rewritten. Airplanes and radio, the Ministry had recently discovered, had been invented not by the Party (as had previously been recorded) but by the ancient Hindus, who afterward dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.

  None of this mattered to Blair any more. He was in a new world, a world he had never known before. He was extravagantly happy When he walked with Kate in the country, they fell into absurd enthusiasms over everything they saw: over a jay’s feather that they picked up, blue as lapis lazuli; over a stagnant pool like a jet mirror, with boughs reflected deep down in it; over the fungi that sprouted from the trees like monstrous horizontal ears.

  For many days after the beating, he had lain half conscious on a mattress in the corner of her room. He dimly remembered other men coming and going, their silhouettes and coarse grunts drifting in and out of his fractured dreams. Then at last he’d been able to stagger to his feet.

  The next morning she had made him a cup of coffee—richly perfumed, market coffee—and had mentioned quite casually that she’d grown tired of the streets.

  “If you wants to stay for a bit, I can put you up,” she added. “Why’d you get done over, anyway?”

  “Thoughtcrime,” Blair answered solemnly

  “Yeah, but whacha do?”

  He pondered. He had read a few pages of Smith’s diary, of course. Why they had left him alive in the street he could not explain.

  Perched on a wooden stool opposite him, she accepted his silence as an answer. Her steaming mug was cradled in both hands, her hair in glorious bright disarray, her lacy petticoats showing under a long flowered skirt. She wore less makeup now, though vestiges of black liner shadowed her lids. Her skin was milky white and translucent.

  And that night, it was hard to say by whose act, he had been in her arms. At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of tumbled red hair was against his face, and yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck. He had held her with a fierce passion, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her. Wherever his hands had moved it had been all as yielding as water. In the morning, just before dawn, he had lain beside her looking at her face, until she woke and stretched herself with voluptuous, sleepy writhings, half smiling, half yawning up at him, one cheek and bare arm rosy in the early morning light.

  In the weeks that followed he had watched the changes in the city with amazement. There was always a terrific hullabaloo in the market nowadays: dogs barking, pigs squealing, chaps in tradesmen’s vans who wanted to get through the crush cracking their whips and cursing. The down and out still slept on the benches and urinated in the shadows of the buildings; in some ways, the poverty stood out even more now, against the rising wealth. The vegetables in the stalls were fresh and abundant. The black market chocolate had a rich creaminess Blair had never tasted before. And only the day before Blair had seen an astonishing new poster. The colors were fresh. It displayed several loaves of steaming bread, and the smiling faces of a mother and two small children.

  “Fresh bread! Penny a lump! Taste before you buy!” a stallkeeper had cried from nearby.

  “Cockles and
whelks,” another had replied. “Buy my cockles and whelks! Jellied eels! Cockles and whelks!”

  “Bargain time! Bargain time!” sang another voice. “Loose strawberries going cheap, bargain time!”

  “Last batch of pork sausages, finish up my pork sausages!”

  How was the trading maintained, without dollars or coupons? As far as Blair could tell, it worked on well-documented trust. The proles are governed by private loyalties which they do not question, Smith had written. The proles are not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they are loyal to one another. Blair understood now. Money was just another medium of trust, and the proles could make it almost as easily as fresh bread. Their market was a civilization of its own, a tradition and a shared understanding. Their currencies, their property, their laws evolved spontaneously from their loyalties. And the telescreens were now extending those private loyalties across all of London and beyond. Selling good bread was the greatest revolt of all. It was a political act.

  The Party, it seemed, dimly understood the danger. Day by day telescreens denounced the “grave threat to our new happy life.” Free speech, it was reported, was under attack by a conspiracy of wealthy private interests. Money was being used by subversive groups to undermine Party policies. Mysterious plutocrats were said to have infiltrated London and were using their wealth to drown out the voices of honest citizens. There were even shadowy rumors that rich capitalists were planning to seize control of the network and cut themselves off from the rest of society entirely. The agents of Blythe were at work again. It was obvious to any thinking man that London was being turned upside down, but the Party seemed determined to continue with its purges and directives, like a fish bashing its nose against the wall of an aquarium again and again, too dimwitted to realize that glass and water are not the same thing.

  The proles ignored the Party. They seemed concerned only about little goods and evils, but in attending to those they somehow took care of the big ones too. If you didn’t pay your debts or keep your promises, every shopkeeper soon knew it. The cardinal punishment was to be exposed as a deadbeat and sent back to grub for food and clothes in the Party’s empty emporiums.

  In response, the Party had launched another virulent campaign against what it called the corrupt currency capitalists. That one comrade should report on another’s habit of paying his bills was a criminal invasion of privacy. Any comrade who desired credit was to apply through normal channels at a government bank. After the first announcement had aired, the telescreen had crashed into “Oceania, ’tis for thee,” which was always a sign that the matter was considered to be serious.

  “There’ll be a purge,” Kate predicted. “Mass arrests. Cart ’em off and shoot ’em. Nothing changes.”

  “The network is changing,” Blair had answered. She had ignored him. She tolerated his network daydreams with feminine amusement, but she refused to treat any of it seriously. Her preoccupations were more earthy.

  “Stop dreaming about tomorrow,” she said. “You’ve got me now. Forget about the rest.”

  But he hadn’t been able to. He dreamed now of a world with neither solitude nor Big Brother, a world in which thought was free, and men were different from one another, and yet still did not live alone. One had to imagine the telescreen without the Thought Police behind it. That now seemed possible. He had seen the young man again, standing by the telescreen, looking somewhat frail, a tall fellow with a fawn jacket and a mac. His strong cord trousers gave a massivity to his legs oddly in contrast to his emaciated torso. His pale, china-blue eyes still had a mischievous, amused look.

  “Didn’t I see you working on the telescreens?” Blair had asked. The phreak had grinned. “Marvelous things. Bloody marvelous!”

  “Was the screen broken?”

  “Broken from the day it was put in,” he had replied with a laugh. “I fixed it.”

  Blair had told Kate about it after they made love in the belfry of an abandoned church. She had been both amused and annoyed by Blair’s fascination with the phreak. “He plugs wires together instead of fucking,” she had said offhandedly, as if this was obvious and beyond dispute. Then she had arched her back under the blanket and curled up like a cat. She adored cats.

  “I don’t imagine that he can alter anything in our own lifetime,” Blair had replied. “But suppose he really does get control of a few screens. One can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there—small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generation can carry on where we leave off.”

  “I’m not interested in the next generation, dear. I’m interested in us.”

  “You’re only a rebel from the waist downward,” he told her.

  She thought it brilliantly witty and flung her arm round him in delight. But Blair knew now that it was possible. Sooner or later it will happen, Winston Smith had written. The proles’ strength will change into consciousness. A race of conscious beings must one day come.

  That afternoon they had wandered out of town into the country lanes. There was a golden glow over the countryside. The flat fields were full of ripening grain, and bluebells and forget-me-nots and Queen Anne’s lace clustered along the hedgerows. Bees buzzed and fumbled around the flowers, independent vagabonds. In the clear blue dome of the sky, a lark twittered and soared. After a while they had found their way as they always did back to the belfry, and into each other’s arms.

  They had awoken with the sun streaming in through the stone pillars. It was perfectly silent. And then a single green bird had fluttered down and perched on the windowsill. It did not know it was being watched. It was a tender thing, smaller than a tame dove, with a green back as smooth as velvet, and a neck of iridescent colors. Its legs were like pink wax. The bird rocked itself backward and forward on the bough, swelling out its breast feathers and laying its coralline beak upon them. It burst into a torrent of song. In the afternoon quiet the volume of sound was startling. They had clung together, fascinated. Then the bird took fright and fled with a clatter of wings, and once again all was silence. They lay perfectly still. The silence engulfed them like a mother’s embrace.

  Later he talked to her about it. To her amused annoyance, he tried to explain how it was all connected, the thrush and the sex, the market and the telescreen, and the glorious silence of the warm afternoon. The idea that the phreak might have given him a profound insight into their passion made her laugh out loud. She had stretched out languorously beside him again and had listened quietly as he talked. After a while she had closed her eyes. A moment later she had been asleep.

  Now the shadows were lengthening. They were nearing the huddle of streets where they lived. Their paces were matched, and they walked hand in hand. Women leaned out of their windows in the clear evening light, gazing at the street, or stood on their front doorsteps talking casually to neighbors. Through their open doors he could see into little back yards, where washing hung on lines and children played. He felt a warm familiarity and safety. E. A. Blair had disappeared from the Party and was no more. He had become a prole, in a prole’s clothes, living in a prole’s home. They had lost interest in him.

  Blair thought again of his conversation with the phreak.

  “How does one escape it?” he had asked.

  “You turn it off,” the phreak had replied.

  “But you can’t,” Blair had said.

  The phreak had laughed. “Any machine can be turned off,” he had said. “You just have to find the switch.”

  It was a gigantic thought, which seemed to verge on doublethink. Silence was oppression; silence was also freedom. Freedom was solitude; freedom was also the company of others. The difference between slavery and freedom was nothing more than a switch on the front of a screen. Freedom was the power to choose.

  The sun began to set. The pavement turned pink, and even the pitted street and ramshackle houses seemed radiant. Abruptly, from the far distance, there came a
hollow ringing sound, floating through the evening air and echoing over the roofs of London, filling the sky and the street with a rhythmic resonance. It started in only one place, far in the east, but in a moment it had surrounded them.

  It was the sound of church bells. At first he thought he had never before heard church bells ringing. Then, with a rush of remembrance, he knew that once, long ago, when he had still been a child, church bells had often spoken to the community, ringing out sounds of danger and warning, worship and love.

  “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clements,” he said. To his surprise, Kate immediately capped the line:

  “You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martins. When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey—”

  With a sort of grave courtesy, Blair completed the stanza:

  “When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.”

  For a moment they stood quite still in the street. The pealing of the bells slowly died away, and then the echoes too. The light was golden, the sky a prussian blue. As they watched, the crimson ball of the sun sank from view, the scarlet fleece of clouds slowly changed hue, and the air was filled with a crimson silence.

  CHAPTER 13

  The sound of bells, O’Brien reflected, had not been heard in London for years. He wondered idly how the proles would react. They probably wouldn’t. Proles were animals.

  The bells had woken him from a light doze. As his mind cleared, a deep sense of misgiving crept through him, which he could not explain. Was he hanging someone he knew today? Was his chest bad again? His eyes fell on Smith’s diary, which had slipped off his lap and lay closed on the floor. He looked at the book dully for a moment, then painfully reached down and picked it up. He opened it back at the third page and began to read again.