by Peter Huber
You have asked: “What is it, this principle that will defeat us?” It is the principle that the past does not belong to the present. It is the principle that what is inside a man is separate from what is outside, and that what is believed does not determine what is. It is the principle that two plus two equals four.
O’Brien sat slumped in the armchair. Perhaps Smith had glimpsed revolutionary possibilities, but what of it? No one else would even conceive of such things. Orwell’s network might even have a capacity for revolution built into its wires, but what was still missing was the will. The network would not set the proles free until they understood its power. But they could not understand its power until they were free. However explosive the telescreen might be, it would not explode without a spark of understanding. And there was no spark.
The face of Winston Smith floated back into O’Brien’s mind. He found himself remembering how he had broken the man. In the end, there had been nothing left in Smith except sorrow for what he had done, and love of Big Brother. It had been touching to see such love. O’Brien glanced again at the slim black volume of Smith’s diary. There were undoubtedly other copies of it in circulation, he thought.
And then it struck him: the diary was the spark. When the proles read it, they would understand the power of the telescreen. And once they understood that power, it would be over.
O’Brien turned to his telescreen. “COMM-TWO-OFFICE,” he barked. The screen flickered into life. “Get me Cooper.”
O’Brien noticed with some surprise that his voice was breaking as he spoke the name. He turned back to Smith’s book. He had still not learned the ultimate secret. He understood why; he did not understand how. The why was obvious now: the network was dangerous because it might bring consciousness to the masses. But how it would do so was still a mystery. The first part of the diary, like the third, had not actually told him anything that he did not know; it had merely systematized the suspicions he had long possessed. He flipped the page and began to read again, in a desperate hurry
There is one question which until this moment I have almost ignored. What is it about Orwell’s telescreen that makes freedom inevitable?
Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen, the mystique of the telescreen, and above all the Thought Police, depends on the telescreen’s power to watch every citizen at every moment of time. But behind that power lies the original structure of the device itself, the never-questioned design that made it possible to place telescreens everywhere, and to monitor any screen at will from any other place. The secret of the telescreen is . . .
A soft buzz issued from O’Brien’s own screen. He heaved his vast bulk from the chair. A moment later, a face came into focus on the screen.
“Cooper,” said O’Brien, “Destroy the underground press. Locate and eliminate every last copy of Winston Smith’s diary. This is of the utmost urgency.”
The face on the screen said nothing.
“Surely we have some leads,” O’Brien exclaimed, his voice rising unexpectedly. “What about Blair? What about the whore? Does she have anything to do with it?”
“I don’t believe so,” Cooper answered slowly. “We’ve been watching them both.”
O’Brien stared back at the screen. Perhaps the time had come. O’Brien had long prepared for this day, though he had always hoped it would never arrive.
He turned and shuffled painfully back to his armchair as his telescreen faded into darkness. A white-jacketed servant moved silently across the room, picking up a glass and emptying an ashtray.
Suddenly the telescreen burst into sound again. O’Brien looked up, startled. Five men in black uniforms had appeared on the screen. In front of them, apparently unaware of their presence, shambled an insubstantial figure, his slight frame frail in his oversized overalls. O’Brien had a vague feeling he had seen the man before. In a moment, the others had fallen upon him and were beating him mercilessly with their truncheons. O’Brien felt a faint but definitely pleasant thrill. A kick landed squarely in the man’s groin, and vomit spewed from his mouth.
The picture abruptly froze, with the face of one of the black-coated men filling the screen. The man’s tongue was protruding slightly from his mouth, and he was grinning sadistically. After a few seconds, there appeared at the bottom of the screen, like a noose around a condemned man’s neck, the words:
THE PROLES ARE WATCHING YOU
CHAPTER 14
It happened on the sixth day. On the sixth day of Love Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the sit-ins, the demonstrations, the sensitivity sessions, the consciousness raisings—after six days of celebrating Big Brother’s all-embracing love, his nurturing of the young, his caring for the old, his generosity to the poor, his feeding of the hungry, his ministrations to the sick, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general revulsion of all oppression and exploitation, all callousness and insensitivity, had boiled up into delirium—at just this moment it was announced that Big Brother had been overthrown. Big Brother was a renegade and backslider, a traitor and a spy. Kenneth Blythe had returned.
There had not exactly been an admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Big Brother was gone. It was night, and the white faces and scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square had been packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the green uniform of the Huggers. On a scarlet-draped platform stood an orator of the Inner Party, an androgynous woman with wire-rimmed glasses and thin brown hair dragged into a bun. She bent over the microphone, her black overalls loose on her bony frame. Her voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, whined forth an endless catalog of oppressions and iniquities, harassments, discriminations, and deportations, a never-ending account of supercilious wealth, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions—a vast litany of injustice.
The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried onto the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. She unrolled and read it without pausing in her speech. Nothing altered in her voice or manner, or in the content of what she was saying, but suddenly the names were different. The next moment the face of Kenneth Blythe, the former Enemy of the People, flashed onto a giant screen behind the speaker. Blythe looked different now. His once-lean face had filled out; the great fuzzy aureole of white hair was tamed, brushed back, silvery; the small goatee was gone; the old look of cleverness had given way to a new one of wisdom. He was now full of power and mysterious calm.
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 shoutin
g.
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