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If you hated the enemy, you could be loved. People smiled dopily at each other, and some eyes welled with tears. They had had a good Hate.
Now all that remained was the petty problem of knowing when to stop chanting. You wouldn’t want to be the first to quit, but being last was no good, either.
As a child of the SAZ, Julia had been raised with the lore of police interrogations. She knew you didn’t name names if you could help it. It was as fatal to accuse those with protection as it was to defend those who had none.
If they asked about anything but the incident, you talked about the incident, playing the part of a simpleton who couldn’t keep up. Above all, you kept your story simple and repeated it word for word, so they couldn’t find inconsistencies. Never mind if you sounded daft. Daft was good. Daft lived while clever died.
He might kill you any time he liked, and enjoy it—but for now you were his friend, and wasn’t that a pleasant thing to be?
Here, too, she was lucky. The meal was shepherd’s pie, and though the carrots were rubbery, it had a good amount of tripe and the potatoes were browned just right.
The dining room was chilly and had a sad odor of bleach and cabbage, yet Julia felt a struggling love in her chest.
The revolution came and took her lands and her Greek, but Clara loved it no less, and carried sheaves of red carnations in early victory demonstrations. She defended all the Party’s early crimes—the burning of Parliament, the massacre at Sandhurst, the murders of the two princesses.
Just as strange, however, was the noise—the sound of fifty people arguing, laughing, dancing, while jazz music played and a baby shrieked. It was a wild, gay din Julia never heard again, not at any community-center dance, not even at balls for departing soldiers.
Then there was the night the exiles obediently brought those books to be burned. Julia remembered the ponderous wheelbarrows creeping up to a hill of fire, the reflections of flames on the river’s surface, and the cheers, in which the exiles joined.
But after all, what childhood was not fearsome? Was it not ever the lot of a child to be terrified among the giant adults and their sudden blows and their unfathomable pain?
Later she could sometimes feel bitter that planes had been produced in such abundance while farm machinery rusted away, and horses were eaten in hungry years, and starving men pulled the plows themselves.
As a doctor, he was valued at Anti-Sex for his ability to write authoritatively on the health hazards of the sexual act and, less officially, for his willingness to treat those hazards discreetly when they occurred.
There’ll be red flags over The white cliffs of Dover Tomorrow Just you wait and see! There’ll be love and laughter And peace ever after Tomorrow When the world is free!
She had been feeling variously disappointed. The notorious Weeks was just a junk shop whose owner had an unfortunate manner; Winston Smith, far from being a terrorist, was someone who saw buying a paperweight as the height of manly valor.
“From the moment of declaring war on the Party,” he said, “it’s better to think of yourself as a corpse.”
“You think it’s possible to construct a secret world in which you can live as you choose, that all you need is luck and cunning and boldness, and then you’re safe. But the individual is always defeated. You must realize yourself you’re doomed—yes, in your heart, I expect you know it well enough.”
Ampleforth sometimes used a cane, and more often visibly wanted one. In every posture, he drooped. His attitude toward all things was apologetic weakness.
All was alien, impossible, the only familiar note the tinny burble of the telescreen. But as she thought this, the servant casually went to the telescreen and turned it off. Not down—off! She thought feebly that here was the malfunction. One oughtn’t to be able to turn it off. At the same time, she knew there was no broken telescreen. There would be no pretense at a broken telescreen. All such games were done.
She had milked her cows and told Big Brother a version in which she horribly bled.
When it later turned out the quotas were too high for anyone to fulfill, and the villagers began to suffer hunger, it didn’t occur to her that it was strange to let agricultural quotas be set by a child.
What Julia remembered particularly was how the bodies spun gently at the ends of the ropes, and the wind ruffled their hair as if they were alive.
Every change of wind carried awful smells. Even in a normal year this was a problem; a poignant line might be undercut by a sudden rude stink of manure. The smell now was of shallow graves.
“But I am weak and in pain. Can you not spare a bed? Oh, please, have pity!” He replied, “No, I cannot, for you will infect the workers. You bring death and poverty to the people. You are to be hated. That is love.”
Inside were four pages of small print, headed by four slogans: “Truth Is Hate. Plenty Is Hate. Peace Is Hate. Love Is Hate.” The text then explained that the names of the four big Ministries were decoys for the ignorant. Truth was not truth, love was not love—the Party had never embraced such weak delusions.
“In the place of the voluptuousness of plenty, the cowardice of peace, the dependency of love, the empty sanctimony of truth, we place hate. Hate is the highest capacity of mankind. Every other sentiment we share with the animal kingdom—anger, greed, mother love, fear, curiosity. Only hate is human.
Hate is goodness in operation.
“Only hate is good. That is the great revelation of Big Brother Thought. Perhaps future human beings will evolve some still higher faculty, purer and more ruthless. For now, this is the greatest of what is human: to hate and to be led by hate.”
You’ll see that here. The criminal has never been so happy in his life; he has come to the golden land of his hopes. That brief interlude in the web—those are the criminal’s sweetest hours.”
Because she knew what came of all this. Winston would be taken to Love and tortured, turned into a ruined, sobbing thing that crept on the ground, that exhibited its broken bones and dribbled pink froth from a toothless mouth, then at last was taken out and shot.
She could see no way back to herself. But when she returned to the bright, false noise of the hostel, how she missed that darkness! She had never been so real.
She leaned against a wall and went into a reverie, in which she imagined a greater purpose that made what she was doing right. She remembered, as if it were a fact long known, that Big Brother loved her—only he.
Hate Week was traditionally timed to coincide with the regular summer blitz, but this too had begun a few weeks early. Bombs fell more often, killing more people, and the newsflashes were all bodies and wreckage.
If a book was handed to her, she gladly tossed it into the waiting fire. Who didn’t like the sweet, hysterical sound of breaking glass? Who didn’t like the brave smell of gasoline and the brightness of the conflagration?
Like everyone, she sang the new Hate Song as she went about the streets. It had been simplified from previous years, so now it scarcely had a tune or lyrics. It went: Death to the wrongthinker, death death death! Death to the ownthinker, death death death! Death to Eurasia! Death! Death! Death!
Hate itself still eluded her. In the mob, what she felt was the thrill of the crowd, the physical pleasure of yelling and waving fists that was like the fun of dancing.
“The semenic materials are his. Quite factually, biologically, your child will be Big Brother’s.” Julia was visited by an unwelcome image of Big Brother pleasuring himself, positioned over a bucket. She clenched her teeth against a burst of nervous laughter.
Everything would be put to rights and the wrongdoers punished. Big Brother knew. So when the purges came to the airfield, and the villagers were made to watch the pilots’ hangings, Julia lay in bed and told Big Brother. She told Big Brother when the quotas rose until every ounce of food from the farms was taken, and anyone who kept back food was shot.
Big Brother spoke in voice-over, thanking the viewer for her sacrifice and promising a worthy life for her children. Then the film went back to the verdant garden of the children’s home, where a small boy was catching a ball, and the camera turned to show who had thrown it: Big Brother. He turned to the viewer with a grave smile, expressive of the troubles they’d endured together and their trust in the fruits of that endurance. He said, “Your body is Oceania’s future. You will bring forth our victory.”
Meanwhile, her mind ran in circles. She thought that pregnancy might kill her and would surely make her terribly ill. She thought of the absurdity of having a baby that might be Big Brother’s or Tom Parsons’s; of the years she’d dreamed of fucking Big Brother, and the men she’d actually fucked, and how many were killed by the Party.
She imagined a Party of the future, where everyone had Big Brother’s face, where Big Brothers hanged and tortured Big Brothers and sent Big Brothers to die in war.
As he hit the switch and it went black, she made a keen sound of surprise. Winston said in rapture, “You can turn it off!” “Yes,” said O’Brien. “We can turn it off. We have that privilege.”
It made her conscious, as she’d never been before, that thoughtcrime was nothing to do with crime. It wasn’t even a prelude to real crime. And for this, he was to be condemned? One might as well execute a boy of six for saying he would like to be a pirate.
You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead.”
Nothing she did had meaning to these men. She could believe every tenet of Ingsoc and perform all its commandments, she could even do the work of Love, and she would still be killed when it suited their convenience—as
Across the street, one window showed a pair of emerald velvet curtains, tied neatly back at their waists with golden cords. Beyond was a spacious room, in which warm light shone over a gleaming piano. Two pale-blue armchairs sat on either side, as if awaiting the piano’s song, and the walls were lined with bookshelves full of clothbound books. Even the ceiling was ornamented with plaster flowers, and the piano had its own lovely rug to stand upon. Most strange of all was that no one was in the room. All that beauty sat unattended. The piano alone received the wasteful flood of electric light,
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Hate Week itself had begun, and every waking hour was spent marching, shouting, singing, burning, smashing. She lived in the streets, and the streets were a delirium. What she felt wasn’t hate, but it melded her to the crowd and made her feel multitudinous, godlike.
Then Hate Week had passed, with no greater consequence than that the name of the enemy had changed.
The others leaned against the coaches, fighting yawns, as one zealot after another speculated about new surgeries to render people incapable of sex, spoke with disgust of the “unwholesome slimes” that issued from human bodies, and sang the praises of True Vegetarianism—which meant not only eschewing meat but exterminating all animals for their obscene lives.
She might hope for some months or years of safety, at the price of condemning dozens of others. Then she too would die.
