Chapter Seven.
‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it
lies in the proles.’
If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles,
because only there in those swarming disregarded
masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania,
could the force to destroy the Party ever
be generated.
The Party could not be overthrown from within.
Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no
way of coming together or even of identifying
one another.
Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed,
as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable
that its members could ever assemble in larger
numbers than twos and threes.
Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion
of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered
word.
But the proles, if only they could somehow
become conscious of their own strength.
would have no need to conspire.
They needed only to rise up and shake themselves
like a horse shaking off flies.
If they chose they could blow the Party to
pieces tomorrow morning.
Surely sooner or later it must occur to them
to do it?
And yet ——!
He remembered how once he had been walking
down a crowded street when a tremendous shout
of hundreds of voices women’s voices — had
burst from a side-street a little way ahead.
It was a great formidable cry of anger and
despair, a deep, loud ‘Oh-o-o-o-oh!’ that
went humming on like the reverberation of
a bell.
His heart had leapt.
It’s started! he had thought.
A riot!
The proles are breaking loose at last!
When he had reached the spot it was to see
a mob of two or three hundred women crowding
round the stalls of a street market, with
faces as tragic as though they had been the
doomed passengers on a sinking ship.
But at this moment the general despair broke
down into a multitude of individual quarrels.
It appeared that one of the stalls had been
selling tin saucepans.
They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots
of any kind were always difficult to get.
Now the supply had unexpectedly given out.
The successful women, bumped and jostled by
the rest, were trying to make off with their
saucepans while dozens of others clamoured
round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper
of favouritism and of having more saucepans
somewhere in reserve.
There was a fresh outburst of yells.
Two bloated women, one of them with her hair
coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan
and were trying to tear it out of one another’s
hands.
For a moment they were both tugging, and then
the handle came off.
Winston watched them disgustedly.
And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening
power had sounded in that cry from only a
few hundred throats!
Why was it that they could never shout like
that about anything that mattered?
He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never
rebel, and until after they have rebelled
they cannot become conscious.
That, he reflected, might almost have been
a transcription from one of the Party textbooks.
The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated
the proles from bondage.
Before the Revolution they had been hideously
oppressed by the capitalists, they had been
starved and flogged, women had been forced
to work in the coal mines (women still did
work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact),
children had been sold into the factories
at the age of six.
But simultaneously, true to the Principles
of doublethink, the Party taught that the
proles were natural inferiors who must be
kept in subjection, like animals, by the application
of a few simple rules.
In reality very little was known about the
proles.
It was not necessary to know much.
So long as they continued to work and breed,
their other activities were without importance.
Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose
upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted
to a style of life that appeared to be natural
to them, a sort of ancestral pattern.
They were born, they grew up in the gutters,
they went to work at twelve, they passed through
a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual
desire, they married at twenty, they were
middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the
most part, at sixty.
Heavy physical work, the care of home and
children, petty quarrels with neighbours,
films, football, beer, and above all, gambling,
filled up the horizon of their minds.
To keep them in control was not difficult.
A few agents of the Thought Police moved always
among them, spreading false rumours and marking
down and eliminating the few individuals who
were judged capable of becoming dangerous;
but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them
with the ideology of the Party.
It was not desirable that the proles should
have strong political feelings.
All that was required of them was a primitive
patriotism which could be appealed to whenever
it was necessary to make them accept longer
working-hours or shorter rations.
And even when they became discontented, as
they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere,
because being without general ideas, they
could only focus it on petty specific grievances.
The larger evils invariably escaped their
notice.
The great majority of proles did not even
have telescreens in their homes.
Even the civil police interfered with them
very little.
There was a vast amount of criminality in
London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves,
bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers
of every description; but since it all happened
among the proles themselves, it was of no
importance.
In all questions of morals they were allowed
to follow their ancestral code.
The sexual puritanism of the Party was not
imposed upon them.
Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted.
For that matter, even religious worship would
have been permitted if the proles had shown
any sign of needing or wanting it.
They were beneath suspicion.
As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and
animals are free.’
Winston reached down and cautiously scratched
his varicose ulcer.
It had begun itching again.
The thing you invariably came back to was
the impossibility of knowing what life before
the Revolution had really been like.
He took out of the drawer a copy of a children’s
history textbook which he had borrowed from
Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into
the diary:
In the old days (it ran), before the glorious
Revolution, London was not the beautiful city
that we know today.
It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where
hardly anybody had enough to eat and where
hundreds and thousands of poor people had
no boots on their feet and not even a roof
to sleep under.
Children no older than you had to work twelve
hours a day for cruel masters who flogged
them with whips if they worked too slowly
and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts
and water.
But in among all this terrible poverty there
were just a few great big beautiful houses
that were lived in by rich men who had as
many as thirty servants to look after them.
These rich men were called capitalists.
They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces,
like the one in the picture on the opposite
page.
You can see that he is dressed in a long black
coat which was called a frock coat, and a
queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe,
which was called a top hat.
This was the uniform of the capitalists, and
no one else was allowed to wear it.
The capitalists owned everything in the world,
and everyone else was their slave.
They owned all the land, all the houses, all
the factories, and all the money.
If anyone disobeyed them they could throw
them into prison, or they could take his job
away and starve him to death.
When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist
he had to cringe and bow to him, and take
off his cap and address him as ‘Sir’.
The chief of all the capitalists was called
the King, and ——
But he knew the rest of the catalogue.
There would be mention of the bishops in their
lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes,
the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the
cat-o’-nine tails, the Lord Mayor’s Banquet,
and the practice of kissing the Pope’s toe.
There was also something called the JUS PRIMAE
NOCTIS, which would probably not be mentioned
in a textbook for children.
It was the law by which every capitalist had
the right to sleep with any woman working
in one of his factories.
How could you tell how much of it was lies?
It MIGHT be true that the average human being
was better off now than he had been before
the Revolution.
The only evidence to the contrary was the
mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive
feeling that the conditions you lived in were
intolerable and that at some other time they
must have been different.
It struck him that the truly characteristic
thing about modern life was not its cruelty
and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its
dinginess, its listlessness.
Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance
not only to the lies that streamed out of
the telescreens, but even to the ideals that
the Party was trying to achieve.
Great areas of it, even for a Party member,
were neutral and non-political, a matter of
slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for
a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock,
cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette
end.
The ideal set up by the Party was something
huge, terrible, and glittering — a world
of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines
and terrifying weapons — a nation of warriors
and fanatics, marching forward in perfect
unity, all thinking the same thoughts and
shouting the same slogans, perpetually working,
fighting, triumphing, persecuting — three
hundred million people all with the same face.
The reality was decaying, dingy cities where
underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky
shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses
that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.
He seemed to see a vision of London, vast
and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and
mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons,
a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling
helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
He reached down and scratched his ankle again.
Day and night the telescreens bruised your
ears with statistics proving that people today
had more food, more clothes, better houses,
better recreations — that they lived longer,
worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier,
stronger, happier, more intelligent, better
educated, than the people of fifty years ago.
Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.
The Party claimed, for example, that today
40 per cent of adult proles were literate:
before the Revolution, it was said, the number
had only been 15 per cent.
The Party claimed that the infant mortality
rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas
before the Revolution it had been 300 — and
so it went on.
It was like a single equation with two unknowns.
It might very well be that literally every
word in the history books, even the things
that one accepted without question, was pure
fantasy.
For all he knew there might never have been
any such law as the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, or
any such creature as a capitalist, or any
such garment as a top hat.
Everything faded into mist.
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten,
the lie became truth.
Just once in his life he had possessed — AFTER
the event: that was what counted — concrete,
unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification.
He had held it between his fingers for as
long as thirty seconds.
In 1973, it must have been — at any rate,
it was at about the time when he and Katharine
had parted.
But the really relevant date was seven or
eight years earlier.
The story really began in the middle sixties,
the period of the great purges in which the
original leaders of the Revolution were wiped
out once and for all.
By 1970 none of them was left, except Big
Brother himself.
All the rest had by that time been exposed
as traitors and counter-revolutionaries.
Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew
where, and of the others, a few had simply
disappeared, while the majority had been executed
after spectacular public trials at which they
made confession of their crimes.
Among the last survivors were three men named
Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
It must have been in 1965 that these three
had been arrested.
As often happened, they had vanished for a
year or more, so that one did not know whether
they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly
been brought forth to incriminate themselves
in the usual way.
They had confessed to intelligence with the
enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia),
embezzlement of public funds, the murder of
various trusted Party members, intrigues against
the leadership of Big Brother which had started
long before the Revolution happened, and acts
of sabotage causing the death of hundreds
of thousands of people.
After confessing to these things they had
been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and
given posts which were in fact sinecures but
which sounded important.
All three had written long, abject articles
in ‘The Times’, analysing the reasons
for their defection and promising to make
amends.
Some time after their release Winston had
actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut
Tree Cafe.
He remembered the sort of terrified fascination
with which he had watched them out of the
corner of his eye.
They were men far older than himself, relics
of the ancient world, almost the last great
figures left over from the heroic days of
the Party.
The glamour of the underground struggle and
the civil war still faintly clung to them.
He had the feeling, though already at that
time facts and dates were growing blurry,
that he had known their names years earlier
than he had known that of Big Brother.
But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables,
doomed with absolute certainty to extinction
within a year or two.
No one who had once fallen into the hands
of the Thought Police ever escaped in the
end.
They were corpses waiting to be sent back
to the grave.
There was no one at any of the tables nearest
to them.
It was not wise even to be seen in the neighbourhood
of such people.
They were sitting in silence before glasses
of the gin flavoured with cloves which was
the speciality of the cafe.
Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance
had most impressed Winston.
Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist,
whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame
popular opinion before and during the Revolution.
Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons
were appearing in The Times.
They were simply an imitation of his earlier
manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing.
Always they were a rehashing of the ancient
themes — slum tenements, starving children,
street battles, capitalists in top hats — even
on the barricades the capitalists still seemed
to cling to their top hats an endless, hopeless
effort to get back into the past.
He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy
grey hair, his face pouched and seamed, with
thick negroid lips.
At one time he must have been immensely strong;
now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging,
falling away in every direction.
He seemed to be breaking up before one’s
eyes, like a mountain crumbling.
It was the lonely hour of fifteen.
Winston could not now remember how he had
come to be in the cafe at such a time.
The place was almost empty.
A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens.
The three men sat in their corner almost motionless,
never speaking.
Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses
of gin.
There was a chessboard on the table beside
them, with the pieces set out but no game
started.
And then, for perhaps half a minute in all,
something happened to the telescreens.
The tune that they were playing changed, and
the tone of the music changed too.
There came into it — but it was something
hard to describe.
It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering
note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow
note.
And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
The three men never stirred.
But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford’s
ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full
of tears.
And for the first time he noticed, with a
kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing
AT WHAT he shuddered, that both Aaronson and
Rutherford had broken noses.
A little later all three were re-arrested.
It appeared that they had engaged in fresh
conspiracies from the very moment of their
release.
At their second trial they confessed to all
their old crimes over again, with a whole
string of new ones.
They were executed, and their fate was recorded
in the Party histories, a warning to posterity.
About five years after this, in 1973, Winston
was unrolling a wad of documents which had
just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on
to his desk when he came on a fragment of
paper which had evidently been slipped in
among the others and then forgotten.
The instant he had flattened it out he saw
its significance.
It was a half-page torn out of ‘The Times’
of about ten years earlier — the top half
of the page, so that it included the date
— and it contained a photograph of the delegates
at some Party function in New York.
Prominent in the middle of the group were
Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
There was no mistaking them, in any case their
names were in the caption at the bottom.
The point was that at both trials all three
men had confessed that on that date they had
been on Eurasian soil.
They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada
to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and
had conferred with members of the Eurasian
General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important
military secrets.
The date had stuck in Winston’s memory because
it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole
story must be on record in countless other
places as well.
There was only one possible conclusion: the
confessions were lies.
Of course, this was not in itself a discovery.
Even at that time Winston had not imagined
that the people who were wiped out in the
purges had actually committed the crimes that
they were accused of.
But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment
of the abolished past, like a fossil bone
which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys
a geological theory.
It was enough to blow the Party to atoms,
if in some way it could have been published
to the world and its significance made known.
He had gone straight on working.
As soon as he saw what the photograph was,
and what it meant, he had covered it up with
another sheet of paper.
Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been
upside-down from the point of view of the
telescreen.
He took his scribbling pad on his knee and
pushed back his chair so as to get as far
away from the telescreen as possible.
To keep your face expressionless was not difficult,
and even your breathing could be controlled,
with an effort: but you could not control
the beating of your heart, and the telescreen
was quite delicate enough to pick it up.
He let what he judged to be ten minutes go
by, tormented all the while by the fear that
some accident — a sudden draught blowing
across his desk, for instance — would betray
him.
Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped
the photograph into the memory hole, along
with some other waste papers.
Within another minute, perhaps, it would have
crumbled into ashes.
That was ten — eleven years ago.
Today, probably, he would have kept that photograph.
It was curious that the fact of having held
it in his fingers seemed to him to make a
difference even now, when the photograph itself,
as well as the event it recorded, was only
memory.
Was the Party’s hold upon the past less
strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence
which existed no longer HAD ONCE existed?
But today, supposing that it could be somehow
resurrected from its ashes, the photograph
might not even be evidence.
Already, at the time when he made his discovery,
Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia,
and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia
that the three dead men had betrayed their
country.
Since then there had been other changes — two,
three, he could not remember how many.
Very likely the confessions had been rewritten
and rewritten until the original facts and
dates no longer had the smallest significance.
The past not only changed, but changed continuously.
What most afflicted him with the sense of
nightmare was that he had never clearly understood
why the huge imposture was undertaken.
The immediate advantages of falsifying the
past were obvious, but the ultimate motive
was mysterious.
He took up his pen again and wrote:
I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered
before, whether he himself was a lunatic.
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of
one.
At one time it had been a sign of madness
to believe that the earth goes round the sun;
today, to believe that the past is unalterable.
He might be ALONE in holding that belief,
and if alone, then a lunatic.
But the thought of being a lunatic did not
greatly trouble him: the horror was that he
might also be wrong.
He picked up the children’s history book
and looked at the portrait of Big Brother
which formed its frontispiece.
The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own.
It was as though some huge force were pressing
down upon you — something that penetrated
inside your skull, battering against your
brain, frightening you out of your beliefs,
persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence
of your senses.
In the end the Party would announce that two
and two made five, and you would have to believe
it.
It was inevitable that they should make that
claim sooner or later: the logic of their
position demanded it.
Not merely the validity of experience, but
the very existence of external reality, was
tacitly denied by their philosophy.
The heresy of heresies was common sense.
And what was terrifying was not that they
would kill you for thinking otherwise, but
that they might be right.
For, after all, how do we know that two and
two make four?
Or that the force of gravity works?
Or that the past is unchangeable?
If both the past and the external world exist
only in the mind, and if the mind itself is
controllable what then?
But no!
His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of
its own accord.
The face of O’Brien, not called up by any
obvious association, had floated into his
mind.
He knew, with more certainty than before,
that O’Brien was on his side.
He was writing the diary for O’Brien — TO
O’Brien: it was like an interminable letter
which no one would ever read, but which was
addressed to a particular person and took
its colour from that fact.
The Party told you to reject the evidence
of your eyes and ears.
It was their final, most essential command.
His heart sank as he thought of the enormous
power arrayed against him, the ease with which
any Party intellectual would overthrow him
in debate, the subtle arguments which he would
not be able to understand, much less answer.
And yet he was in the right!
They were wrong and he was right.
The obvious, the silly, and the true had got
to be defended.
Truisms are true, hold on to that!
The solid world exists, its laws do not change.
Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported
fall towards the earth’s centre.
With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien,
and also that he was setting forth an important
axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom 
to say that two plus two make four.
If that is granted, all else follows.
