1984 - Planet eBook

seemed to exist, between himself and O’Brien, and of theimpulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O’Brien’spresence, announce that he was the enemy of the Party, anddemand his help. Curiously enough, this did not strike heras an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judgingpeople by their faces, and it seemed natural to her thatWinston should believe O’Brien to be trustworthy on thestrength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover she took itfor granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hatedthe Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe todo so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organizedopposition existed or could exist. The tales about Goldsteinand his underground army, she said, were simply a lot ofrubbish which the Party had invented for its own purposesand which you had to pretend to believe in. Times beyondnumber, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations,she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution ofpeople whose names she had never heard and in whose supposedcrimes she had not the faintest belief. When publictrials were happening she had taken her place in the detachmentsfrom the Youth League who surrounded the courtsfrom morning to night, chanting at intervals ‘Death to thetraitors!’ During the Two Minutes Hate she always excelledall others in shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she had onlythe dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what doctrineshe was supposed to represent. She had grown up since theRevolution and was too young to remember the ideologicalbattles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an independentpolitical movement was outside her imagination: and