1984 - Planet eBook

opened, nor even looked at.On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, thespeeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters,the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealingof trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grindingof the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, thebooming of guns—after six days of this, when the great orgasmwas quivering to its climax and the general hatred ofEurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowdcould have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminalswho were to be publicly hanged on the last day of theproceedings, they would unquestionably have torn themto pieces—at just this moment it had been announced thatOceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania wasat war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.There was, of course, no admission that any change hadtaken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddennessand everywhere at once, that Eastasia and notEurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstrationin one of the central London squares at themoment when it happened. It was night, and the white facesand the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The squarewas packed with several thousand people, including a blockof about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of theSpies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the InnerParty, a small lean man with disproportionately long armsand a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled,was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskinfigure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the