not interested in those stupid crimes that you have
committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is
all
we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do
you
understand what I mean by that?'
He was bending over Winston. His face looked enormous because of
its
nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover
it
was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity. Again
Winston's
heart shrank. If it had been possible he would have cowered deeper into
the
bed. He felt certain that O'Brien was about to twist the dial out of
sheer
wantonness. At this moment, however, O'Brien turned away. He took a pace
or
two up and down. Then he continued less vehemently:
'The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there
are
no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past.
In
the Middle Ages there was the Inquisitlon. It was a failure. It set out
to
eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it
burned
at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because
the
Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they
were
still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were
unrepentant.
Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs.
Naturally
all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the
Inquisitor
who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were
the
totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and
the
Russian Commun
|
