'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said.
'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.'
'Do you know how long you have been here?'
'I don't know. Days, weeks, months -- I think it is
months.'
'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this
place?'
'To make them confess.'
'No, that is not the reason. Try again.'
'To punish them.'
'No!' exclaimed O'Brien. His voice had changed
extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern
and animated. 'No! Not merely to extract your confession, not
to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here?
To cure you ! To make you sane ! Will you understand, Winston,
that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands
uncured? We are 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 Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more
cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that
they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at
any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed
their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves
to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and
solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches,
confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering
themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one
another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years
the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become
martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why
was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they
had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make
mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered
here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow
the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that
posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never
hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of
history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the
stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a
register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be
annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will
never have existed.'
Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a
momentary bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as though
Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came
nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.
'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to
destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can
make the smallest difference -- in that case, why do we go to
the trouble of interrogating you first? That is what you were
thinking, was it not?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien smiled slightly. 'You are a flaw in the pattern,
Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell
you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the
past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with
the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us,
it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic
because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never
destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we
reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we
bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely,
heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill
him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should
exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it
may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any
deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake
still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even
the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked
up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the
bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.
The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The
command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt". Our command is
"Thou art". No one whom we bring to this place ever
stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those
three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed
-- Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford -- in the end we broke them
down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them
gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping -- and in
the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By
the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of
men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they
had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how
they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they
could die while their minds were still clean.'
His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the
lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not
pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes
every word he says. What most oppressed him was the
consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched
the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of
the range of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all ways larger
than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could
have, that O'Brien had not long ago known, examined, and
rejected. His mind contained Winston's mind. But in that
case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? It must be he,
Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him.
His voice had grown stern again.
'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston,
however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once
gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you
live out the natural term of your life, still you would never
escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever.
Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the
point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to
you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand
years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human
feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will
you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or
laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be
hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you
with ourselves.'
He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston
was aware of some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into
place behind his head. O'Brien had sat down beside the bed, so
that his face was almost on a level with Winston's.
'Three thousand,' he said, speaking over Winston's head to
the man in the white coat.
Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped
themselves against Winston's temples. He quailed. There was
pain coming, a new kind of pain. O'Brien laid a hand
reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.
'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes
fixed on mine.'
At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what
seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether
there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of
light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had
already been lying on his back when the thing happened, he had
a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position.
A terrific painless blow had flattened him out. Also something
had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus
he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the
face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there
was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been
taken out of his brain.
'It will not last,' said O'Brien. 'Look me in the eyes.
What country is Oceania at war with?'
Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and
that he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered
Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not
know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.
'I don't remember.'
'Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that
now?'
'Yes.'
'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the
beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since
the beginning of history, the war has continued without a
break, always the same war. Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
' Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men
who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended
that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent.
No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later
you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at
which you first invented it. Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
'Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw
five fingers. Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the
thumb concealed.
'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'
'Yes.'
And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the
scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was
no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old
fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back
again. But there had been a moment -- he did not know how long,
thirty seconds, perhaps -- of luminous certainty, when each new
suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and
become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been
three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had
faded but before O'Brien had dropped his hand; but though he
could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers
a vivid experience at some period of one's life when one was in
effect a different person.
'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is at any rate
possible.'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left
Winston saw the man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw
back the plunger of a syringe. O'Brien turned to Winston with a
smile. In almost the old manner he resettled his spectacles on
his nose.
'Do you remember writing in your diary,' he said, 'that it
did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was
at least a person who understood you and could be talked to?
You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to
me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be
insane. Before we bring the session to an end you can ask me a
few questions, if you choose.'
'Any question I like?'
'Anything.' He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial.
'It is switched off. What is your first question?'
'What have you done with Julia?' said Winston.
O'Brien smiled again. 'She betrayed you, Winston.
Immediately-unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over
to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw
her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her
dirty-mindedness -- everything has been burned out of her. It
was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.'
'You tortured her?'
O'Brien left this unanswered. 'Next question,' he said.
'Does Big Brother exist?'
'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the
embodiment of the Party.'
'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?
'You do not exist,' said O'Brien.
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