It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the
RECORDS DEPARTMENT newsroom at MSNBC, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein Sarah Palin, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. Goldstein Palin was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party a governor, almost on a level with BIG BROTHER OBAMA himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities run for Vice President and lost, had been condemned to death political oblivion and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared reappeared as a major media figure.
The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein Palin was not the principal figure. He She was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity Hope and Change. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his her teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive She was off in the wilds of Alaska and hatching his her conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, FOX News perhaps even - so it was occasionally rumoured - in some hiding-place in Oceania itself
on Facebook.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein Palin without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard - a clever face genial, WASPy face with whispy bangs--a pleasant face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end top of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein Palin was delivering his her usual venemous attack upon the doctrines of the Party - an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He She was abusing BIG BROTHER OBAMA, he she was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he she was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia end of quantitative easing, he she was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, the right to keep and bear arms, he she was crying hysterically that the American Revolution has been betrayed - and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech a soothing, folksy tone which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's Palin's specious clap trap covered, behind his her head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army TEA Partiers - row after row of solid ordinary-looking men and women with expressionless Asiatic faces, American flags and home-made signs who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots plodding of the protesters' shoes formed the background to Goldstein's Palin's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides the sight or even the thought of Goldstein
Palin produced fear and anger automatically. He She
was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other John McCain or Ron Paul, since from time to time either would take positions supporting the Party. But what was strange was that although Goldstein Palin was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his her theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were - in spite of all this, his her influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him her. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his her directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He She was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State restoration of Constitutional government.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's Palin's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably.
In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein Palin had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier an evangelical Protestant who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring waving a leather-bound Bible, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of BIG BROTHER OBAMA.
Winston had heard the whispered story of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein Palin was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there was a best-seller on Amazon. It was a book without title reputedly entitled "America by Heart". People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood TEA Party nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
