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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 Inquisition. 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]