He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
That, he reflected, might have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been oppressed by the capitalists. The Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous. The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. The sexual Puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. As the Party slogan put it: “Proles and animals are free.”
Winston took out of the drawer a copy of a children’s history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary:
In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as “Sir”. The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and—
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It MIGHT be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible—a world of steel and concrete—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity. The reality was decaying cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes.
Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations—that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300—and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed—AFTER the event: that was what counted—concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been—at any rate, it was at about the time when he and Katharine had parted. But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.
The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the majority had been executed. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way. They had confessed working with the enemy. After confessing they had been pardoned, and given posts in the Party which didn’t mean anything but which sounded important.
Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were like corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.
There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even to be seen in near such people. They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves which was the speciality of the cafe. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in The Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, lifeless and unconvincing. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair. At one time he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one’s eyes.
Winston could not now remember how he had come to be in the cafe at such a time. The place was almost empty. The three men sat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out but no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed. It was a peculiar, cracked, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford’s face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, and yet not knowing AT WHAT he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.
