Free Orwell's Revenge by Peter Huber Page A

Public propaganda is everywhere; private discourse is nowhere. It’s the same with memory: the Ministry stores, collects, and rewrites everything; the private individual forgets, and forgets again. The Thought Police know every private thought; private thought itself ceases to exist. All of this hinges on the technology of telecommunications.
    And what’s most chilling about 1984 is that it seems so plausible. The Ministry installs all telescreens, and the telescreens project Big Brother’s face and voice, his eyes and ears, the Ministry incarnate. In fact, “[n]obody has ever seen Big Brother in the flesh. He is a face on the hoardings,a voice on the telescreen.” Yes, that’s it: Big Brother is sense, sound, and image inside the electronic machine itself. He is the Brain in the Bottle. The machine itself is the enemy.
    Except that that’s impossible. Even the most evil of machines require evil men behind them.

CHAPTER 5
    The lifts worked, silently and fast. White-jacketed servants still hurried about on the softlycarpeted passages in the building. The smells were of good food and good tobacco, as they had always been. But the cream-papered walls with white wainscotting, once exquisitely clean, were now beginning to show the grime of long contact with human bodies. The dark-blue carpet, rich as velvet, was now distinctly frayed.
    O’Brien sat alone in the room, by a table under a green-shaded lamp. The telescreen was dimmed to a murmur. He had once been a monstrous man, witha mane of greasy gray hair. His face, pouched and seamed, coarse, humorous, and brutal, had suggested a certain charm of manner. The charm was gone now Nothing remained but the size and brutality.
    O’Brien stretched a great, flabby arm over the desk, and picked up a memorandum. Idiots, he thought, they were all idiots and incompetents, every last one of them. He was surrounded by fools. It went to show what happened when you left things to others. The helicopters, the telescreens . . . now a pathetic little diary— they bungled everything.
    It had been different in the old days. O’Brien remembered how he had personally taken charge of breaking Winston Smith. Smith had confessed,recanted, and learned to love Big Brother. The business had been handled with dispatch. O’Brien had particularly enjoyed the hanging afterward. The Party had abolished the drop, of course. People were hanged by simply hauling them up and letting them kick and struggle. Smith had taken almostfifteen minutes to die. The Party was good at this sort of thing.
    Yet now—now O’Brien’s own Thought Police couldn’t even find Smith’s diary. Agitators and traitors were probably paging through it at this very moment. It was outrageous, a fundamental threat to Party hegemony. The Party had taught this from the very beginning: Every citizen shall be kept for twenty-four hours a day in the sound of official propaganda, with allother channels of communication closed. Yet despite all the Party’s efforts, other channels of communication remained open.
    O’Brien thought of Smith again. It had been an amusing case. After breaking and releasing him, O’Brien had ordered Smith rearrested some months later. It was proved at the trial that Smith had engaged in fresh conspiraciesfrom the very moment of his release. The execution had been performed in Victory Square,as a warning to posterity. But somehow, through an unfortunate mix-up, Smith’s diary had escaped the memory holes.
    Worse still was the problem of the telescreens. That no one knew how to fix a broken unit was manageable. The Eastasian prisoners were perfectly capable of producing new ones as fast as the old ones broke down. But now the entire system seemed to be acting up. Perhaps the network was just aging, but it was impossible to say for sure. Orwell would have known, but Orwell had been purged years ago. And if the network failed, what