>>19016495
p. 207
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.