Ch7

• 1.7

  Winston discusses the proles, the history the Party claim is the truth and Rutherford, Aaronson and Jones
• only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 percent of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.
• But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire.
• They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.’
• The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave.
• The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
• Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution.
• But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory.
• Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?
• The past not only changed, but changed continuously.
• (the gaze of Big Brother) frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses.
• In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.
• If both the past and external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?
• Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.