It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate.
Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when someone he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. It was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with straight hair, a tanned face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Woke Police.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Donald Trump, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Trump was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his campaigning.
Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Trump without a painful mixture of emotions. Trump was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party–an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Biden, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the withdrawal of protesters from Portland, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, license to invade, he was crying hysterically that America had been betrayed–and all this in slow monosyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied bland face on the screen was too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Trump produced fear and anger automatically. But what was strange was that although Trump was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were–in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when racists with green teeth acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Woke Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of confederates dedicated to the overthrow of the State. White Supremacy, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Trump was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening mocking voice that came from the screen. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Racist! Racist! Racist!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Trump at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Biden, the Party, and the Woke Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Trump seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Biden changed into adoration, and Big Biden seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the plagues of Asia, and Trump, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about him, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.
The Hate rose to its climax. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Biden, white-haired, clean-shaven, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen.(link) Nobody heard what Big Biden was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Biden faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE
FUND RED COMMUNITIES
KILL THE 1%
Nobody mentioned the young, educated candidate for the Libertarian Party,. Jo Jorgensen. Jorgensen, however, was already an UNPERSON. She did not exist: she had never existed, and her party was now in its 49th year of non-existence. It’s vote share was now increasing 80% per year. Before long tripping would be decriminalized and conscription abolished forever.
She’s With Us!
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian blog…
libertariantranslator 