behind one another, whimpering for mercy.
And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The
dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once
again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they
had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of
that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them
true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You
must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity
will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of
history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere.
Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a
living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future.
You will never have existed.'
Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary
bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as though Winston had uttered the
thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little
narrowed.
'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to destroy you
utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest
difference -- in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating
you first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
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 hi

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