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 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