THE UNFUTURE OF UTOPIA
745
and then promptly answering them ... easy to imitate"). And who is
Goldstein, the dissident leader of Ingsoc against whom Two Minute Hate
Periods are conducted in all Party offices,
if
not Trotsky, the grand
heresiarch and useful scapegoat, who is even now as indispensable to
Stalin as Goldstein is shown to be to Big Brother? The inserted chap–
ters from Goldstein's imaginary book on "The Theory and Practice of
Oligarchical Collectivism," are a wonderfully realised imitation not only
of Trotsky's characteristic rhetoric but also of his mode and manner as
a Marxist theoretician. Moreover, the established pieties of Communism
are at once recognizable in the approved spiritual regimen of the Ingsoc
Party faithful: "A Party member is expected to have no private emotions
and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous
frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over
victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party."
One of Orwell's best strokes is his analysis of the technique of "double–
think," drilled into the Party members, which consists of the willingness
to assert that black is white when the Party demands it, and even to
believe that black is white, while at the same time knowing very well
that nothing of the sort can be true. Now what is "doublethink," actually,
if not the technique continually practiced by the Communists and their
liberal collaborators, dupes, and apologists. Nor is it a technique avail–
able exclusively to Soviet citizens. Right here in New York any issue of
The Daily Worker
or of
The Daily Compass
will provide you with illus–
trations of it as vicious and ludicrous as any you will come upon in
Orwell's story. As for "the control of the past," of which so much is made
in Oceania through the revision of all records and the manipulation
of memory through force and fraud, that too is by no means unknown
in Russia, where periodically not only political history but also the history
of art and literature are revamped in accordance with the latest edicts
of the regime. The one feature of Oceanic society that appears to be
really new is the proscription of sexual pleasure. The fact is, however, that
a tendency in that direction haS long been evident in Russia, where a new
kind of prudery, disgusting in its unctuousness and hypocrisy, is officially
promoted. In Oceania "the only recognized purpose of marriage was to
beget children for the service of the Party." The new Russian laws regu–
lating sexual relations are manifestly designed with the same purpose
in mind. It is plain that any society which imposes a ban on personal ex–
perience must sooner or later distort and inhibit the sexual instinct. The
totalitarian State cannot tolerate attachments between men and women
that fall outside the political sphere and that are in their very nature
difficult to control from above.
