Re: Goodbye, Futurama!

the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of
massed planes, the booming of guns -- after six days of this, when the
great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia
had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their
hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on
the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them
to pieces -- at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not
after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia
was an ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place.
Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once,
that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a
demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it
happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were
luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people,
including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the
Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small
lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over
which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little
Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony
arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by
the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres,
deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of
civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was
almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then
maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the
voice of the speaker was dr