The Two Minutes Hate

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 center 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 two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them 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 thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, eblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shape-lines of her hips. Winston has disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. 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 had given 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 Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to fell a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
[...]
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.
[...]
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. [...]
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 bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out “Swine! Swine! Swine!2 and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at 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 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. [...]
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed trough his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. [...]
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant “B-B! . . . . B-B! . . . . B-B!” – over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first “b” and the second – a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston’s entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of “B-B! . . . . B-B!” always filled him with terror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple ofQuote seconds during which the expression in his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened – if, indeed, it did happen.”

Dies war ein Auszug aus dem Buch 1984 von George Orwell.
In der Szene geht es um eine immer um 11 Uhr stattfindende Szenerie in den Büros der Stadt. Es handelt sich dabei um zwei Minuten während derer von einem riesigen Bildschirm aus eine Propaganda-Show läuft.
Wie zu lesen war, versetzen sich die Menschen in dem im ganzen Buch von George Orwell beschriebenen Unterdrückungsstaat während dieser zwei Minuten in eine regelrechte Rage gegen jeden und alles.
Können wir so leben? Kontrolliert durch einen Staat der uns keine Wahl lässt, außer wenn wir hassen? Doch selbst zum Hass auf den Staatsfeind werden wir gezwungen!
Weiter beschreibt Orwell in seinem Buch andere Arten der Unterdrückung der Bürger durch den Staat. Zum Beispiel gibt es die sogenannten Telescreens, welche in jedem Raum installiert und ein ständiges Propaganda-Programm ausstrahlen. Man kann die Laustärke dieser Geräte zwar dimmen aber nie vollkommen abschalten.
Weitaus schlimmer ist der Aspekt, dass diese Geräte nicht nur zur Ausgabe vorhanden sind, sondern auch als Kamera und Mikrofon, die jede Bewegung und jeden Laut der in dem Raum befindlichen Personen, aufnehmen.
Wer würde es wirklich wollen in solch einem Staat zu leben? Kann man unter solch einer Unterdrückung überhaupt noch vom freien Bewusstsein sprechen?
Werden wir gar auch irgendwann soweit sein diese Utopie durchleben zu müssen? Geht der Überwachungsstaat irgendwann soweit, dass wir uns vorsehen müssen was wir denken?
Ich hoffe, dass es nie soweit kommen wird und wir uns stattdessen vorher zur Rebellion erheben!

The Two Minutes Hate (PDF-Version)

No related posts.