It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Toronto Star, where John worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate…
…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. As usual, the face of George W Bush, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust…
..The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Bush was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Ideological purity. All subsequent crimes against the Ideology, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching…
…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 dark-haired girl behind John had begun crying out 'Bastard! Moron! Idiot!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Red Book Platform and flung it at the screen. It struck Bush's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment John 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...
...But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Paul Martin, grey-haired, clean-shaven, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Paul Martin was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Paul Martin faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
GOVERNMENT IS CARING
LESS MILITARY IS PEACEKEEPING
LIBERAL IS CANADA
