"The first thing you must understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms." (Orwell 253)This idea he presents really got me going. We all know what a martyr is the person who dies for their cause. Whether it be Martin Luther King Jr. dying while fighting for equal rights or that guy who gets arrested at the protest. They're often viewed as martyrs. They sacrificed themselves albeit on very different levels for what they believed in. They sometimes too are considered heroes for what they've done. That's the problem going on here for the Party. Heroes. Big damn heroes. (If anyone gets the reference to Firefly, you probably laughed, if not....carrying on...).
"In the middle ages there were Inquisition. It was a failure.[...] Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned them." (253)
These heroes become something people are inspired by and we can't have that in Oceania. Only Big Brother inspires. So, they've solved the problem. They made their decision and it worked "so long as [they] resist us we will never destroy [them]. " (254).
Problem solved. We didn't kill a traitor. We killed one of us, because we could. I don't have much of a way to relate this to anything today, other than how interesting it is. It's an interesting technique. Cruel,but an idea that is curious. It's one thing to convert someone unwavering to your side, its another to kill them once they've gotten there.
**Also, song for this post or I guess for Winston and Julia is here.
