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It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen[1]. Winston Smith went quickly through the glass do ors of Victory Mansions, trying to escape the cold wind.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. On the wall at one end of it, there was a large coloured poster. It was a picture of a huge face, more than a metre wide: the face of a strong handsome man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache. Winston went to the stairs. The lift was rarely working, and right now there was no electricity during the day. It was PART of the preparation for Hate Week. The flat was on the sixth floor, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had problems with his right leg, went slowly, stopping several times on the way. On each floor, opposite the lift, there was the poster with the huge face on the wall. The man's eyes followed you when you moved. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU stood on the poster.
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The Party said that Oceania had never been at peace with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been at peace with Eurasia four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only inside his head. And if all others accepted the lie, if all records told the same tale, then the lie became truth. «Who controls the past», ran the Party slogan, «controls the future: who controls the present controls the past». And yet the past never had been changed. It was quite simple. You just had to win against your own memory. «Reality control», they called it: in Newspeak it was called «doublethink».
The exercise was over. Winston breathed deeply. He thought about the word «doublethink». To know and not to know, to know the truth and tell lies, to have two opinions at the same time, to know that they were contradictory and to believe in both of them, to use logic against logic, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party protected democracy, to forget what it was necessary to forget, to remember it when it was necessary to remember and then to forget it again. Even to understand the word «doublethink» you had to use doublethink.
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