Party would select this version or that, would
re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing
that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the
permanent records and become truth.
Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was
for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid
of a too-popular subordinate. Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had
been suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps -- what was likeliest of
all -- the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were
a necessary part of the mechanics of government. The only real clue lay in
the words 'refs unpersons', which indicated that Withers was already dead.
You could not invariably assume this to be the case when people were
arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed to remain at liberty for
as much as a year or two years before being executed. Very occasionally
some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly
reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of
others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever. Withers,
however, was already an unperson. He did not exist: he had never existed.
Winston decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse the tendency
of Big Brother's speech. It was better to make it deal with something
totally unconnected with its original subject.
He mi