to twist the dial out of sheer
wantonness. At this moment, however, O'Brien turned away. He took a pace or
two up and down. Then he continued less vehemently:
'The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are
no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In
the Middle Ages there was the Inquisitlon. It was a failure. It set out to
eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned
at the stake, thousands of others rose up. 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 were 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 him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the
totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the
Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the
Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the
mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make
martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they
deliberately set themselves to destroy their d