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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with
negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally
you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy
the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never
destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.
We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our
side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of
ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous
thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless
it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In
the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming
1984 |
