The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part…
…but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.
Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary.
A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness…
…a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current…

View of Canary Wharf from Stave Hill Ecological Park, Timber Pond Road, Surrey Quays, Bermondsey, SE16
…turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
From George Orwell’s 1984 (1948)



















