phony
 

-- 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 might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and
thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a
victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth
Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What was needed was
a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready made as
it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in
battle, in heroic circumstances. There were occasions when Big Brother
devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file
Party member whose life and death he