“revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity.”
The game of cricket in this usage is reference to a gentlemanly sport—really more a pastime than a sport in the modern sense—and is situated as something old-fashioned and outmoded. Revolutions cannot abide by outmoded gentlemen’s agreement on the rules of engagement during wartime; the metaphor speaks both to a past on the verge of disappearing and toward the future of terrorism which obliterated everything. Everything refers back to Machiavelli’s dictum that the ends will always justify the means.
The Machiavellian Winds of History
Another way of justifying the means is to view the end as a destination point of historical inertia. An argument for lacking ethical dimension and moral guidance is that the means one uses is simply part of the whirlwind of historical change; it’s out of one’s hands because:
“History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned. History knows her way. She makes no mistakes.”
The Crooked Contractor of History
The above metaphor suggests that history rolls forward always to a certain truth in the end, but that makes sense only when one has the actual unvarnished facts. History is not the progression of time, after all, but the recording of events of the past from a point in the future:
“Had not history always been an inhumane, unscrupulous builder, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud?”
Individualism
The individual as a concept is sneered at; he is nothing and the Party is all. The reasoning given in metaphorical imagery is a reference to one of the basic tenets of Marxist political philosophy: the history of society is the history of economic struggle between the haves and the have-nots:
“The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could not be stopped or influenced”
More Means; More Justification
The single most often recurring motif in the book is one centered upon justification. Machiavellian principles—for lack of a better word—permeate almost every page and are references in nearly every conversation. The sheer volume of ways in which a steadfast conviction that means can always be justified in one way or another eventually becomes too enormous to ignore:
“Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas as others punish crimes: with death.”
