On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the
speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters,
the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding
of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the
booming of guns—after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of
Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd
could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the
proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them
to pieces—at just this moment it had been announced that
Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was
at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.

There was, of course, no admission that any change had
taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not
Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the
moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square
was packed with several thousand people, including a block
of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the
Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner
Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms
and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin
figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the 
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at
the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his
head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed
forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing
of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken
treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without
being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the
speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose
uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech
had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a
messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper
was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it
without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice
or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave
of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was
at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the
square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them
had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of
Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude
while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to
shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting
the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within
two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping 
the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward,
his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with
his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage
were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued
exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was
that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without
even breaking the syntax.