Part two - I still owe some answers, and I didn't have enough time yesterday.

Me:

...

Not exactly. Winston fails as a human being even before he's arrested.

Remember when he declares he is ready to do anything to bring down the Party - kill hundreds of innocent people, distribute habit-forming drugs, spread venereal diseases, throw acid in a child's face, if need be? He wants to fight the system, but the system has already transformed him and defeated him completely.<<

Fiona:

I don't see this as giving up his humanity. Far from it. Oceania was created

by human beings, and is maintained by human beings-- many of whom are probably quite decent sorts. Violence and hatred are human behaviour-- and are practiced/advocated by the resistance in Oceania as much as by the state.<

A language problem perhaps. When I say 'failure in humanity' I'm refering to a set of moral values. Winston wants to destroy the Party because it is evil, corrupt and inhuman. His statement of what he is willing to do to destroy it demonstrates that he has also become evil, corrupt and inhuman. In this way the system has already defeated him.

What you seem to be doing is starting off arguing that there is some inner

core of goodness to human beings which cannot be destroyed (but can be accessed through love, biological functions etc.)-- but then you go on to say that this core was extinguished in Winston Smith. You can't have it both ways, you know.<

I'm arguing that there exist certain possibilities to resist ideology - some of them, as you say, are related to love and instincts, others to the faculties of reason, creativity and so on. I'm not claiming that everybody wants to resist ideology or manages to use these possibilities. I think, and I already said so, that people are often not even aware of what they ought to fight against. Winston accepted the concept of 'neccessery murder' and from then on he was no better than the system he sought to destroy.

Anyway, IIRC, the proles' expression of human heritage consists in quaffing

beer, reading pornography and singing pop songs, and they have no knowledge of the past.<

Then you don't RC. Proles are human in the way which seems no longer accessible to Winston. He is aware of that. Shortly before he is arrested, he watches a prole woman from his window, working and singing. She is old and her body is 'blown up to monstrous dimensions by child-bearing'. The words of the song are nonsense. Still, he is fascinated by the warmth of her voice and by her vitality. 'The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly... People who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bllies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world... The proles... would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.'

N.