1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"

[Malignd]

Paul Mackin:

<<So think of the following as being said by Pynchon:

Is it not true that the extreme government actions and
restrictions on freedom imposed by Big
Brother--entirely unnecessary to the public good and
therefore completely wrong under normal
circumstances--may nevertheless become necessary in
wartime. The moment enemy bombs begin to fall on one's
homeland, altering the landscape and producing
casualties among friends and neighbors, criticism of
very harsh government controls become irrelevant, if
not indeed subversive. With the homeland in danger,
strong leadership and effective measures become of the
essence, and if you want to call that fascism, very
well, call it whatever you please, no one is likely to
be listening, unless it's for the air raids to be over
and the all clear to sound.  But the unseemliness of
opposing harsh restrictions on freedom or talking
about the long term dangers of granting emergency
powers in the heat of some emergency does not
necessarily make the fears of tyranny wrong.  One
could certainly argue that Churchill's war cabinet had
behaved no differently
than a fascist regime, censoring news, controlling
wages and prices, restricting travel, subordinating
civil liberties to self-defined wartime necessity.>>

I was beginning to think that I was going mad.  

This is, as much as the ambiguities of the text allow,
almost precisely as I read the passage; i.e., that
government restrictions of a sort unacceptable during
peacetime are (arguably) necessary during war; that
complaint at such time is "irrelevant, indeed
subversive"; that carrying that argument on during
wartime is "unseemly," even if it is a viable
argument.

This will no doubt clinch it for some that Paul and I
have not read the foreword and are, rather, part of a
cabal of perpetuators of ad hominem argument directed
at Pynchon.


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