1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"

[pynchonoid]

I wrote:
> Bush's US in 2003 in the Foreward because the system
> of surveillance, manipulation, and oppression in
> democratic disguise is becoming in-your-face overt
> (in-your-face PATRIOT act, widely publicized
> detentions and torture, etc.) in the wake of 9-11.>>

Pynchon's critique is clear enough, although it's best
to read it in context -- I pull these quotes for
convenience:

"[...] Now, those of fascistic disposition - or merely
those among us who remain all too ready to justify any
government action, whether right or wrong - will
immediately point out that this is prewar thinking,
and that the moment enemy bombs begin to fall on one's
homeland, altering the landscape and producing
casualties among friends and neighbours, all this sort
of thing, really, becomes 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 an
argument - let alone a prophecy - in the heat of some
later emergency, does not necessarily make it wrong.
One could certainly argue that Churchill's war cabinet
had behaved on occasion no differently from a fascist
regime, censoring news, controlling wages and prices,
restricting travel, subordinating civil liberties to
self-defined wartime necessity. [...]"
"[...] Doublethink also lies behind the names of the
superministries which run things in Oceania - the
Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth
tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and
eventually kills anybody whom it deems a threat. If
this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the
present-day United States, few have any problem with a
war-making apparatus named "the department of
defence," any more than we have saying "department of
justice" with a straight face, despite well-documented
abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most
formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media
are required to present "balanced" coverage, in which
every "truth" is immediately neutered by an equal and
opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target
of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright
lying, all of which is benevolently termed "spin," as
if it were no more harmful than a ride on a
merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us,
yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same
time - it seems a condition of political thought in a
modern superstate to be permanently of at least two
minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of
inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain
there, preferably forever. [...] "
"[...] Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same,
and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to
confuse them in Orwell's case. There is a game some
critics like to play in which one makes lists of what
Orwell did and didn't "get right". Looking around us
at the present moment in the US, for example, we note
the popularity of helicopters as a resource of "law
enforcement," familiar to us from countless televised
"crime dramas," themselves forms of social control -
and for that matter at the ubiquity of television
itself. The two-way telescreen bears a close enough
resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to
"interactive" cable systems, circa 2003. News is
whatever the government says it is, surveillance of
ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police
activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And
so forth. "Wow, the government has turned into Big
Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?"
"Orwellian, dude!" 
Well, yes and no. Specific predictions are only
details, after all. What is perhaps more important,
indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able
to see deeper than most of us into the human soul.
Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis
defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that
far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet
even come into its own - the corruption of spirit, the
irresistible human addiction to power were already
long in place, all well-known aspects of the Third
Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour party
- like first drafts of a terrible future. What could
prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and
the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions?
Clean living? 
What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of
course, making humanist arguments almost irrelevant,
is the technology. We must not be too distracted by
the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in
Winston Smith's era. In "our" 1984, after all, the
integrated circuit chip was less than a decade old,
and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the
wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most
notably the internet, a development that promises
social control on a scale those quaint old
20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could
only dream about. [...] "
" [...] The interests of the regime in Oceania lie in
the exercise of power for its own sake, in its
unrelenting war on memory, desire, and language as a
vehicle of thought. Memory is relatively easy to deal
with, from the totalitarian point of view. There is
always some agency like the Ministry of Truth to deny
the memories of others, to rewrite the past. It has
become a commonplace, circa 2003, for government
employees to be paid more than most of the rest of us
to debase history, trivialise truth and annihilate the
past on a daily basis. Those who don't learn from
history used to have to relive it, but only until
those in power could find a way to convince everybody,
including themselves, that history never happened, or
happened in a way best serving their own purposes - or
best of all that it doesn't matter anyway, except as
some dumbed-down TV documentary cobbled together for
an hour's entertainment. [...]"





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