Orwell & Nineteen Eighty-Four

[barbara100 at jps.net]

---- Original Message ----
Jbor wrote:
>Having now read the Foreword in full (thanks E.) I find it unlikely that the
mentions of "homeland" and "altering the landscape" (ix-x) refer to 9/11 or
Bush at all.<

Maybe you don't recognise it because you're of fascistic disposition--or merely one of those among us who remain all too ready to justify government action, whether right or wrong. Hmmm?  Sorry, just thinking outloud.

Pynchon's foreword:
"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."

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