Text of Playboy Japan interview

[Otto]

It's been this part that struck me in the "1984"-Intro and nothing has
changed my opinion that it was written with a reference to a more
recent past than WW-2 as the last sentence seems to indicate:

"Now, those of fascistic disposition–or merely those among us who
remain all to 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
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 no differently than a fascist regime, censoring news,
controlling wages and prices, restricting travel, subordinating civil
liberties to self-defined wartime necessity."
("1984"-Intro, pp. ix-x)

Besides, I love this definition of a "fascistic disposition".

2006/8/7, robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>:
> I've been cleaning out the onslaught of e-mail the plychon list has been kind enough to unload onto my computer and ran across this and read it in it's entirety for the first time this morning at 6:14 am (pst). Have to say, it reads like English ttranslated to Japanese to English. But a line really stuck out for me, a statement about the news that is both perfectly consistant with what Pynchon has been saying about politics for years, and about as left as it gets:
>  . . . In a time of war,  information warfare is rather important and even those
> respected newspapers cannot be trusted. The founder of the Daily Mail,
> which was published 100 years ago in London said "News is something
> somebody wants to suppress.  Everything else is propaganda."