1985

1985 by Anthony Burgess Page B

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Authors: Anthony Burgess
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whether or not they’ve ever been in prison, the degree of constraint necessary to get them there, a full diagnosis of the mental ailment, special slots for details of drug addiction, epilepsy, alcoholism –
    But is there anything really so sinister about the truth? And, for that matter, about violation of privacy? When young people copulate openly in public places, who are we to ask that our biographies go unpublished?
    I don’t know, I don’t know. But think – the State is only an instrument. Everything depends on who has control of that instrument, which can so easily be transformed into a weapon. It’s unwise to assume, even with our heightened wariness of tyranny, a continuation of a tradition of liberalism. A new Hitler could arise in Europe and be overjoyed with the information made available by a civil service thinking in the old terms of restraint and democratic rights. Undoubtedly the computers of the world have Jews neatly listed, as well as dangerous intellectual freethinkers. And even now, suppose a crime has been committed, and a man in middle age is suspected, one suffering from epilepsy with four false incisors –. The nation’s blood groups are computerized. The State knows the addresses of all the men with red hair.
    You’re saying that nobody is fit to be given knowledge. We have to take a chance on this sort of thing. I insist on the neutrality of knowledge. Justice is always as likely to be done as injustice. Besides, I see signs everywhere that the State is losing power rather than gaining it
.
    In Russia? In China? In the bloody little republics that issue no news?
    I mean in those areas where the luxury of freedom has been for a long time taken for granted, as much as clean water and mains electricity. I’m not forgetting, by the way, that the essential thing in life is to live, somehow. That if the only way to get a daily bowl of rice is to be in a stinking jail – well, open up, let mein. That in some parts of the world the antonym to State tyranny is not personal liberty but impersonal chaos. No, I mean the civilized West. America, Britain, western Europe. We’ve seen no charismatic bull-necked leaders around for a long time. Politicians are generally despised, statesmen derided, a United States president can take a deserved whipping. Orwell believed that the media, especially the new ones like television, would be in the hands of the State, that here was an apt instrument for propaganda, harangues, lordly directives. It hasn’t worked out that way at all. Politics can’t compete with soap opera or old movies. The posters and slogans we see concern taste-pleasing commodities, not omnipotent Big Brother. We have a bearded Southern colonel who offers us nothing more oppressive than fried chicken, we have handsome open-air smokers of Kool or Kent. The State can’t gratify taste or sense or excite sympathetic tears or the rib risible. It knows it can’t have our souls. All it can get is our money, and that is, true, a real oppression that didn’t seem to interest Orwell (though, I gather, he tried to turn himself into a limited company to protect his royalties from
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and
Animal Farm).
The State exerts its power on us chiefly through fiscal tyranny, in the insolence of brutal demands, not graceful requests, in the immorality of taking money for things not necessarily wanted by the payer, and all without contract – give us your cash or you go to jail; as for what we do with it, that’s our concern, brother. The State calls up young people to fight wars that nobody wants except the Pentagon and the arms manufacturers. The State shows its ugly face most blatantly in the police, which increasingly uses methods learnt from the totalitarian torturers, but shows itself also more and more
not
to be an arm of the State so much as a quasi-autonomous force, able to shoot first and ask questions after. But we’re not

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