As a teenager I ploughed through many of the dystopian tales popular at the time, George Orwell´s 1984, and Animal Farm, Aldous Huxley´s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury´s Fahrenheit 451 as well as a few others. I was not unaware that, scary as they were, none of these were completely unrealistic visions of a troubled future. Recent history might suggest that mankind would learn a lesson and that it would take generations of practised amnesia before the likes of George Orwell´s et al characters once again entered the world´s stage.
Looking back over the past ten years I was obviously mistaken. A whole lifetime of things that went wrong could not match the events of the past decade. The most far reaching of these of course is Covid 19, bouncing us back to the times when lepers rang a bell shouting, ”unclean, unclean” to warn others of a dangerous disease and risk of infection. Despite a global panic and its consequences the virus will eventually be mastered and boxed in by science like so many other diseases threatening human beings.
Not so with politics, never a genre for choir boys uncomfortable with white lies, but now with politicians like America´s Trump and the UK´s Johnson quite prepared to view truths and untruths as interchangeable at will. Hannah Arendt has a few things to say about that in ”The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Dividing people into us and them, then demonising the latter to ride on a wave of political popularity is as criminal as it is cynical. Unfortunately history shows us that it is all too often successful.
Somebody once said, ”when fascism comes to America it will be carrying a bible and be wrapped in a flag.” Of course there are various political recipes for this, with differing flavours but this quote serves well as a base ingredient for an otherwise unsavoury dish.
An article in my daily newspaper or maybe I should say my daily news1sand0s reported on the EU´s reluctance to forward 2,5 billion Euros to Malopolskie, a self declared LGBT free region in Poland, requiring that support for LGBT discrimination in the region be withdrawn. Not an unreasonable demand considering that the money comes from taxpayers in the EU with a slightly less backward approach to the rights of the LGBT community.
The thing that struck me the most in this article was a quote from a sermon given by the Archbishop of Krakow, Marek Jedraszewski where his rhetorical question is, ”should we not stand firm and defend our honour and true freedom.”
”True freedom,” according to the Archbishop would be denying others their equal rights in the name of honour.
Without too much effort I can think of a number of people apart from George Orwell who could sue the Archbishop for plagiarism.
Luckily for the Archbishop and for the rest of us, they are all dead.