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Posted by 'Key on December 25, 2007, 5:36 pm
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live
together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour,
had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. And this vision
had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually profited by each
historical change. The heirs of the French, English, and American
revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of
man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have
even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by
the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of
political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been
discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new
political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy
and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in
round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases
for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war
prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the
use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations -- not only
became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who
considered themselves enlightened and progressive.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions,
and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its
rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been
foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which
had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world
which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What
kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new
aristocracy was made
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