1) Those REAL Old Jamborees ... , 2) Did Noah suffer like Winston - undefeated?, 3) Medieval Italian Neanderthal?
[11] And the earth was corrupted before God, and was filled with iniquity. [12] And when God had seen that the earth was corrupted (for all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth,) [13] He said to Noe: The end of all flesh is come before me, the earth is filled with iniquity through them, and I will destroy them with the earth.
Genesis, chapter 6, from Douay-Rheims Bible Online.
'It is impossible to found a civilisation on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.'
'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we chose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we chose to quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The Party is immortal. ... We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. ...'
Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 281 f. with omissions marked ...
George Orwell is describing a terrorising intimidator called O'Brien describing to his victim Winston the kind of totalitarian rule he proposes to make his victim accept by total fear and total surrender.
People have faced such things in Roumania, I fear in Dachau too. And a young boy called Josef Wajsblat was in a gaz chamber, but saved in the last moment by irrational anger from none other than Doctor Mengele - a fine "room 101", if you like.
The ideology of O'Brien comes out as something which is very close to what may have been what happened before the flood. "All flesh had corrupted its way" - teen girls too? Babies too? Does it say they were evil and mean in their hearts? No, it says their flesh was corrupted.
Modern education and societies in practise force girls to:
- wait marrying till 18 (legal) or, further up you get in society more like 30 it gets (social pressure),
- attend schools with coeducation (legal many countries) till age 16 (legal) and where flirting is considered ok years before any kind of marriage (social pressure),
- where not only malthusian perversions and artificial means of achieving same result, but also abortion is taught as solutions respectively all right and in worst case possible (legal induction of social pressure)
- and there is an acceptation of hypnosis (social pressure)
- and a frowning on daily prayer and weekly fasting (social pressure, in some countries legal powers of persecution)
- - and after that you hope they stay chaste till marriage?
The ideology of O'Brien involves society evolving into a hive. I have already written about that in Beware of Meta Man. No, the title was even braver than I remembered: Resist Meta Man.
http://hglundahl.blogspot.com/2006/08/resist-meta-man-evolutionary.html
It is exactly what Chesterton feared Evolution leads to. There are even Catholic versions of it, like the Piltdown probable forger Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit Father of a sort. He dreamed of a noosphere. I have seen tendencies of moral evolutionism even in St Nicolas du Chardonnet, and also in Orthodox Church. A willingness to make a newcomer suffer and surrender. A willingness even to paint God in colours that remind me of O'Brien.
It is not God who forces pregnant thirteen year olds to either abort or adopt but never even dream of simply starting a family. It is Newthink.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou library of
Paris
16 - VI - 2011
PS, George Orwell made some funny allusions: O'Brien reminds me of Brian Borumha, the royal "Winston" who, like King Alfred did resist Vikings (you are more tired of victory than we are of defeat), the year 1984 is set as in Napoleon of Notting Hill where human nature does turn against totalitarianism, there is a Syme as in The Man Who was Thursday ... but here he is just a man concerned with dictionary writing (God made Tolkien a revenge for that slur on dictionary writers: a man who may yet prove more of a Gabriel Syme than a Dr Johnson drinking the usurper's health), and of course, in the pages quoted and their surroundings, Geocentric and Young Earth scenarios are set off as illogically as "2+2=5" because atheistically: in such a case it really is a kind of collective solipsism as O'Brien himself puts it. Geocentrism without Primum Movens to move outermost sphere and angels for the planets, Young Earth without Creation are obviously illogical. Kind of the funniest allusion, or most tragic, because it means the writer saw the judges of Galileo as O'Briens rather than as the courteous and logical St Robert Bellarmine in first process, the pious Urban VIII in the second./HGL
PPS, As a Geocentric I take offense at any comparison with O'Brien. I have given a method where distance or closeness of stars (which has nothing to do with navigation, practically) could be determined by watching parallax from Mars:
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2011/04/cagasuamfobdis.html
Those who refuse that experiment are - heliocentrics, partly./HGL
