Reblogged from Beastrabban\'s Weblog:
Last Thursday the Mirror ran a story reporting the Conservative’s
deletion of their election promises from their website. They noted that this was
the re-writing of history like that done by Big Brother’s totalitarian
dictatorship in Orwell’s classic 1984. It was Orwell, who coined the
classic statement that he who controls the past, controls the present and
future, though he phrased it far better than my own memory allows here. The
Mirror also reported that, astonishingly, Conservative Central Office
attempted to defend their actions with the excuse that they were trying to help
visitors find their way around their website better. The Mirror did not,
however, pick up the similar totalitarian impulses behind this attitude. While
Orwell’s description of the way absolute dictatorships distort and re-write
history is well-known, this last aspect of such tyrannical regimes is far less
famous. It comes not from Orwell, but from that old author of transgressive SF,
J.G. Ballard.
Ballard’s novels and short stories, such as High Rise, Concrete
Island, The Atrocity Exhibition and Super Cannes, are set
in depersonalised, alienated futures, inhabited by psychopaths and characterised
by social breakdown and savage, extreme violence. His novel, Crash,
filmed in the 1990s by David Cronenberg, is about a subculture of the victims of
motor accidents, who gain sexual pleasure from car crashes. The novel itself was
so shocking that the publisher’s reviewer wrote a note about it say, ‘Author
mentally deranged – do not publish’. Cronenberg’s film was so extreme that it
sent the Daily Mail into another moral panic. Acting once again as the
guardian of the nation’s moral purity, the Mail launched a campaign
against it and the film flopped as a result. Many see it as a classic of SF and
transgressive cinema. Ballard himself was completely different from the violent
and psychotic characters in his work. Visitors to his home were surprised to
find him living in respectable suburban domesticity, caring for his sick wife
and raising his children. Listening to his cultured Oxbridge tones on the radio
brought to mind a gentleman, who enjoyed a good malt and a good cigar, and whose
favourite reading was Wisden, rather than the delineator of brutal
violence and bizarre and extreme sexuality. Ballard is now recognised as one of
the great SF writers of the 20th century, and his work has garnered respect
outside the SF ghetto in the literary mainstream. This is partly due to the way
it examines the role played by the media, including news reportage, in shaping
the post-modern condition.
Back in the 1990s Radio 3 ran a short series of five interviews with writers,
artists and scientists. Entitled Grave New Worlds, the series explored
the transhuman condition. Amongst the guests on the programmes were the SF
author Paul J. McAuley, the performance artist Stelarc, feminist writers on
women and digital technology, and J.G. Ballard. The conversation got on to the
subject of Ballard’s then recent novels, in which the heroes enter gated,
corporate communities. Instead of peace and harmony, the heroes find that these
communities are based on violence, in which brutal attacks on outsiders are used
to bond together the communities’ inmates. Talking about these savage dystopias,
Ballard stated that in his opinion the totalitarianism of the future would not
use force, but would be characterised by servility and obsequiousness. It would
claim to help you.
There is an element of this spurious claim in previous totalitarian regimes.
At times both the Nazis and Stalin’s Communist states claimed to be somehow
helping their victims. The propaganda films produced by the Nazis to allay
international concerns about their treatment of the Jews, purported to show the
victims of their deportations happily working on their new, luxurious plot of
land in the special areas allocated to them in the East, rather than the
violence and horrific, mass murder of the Concentration Camps. The Jews featured
in these films were all forced to do so by the Nazis, the victims of beatings
and torture before and after they appeared in front of the camera. Immediately
after the filming was over, I believe some were taken away to be killed in the
death camps.
Stalin’s propaganda for his collectivisation campaign similarly showed crowds
of joyous peasants voluntarily entering collective farms bursting with food and
abundance. Kniper’s stirring song, Wheatlands, written for this
campaign, contains lines where the peasant subjects of the song declare that
they weren’t forced iinto them. They certainly did not show the squalor and
deprivation within the collective farms, nor the mass starvation caused by the
campaign in the Ukraine and other areas of the former Soviet countryside.
Back in Nazi Germany, a group of shopkeeper’s in Munich took the Nazi’s
professed commitment to the Corporate state at face value, and attempted to set
up a similar corporation themselves. This new body was expected to regulate
trade and prices. The result, however, was inflation. The Nazis reacted by
dissolving it and arresting its members. They pasted notices over the arrested
individuals’ shops, stating their offence and that they were ‘now in protective
custody at Dachau’. This somehow suggests that it was for the victims’ benefit,
rather than their punishment.
Ballard himself was a high Tory, who felt that increased legislation was
stifling Britain by making it too safe. He wrote Crash while he was a
correspondent for a motoring magazine. Driving along the new motorways, he felt
the experience was too bland and antiseptic, and so in his imagination created a
cult around a charismatic psychologist, Vaughn, whose members got their sexual
kicks from staging the very accidents road and motor vehicle legislation was
intended to remove. The violence in his novels, like Super Cannes, was
a deliberate attempt by these societies to counteract the debilitating ennui
experienced by their wealthy members by stimulating them at the most primal
level through violent threats to their lives.
Now my memory of the 1970s was rather different from Ballard’s. Admittedly, I
was only a boy at the time, but I do remember the road safety films. ‘Clunk
Click, every trip’, with the vile Jimmy Savile, told you to wear a seatbelt.
‘Don’t be an Amber Gambler’ warned drivers of trying to rush through the orange
light at crossings. There were also campaigns against drunk driving and
speeding. Dave Prowse, the man behind the Darth Vader costume, appeared in one
set as the ‘Green Cross Man’, helping kids cross the road safely. Alvin Stardust
also appeared in one of these. Rather than the bland landscape of antiseptic
safety Ballard complained about, these public information films traumatised a
generation of children with images of mayhem, destruction and carnage. Cars were
totalled, and drivers, passengers and pedestrians ground to bloody pulps on
regular programming slots – usually just before Grandstand on Saturday
afternoons. Rather than senses-dulling boredom, I’m surprised these films didn’t
turn everyone watching them into quivering nervous wrecks at the thought of
venturing out on the highway.
Despite Ballard’s own Right-wing political views, his observation that future
totalitarian regimes will be manipulative and claiming to serve their victims,
rather than adopting the naked use of force, does describe the style of
Cameron’s own administration and its steady erosion of personal freedom. The
ostensible rationale behind the Work Programme and Work Fare, is supposedly to
get the unemployed back into work by helping them acquire the necessary skills
and the habit of working. The terms and conditions imposed on Job Seekers by the
DWP is presented as a ‘Job Seekers’ Agreement’, as if it were a bargain struck
between two equal parties, and freely accepted by the unemployed, rather than
forced on them through economic necessity. Esther McVey even had the gall last
week to claim that the people suffering from sanctions on their benefit, were
those ‘who refused the system’s help’. They were made to look like recalcitrant,
who had gone back to recidivist scroungers, rather than the victims of a highly
exploitative system that sought for even the smallest reason to deprive the poor
of an income.
The papers also this week carried the news that the legislation proposed by
the government to replace the ASBOs would also allow local councils to ban
peaceful protests and demonstrations on the grounds that these constituted a
public nuisance, or would annoy, upset or inconvenience local residents. It’s a
totalitarian attack on free speech, but again masked by the claim that somehow
people are being protected. Now the authorities will act to curb and ban
demonstrations that may lead to violence or a breach of the peace, such as
Protestant marches in Northern Ireland that go through Roman Catholic areas or
demonstrations by the BNP or English Defence League that enter Black or Muslim
areas. While the authorities’ actions against such marches are resented by the
groups planning them, I doubt many people object to the bans on the grounds that
the marches are deliberately provocative and would result in violence. Cameron’s
legislation goes further than these entire reasonable concerns. Instead, they
allow public protests to be banned simply because the residents in the area in
which they are held may find them simply inconvenient, like being too noisy. The
legislation’s main objective is to stop political protest. It is, however,
disguised with the claim that it is giving local people the power to stop
troublesome individuals upsetting the rest of the community, like the
cantankerous pensioner, who was given an ASBO to stop him being sarcastic to his
neighbours.
There is also something Ballardian about Cameron, Osborne and Boris Johnson’s
own background. They were members of the elite Bullingdon Club after all, an
elite society of the extremely wealthy. Even if they don’t go around beating,
maiming and killing non-members as an exercise in corporate bonding,
nevertheless they seem to have a shared contempt for the poor coming from their
common background.
So Ballard was exactly right. The new totalitarianism does indeed claim to be
helpful and somehow serving you, even as it takes it away its citizens’ incomes,
their rights to free speech and assembly, and their pride. It’s just that
Ballard got the political direction wrong. He thought it was going to come from
the Left, rather than the Libertarian advocates of deregulation on the Right.
