Status Updates From The Four-Gated City (Childr...

..in America the citizen had long since become used to an organized barbarism. This state of affairs spread to Britain. The difficulty was, it spread slowly, and subtly; nothing was ever called by its right name; and there was always a good patriotic reason for every one of the liberties we gave up.

The mass of the human race has never had a memory. History, the activities of historians, has always been a sort of substitute memory, an approximation to actual events. In some epochs this false memory has been nearer to events; in others very far-sometimes by design.

Britain’s version of a fascist phase had been competently forecast. There it was now in the wings, ready to come on, gentlemanly, bland, vicious. There it was: big business, backed by the landowning landlording Church (its face however would be chummy, slangy, modern, tolerant) and Royalty, solidly and narrowly traditional (its face easygoing, goodfellow, amiable) and all taking orders from America-……

The straight dark eyes, the strong black brows, of the Maynards, gave Rita an arresting uncomfortable beauty. She was altogether too decisive in style for the taste of the ‘sixties, which was for dollies, kittens, babies, schoolgirls, kewpies, space girls, little things of one sort and another. So Paul had told her the very first evening.‘You’d better let me take you in hand,’he said;to which she had replied:‘Why? ’

It can be taken absolutely as an axiom that the populace will not be told the truth, nine-tenths because the governments concerned won’t know what is the truth, will be as much in the dark as anybody else, and one-tenth out of panic, greed, hysteria, fear of their own citizenry.

……This money was not being spent. (It was being spent on war, the central fact of our time which is taken for granted.)

Some years before, an Act of Parliament had been passed, which had taken bars off windows, unlocked doors, made strait-jackets and padded cells things of the past, created hospitals that were civilized. Well, not quite. Because, for this bit of legal well-wishing to work, it needed that a great deal of money should be spent on new buildings, doctors, nurses. This money was not being spent….

..events, or processes, in this or that part of the world, whose common quality was horror; and a senseless horror. To listen,read,watch the news of anyof these events was to submit oneself to incredulity: this barbarism, this savagery, was simply not possible. .. everywhere in this country,..world, people ..sat reading, looking, watching, in precisely the same condition: this is not possible; it can’t be happening;