AGE-RESTRICTED SEXY FOREIGNER

Apocalyptic levels of double speak,

What they are saying to you, " While we welcome and Passion debate diverse viewpoints, we don't allow creators to propagate negative stereotypes or segregational content toward a protected community"

What they mean, " Dont talk shit about ++CURRENT_THING++ "

• MrSpenczar Comment

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I SUPPORT THE CURRENT THING! Some current things are more current than others.

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The New Totalitarians

The New Totalitarians is a 1971 book by British author Roland Huntford. Huntford analyzes the political and social climate of early 1970s Sweden, and argues that it resembles a benevolent totalitarian state in the mould of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Summary

At the time that Huntford wrote, Sweden had been governed by the Social Democratic Party of Sweden for over 40 years. Huntford argues that this had led to the complete dominance of socialist thought at all levels of the government; including the bureaucracy and the judiciary; which were controlled by a powerful interconnecting network of Social Democratic labour unions, lobby groups, and partisan organizations. He also points to the fact that these networks had made it very difficult for non-socialists to achieve any position of real power in Sweden, but noted that few Swedes seemed to view this politicization of their state with concern.

The New Totalitarians also analyzes Swedish society in a broader historical context. The author argued that, since the country had bypassed the feudal system and had always been a very centralized state, Sweden had never developed a civic culture that champions individualism like most other countries of Western Europe. He thus argues that the country's political culture and institutions were very much the product of a unique socio-political context, and thus not applicable to otherwise comparable Western nations.

At the same time, he analyses how sex was being "politicized" by design from above. He argued that the changes in the sexual behaviour of the Swedes was a matter of official direction and that sexual liberalism had become the vicarious passion of a society trapped in boredom and "engineered consent".

The New Totalitarians (Revised) 1980 by Roland Huntford

[b-ok.global]

Summery: Roland Huntford's "The New Totalitarians" is a book far more prophetic than George Orwell's "1984". Written several decades ago, Huntford's book has accurately foretold the kind of "soft totalitarianism" that is overtaking the west today. The Swedish model is that of a heavily taxed, bureacratic, totalitarianism in which "consensus" is achieved by ostracisizing dissenters, establishing unlegislated but very real thought and speech boundaries, compelling everyone to think alike and behave alike and discouraging individuality at every opportunity. The situation has been made much worse by the blossoming of a psychopathic feminist movement with idiot females misdefining every concept from "rape" to you name it. The average Swede literally lives in a mental strait jacket.

The same thing is happening outside of Sweden where Swedish socialist tax and regulate everything from finance to thought and behavior now flourishes everywhere. This was just getting started in Huntford's day but now it is on a rampage. Read the book - and tremble for the future.

"The vindication of prophets of doom is perversely fascinating, for men love scourging themselves with proof that they really are as ridiculous as they have always been telling each other. It is therefore scarcely surprising that, in all the literature of prediction that has flourished in the wake of science, the lamentations have achieved the greater fame. Two pessimistic visions of the future have already passed into folklore; two classic nightmares of what very likely awaits us; two sketches of the prison that we appear bent on erecting around ourselves with the most disastrous ingenuity. They are, of course, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Brave New World was first published in 1932; Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. Time has already shown how far both were written with the gift of prophecy. Both divined something that is now becoming uncomfortably apparent: that the advance of science is producing a new kind of ruling class with powers unknown before. Both foretold the final subservience of human beings to a revolutionary hybrid of technological manipulator and political manager.

But, although the end in both cases is roughly the same, Brave New World seems more applicable to the West at this time. Where Nineteen Eighty-Four describes the logical conclusion of a Communist dictatorship, the climax of the Bolshevik Revolution, as it were. Brave New World presents the final corruption of a Western style of life. The crux of the difference is this. Orwell postulates a reign of terror to secure the position of the new ruling class, but Huxley supposes that the scientific advances which bring them to power also induce the requisite change of mentality, so that physical compulsion is superfluous.

Huxley, although he describes certain developments now becoming familiar, assumes the necessary political changes, and concentrates on the human results. It has become a cliche to say that this or that phenomenon is a piece of Brave New World, and it has become evident to the point of banality that certain aspects of the story have started their fulfilment in the West. We have the first steps towards test tube babies and genetic engineering; the hallucinatory drug cults and their 'trips', as the inhabitants of Brave New World took a 'holiday' with 'soma'; mechanical attitudes to sex; the mutability of the past, and the worship of technology. But to find the vision closing in, with its various facets drawn together in a system, is a rather harder thing.

And yet, many of the scientific necessities are already with us. We have foolproof contraceptives, illimitable communication, electric energy and gadgetry in abundance. Their proper application waits only upon the correct social machinery: science, as always, is several lengths ahead of politics.

The victory of technology over man, says Huxley in a foreword to one of the later editions of his novel, requires only a highly centralized totalitarian government. But, he says, There is of course no reason why the new totalitarianism should resemble the old. Government by firing squads ... is not merely inhumane... it is demonstrably inefficient, and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is a sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be the one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Of all people, it is the Swedes who have come closest to this state of affairs. They have the necessary background and predilections. Outside Russia, they alone have grasped the necessity of adapting politics to technology, untroubled by doubts or reservations. They offer the first example of a system that fulfils Huxley's prophecy. Historical accident and national idiosyncrasies have pushed Sweden ahead on the road to Brave New World. But even if she is isolated, inbred and incompletely western, her present state cannot be dismissed as something alien and eccentric, curious to examine, yet with no portents for the rest of us. All that stands between ourselves and Sweden is a certain protective shell granted by the Western European heritage. But it is fragile, and it is being eroded from within and without. To watch present Swedes may be to watch our future selves.

To begin with, says Huxley, Brave New World depends on economic security; without it, the love of servitude is impossible. And in this, the foundation of the 'new totalitarianism', Sweden is well advanced. She has solved the problem of permanent security and abolished enclaves of distress within collective prosperity. She has been helped in this by a century and a half of peace, isolation and neutrality, by being small and easily governed, and by being populated in proportion to her natural resources.

Economic security by itself does not necessarily imply a love of servitude. Other conditions are required: on the side of the rulers, a thorough understanding of the interaction between economics and power; and on the side of the ruled, submission to authority and a reverence for the expert. Also, in both cases, an aversion to individuality, an instinct for the collective, a suspicion of parliamentary institutions, a worship of the State, and a preference for government by bureaucrat rather than by politician.

All through their history, the Swedes have consistently fulfilled these specifications. Thus it is that the technopolitical establishment which has been brought to power in Sweden by a scientific and industrial revolution, found a singularly malleable population to work with, and has been able to achieve rapid and almost painless results. Sweden of 1973 bears as little resemblance to herself of 1930, as the Soviet Union of today to Tsarist Russia. It is in the past forty years, and particularly since 1950, that the Swedish metamorphosis has taken place.

It is the product of the Social Democratic Party which came to office in 1932 and has subsequently broken most records for continuity of government by holding power for over four decades. Their system has proved to be an incomparable tool for applying technology to society. They have altered the nature of government by making it a matter of economics and technology alone. Politicians have lost their significance in Sweden, supplanted by a form of technocratic oligarchy, which is apparently unassailable, because its tenets are universally accepted. Henceforth, changes of political complexion are unlikely to mean changes in circumstance, and the same development is to be expected, whatever the party in office.

To view this is a sobering affair. It is not as if the Swedes were endowed with originality in politics. They are imitators and assimilators. They possess no magic keys. They have shown that the means already exist to build the political foundations of Brave New World. In this sense, they have demonstrated that Huxley did not see far enough.

Security [he says in the aforementioned comment to Brave New World] tends very quickly to be taken for granted. Its achievement is merely a superficial, external revolution. The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies. To bring about that revolution, we require, among others, the following discoveries and inventions. Firstly, a greatly improved technique of suggestion through infant conditioning and, later, with the aid of drugs, such as scopolamine. Second, a fully developed science of human differences, enabling government managers to assign any given individual to his or her proper place in the social and economic hierarchy. (Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and to infect others with their discontents.) Third (since reality, however Utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays), a substitute for alcohol and other narcotics, something at once less harmful and more pleasure-giving than gin or heroin. And fourth (but this would be a long-term project, which would take generations of totalitarian control to bring to a successful conclusion) a foolproof system of eugenics, designed to standardize the human product and so to facilitate the task of the managers.

It is the achievement of the Swedes to have shown what can be done without these expressions of perfection. They have shown that the 'revolution in human minds and bodies' can be carried through, to a remarkable degree, by available methods. They have demonstrated, for example, that the relatively crude indoctrination offered by television and conventional education holds tremendous possibilities, provided only that there is effective centralized control of both. They have proved how powerful are the existing agents of inducing love of servitude. They are the first of the new totalitarians.

In the search for prophecies fulfilled, it is useful to make one excursion into Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Swedes have demonstrated the power of that form of semantic manipulation Orwell called Newspeak: the changing of words to mean something else. In this way, thought can be directed, and undesirable concepts eliminated, because the means of expressing them have been removed. 'Freedom' does not yet in Swedish, as in the brainchild of Orwell's Ministry of Truth, mean exactly 'slavery', but it already implies 'submission', and a powerful word in the vocabulary of opposition has therefore been effectively neutralized. Similarly, it is exceedingly difficult to speak in any but favourable terms of the State, because the words in that field have been positively loaded.

But otherwise. Brave New World is enough. 'Industrial civilization is only possible,' says Mustapha Mond, 'when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.' This is precisely what the rulers of Sweden are always saying, although of course not so directly, and with rather greater verbosity.

The Swedes have found other devices, extremely useful for inducing the 'love of servitude', in the manipulation of sexuality and the official sponsorship of changes in morals. It is a mistake to believe that the Swedes are particularly advanced or emancipated. The English are no less sexually liberated. But what distinguishes Sweden is that morality has become the concern of the government, where elsewhere it is something independent, growing out of changes within society.

The ultimate crime in Brave New World is to deviate from a norm. That norm is innocent of ethics and morality, and decided on grounds of expediency alone. The situation is already a doctrine of Swedish law. Gone is the idea of right or wrong, or the moral content of an action. Crime is now defined as social deviation. The test of whether an offence is punishable, however, is solely whether it has awkward effects on the collective. Analogously, in non-criminal spheres the worst solecism is to be different. Sweden, like Soviet Russia, belongs to that group of countries in which 'individuality' has a derogatory ring.

All this is not because Sweden is so far advanced but because, in all senses except the purely technological, she is so extraordinarily backward. Sweden is a relic of the Middle Ages, a State of corporations and communes, and the Swedes are medieval people living only as members of a group. It is an ideal situation for the incarnation of Brave New World.

Like the rulers of Brave New World, the managers of Sweden have abolished history, in order to cut off the past and, by disorienting their time sense, to make people easier to manipulate. But the Swedish leaders, at any rate, act historically and, like Huxley's privileged Controller, they at least are aware of their historical roots. To understand the new totalitarians of Sweden, then, it is best to start with Swedish history.