The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. George Orwell, 1984 p1
On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. ibid.
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised. ibid.
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below … The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all … It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons. ibid.
Then the face of Big Brother faded away and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. ibid.
Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you. ibid.
‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ ibid.
The great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years. ibid.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. ibid.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ibid.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting them both. ibid.
The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention ... It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant ... the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. ibid.
The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. ibid.
The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover against his will what another human being is thinking and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. ibid.
A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. ibid.
There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts. ibid.
Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever. ibid.
Fascism has been able to play upon every instinct that revolts against hedonism and a cheap conception of ‘progress’. It has been able to pose as the upholder of the European tradition, and to appeal to Christian belief, to patriotism, and to the military virtues. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Fascism is now an international movement, which means not only that the Fascist nations can combine for purposes of loot, but that they are groping, perhaps only half consciously as yet, towards a world-system. ibid.
Fascism is coming; probably a slimy Anglicized form of Fascism, with cultured policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead of the swastika. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Fascism is a mental infection. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie IV starring Geraldine McEwan & Amanda Kirby & Lynsey Baxter & Vivienne Ross et al, Uncle Archie, ITV 1978
The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. Henry A Wallace
There were accommodations made prior to World War II between the fascists and the Church – basically, we’ll leave you alone if you’ll leave us alone. Jim Marrs, interview Illuminating Angels & Demons
It might come as a shock to many people but the form of government we have in this country today basically is socialistic – we have social programs for everything ... But instead of the benefits going to the people, the benefits go to the corporations ... We have socialism geared to benefit the multinational corporations ... This is pushed along by a fervent nationalism – what’s good for GM is good for the country – our country, right or wrong, and we’re going to take our form of democracy to other countries and if you don’t like it we’ll invade you and occupy you ... That tells us that the form of government that we’re operating under today is national socialism ... a form of fascism ... Benito Mussolini himself said that fascism isn’t really the proper term, it more correctly should have been called Corporatism. That is simply when you have the corporations running the county and controlling the government ... In those countries ... the state took over the corporations; in the United States today the corporations have taken over the state, but the end result is the same. Jim Marrs, cited One Nation Under Siege
Funny how you get more right wing as you get older. Father Ted s3e1: Are You All Right There Father Ted? Ted to Nazi priest, Channel 4 1998
I hear you’re a racist now, Father? ibid. Coln
Fascists dress in black and go round telling people what to do. ibid.
Fascist! Fascist! Star Trek Deep Space Nine s5e9: The Ascent, Quark to Odo
Democracy was safe however for the fascist leader Moseley to be released. He had been interned since 1940. The government said that he was ill but very few people believed it. This caused the greatest public uproar of the war years. The World at War 15/26: Home Fires, ITV 1974
Oswald Moseley, the English Fuhrer, challenges the government right in the centre of London. He will spend the next several years in prison. World War II: The Apocalypse: Hitler’s Rise to Power aka Apocalypse: The Second World War: Aggression, France 2 2009
Why do socialists deny free speech to fascists? After all, we are in favour of democracy. Socialist ideas flourish best where there are trade unions, public meetings, leaflets and newspapers which express different points of view. Imposing socialist ideas without that democratic debate is the opposite of real socialism.
Yet we deny these rights to the Nazis. Is this just the same sort of hypocrisy used by tyrants through the ages who have demanded free speech for themselves but seized the first opportunity to deny it to others? After all, runs our critics’ argument, the fascists are, like you, a minority. They have a ‘point of view’. Why should they be denied the right to put that point of view in the same way that you do?
There are two immediate answers. First, there is the connection between saying and doing. If an organised party goes around preaching race hatred against black people, as the British National Party does, that race hatred is bound to overflow into deeds ...
The other answer to the question why deny free speech to the fascists is that the central aim of fascism is to destroy democracy. This is not speculation, as it might have been before Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922 or Hitler in Germany 11 years later. Now we know without any shadow of doubt that the aim of fascism is totally to destroy democracy and to remove the rights and freedoms of everyone except themselves ...
The single common aim of fascism in the 1930s was to break the strength and spirit of organised labour: to pave the way for uninterrupted profiteering by the people who own the means of production. Though its shock troops were the lumpen proletariat and the lower middle class, fascism’s real master was capital. When at least sections of the capitalists lost all hope of proceeding through the democratic system and the trade unions it had conceded under pressure in the past, it looked round for a battering ram to dispose of both. Paul Foot, article May 1994, ‘Silencing the Nazi Threat’
This determination to wipe out all democratic freedoms was widely trumpeted after fascism seized state power. In the run up to the seizure of power, the fascists were more circumspect. To themselves in their private meetings and handpicked rallies, they denounced the ‘communist doctrine of democracy’ and promised the book burning to come. At election times, on the other hand, they were more constitutional. For as long as they thought it necessary, they promised to stand by the constitution and safeguard the freedom of the press and speech. Again and again they declared that they would extend to other parties and newspapers the freedom enjoyed by their own. They were especially eloquent on this subject when Social Democrats and Communists demanded that the fascist literature, which was leading among other things to the systematic violence against Jews, should be suppressed. No, no, the fascists objected. We do not approve racial violence. We respect the rights of others ...