Yesterday’s post about Bing somehow linking Josef
Goebbels with Fiennes (not specific about which one) reminded me of the
section in Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, Hitch-22,
in which he describes his early educational experiences.
In relating the “mania and ritual” of the boarding school
to which he was sent at age eight, Hitchens encapsulates the best depiction of
life in a totalitarian state I’ve ever seen. And please do believe me, I’ve
seen a lot.
He starts out noting how the students are “robbed of all
privacy, encouraged to inform on one another, taught how to fawn upon authority
and turn upon the vulnerable outsider, subject at all times to rules which it
was not always possible to understand, let alone to obey.”
All of which you’d expect. But it’s the last point, about
the rules, that’s crucial. All the fawning and informing in the world really
doesn’t buy you anything, because “the rules” keep changing. Hitchens
absolutely nailed it:
“The conventional word that is employed to describe
tyranny is ‘systematic.’ The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its
regularity but its unpredictability and caprice;
those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure
if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was:
whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found
to be in the wrong. “
In such a regime you are never able to find a path
through the crocodile-infested quicksand. If you made it through the swamp
yesterday, that route doesn’t work today. What is acceptable—possibly even applauded—right
now will be dangerously—possibly fatally—wrong ten minutes from now.
You never know what’s in the minds of the psychopaths in
charge and there is no rest for the weary. That covers Stalinist Russia, Nazi
Germany, Maoist China and all the others, large and small.
Aside from capturing that reality in one succinct
paragraph, this passage got me thinking. Considering that much of Britain’s
leadership have cycled through public schools such as the one Hitchens
describes, I really wonder what psychoses lurk in their carefully-coiffed
crania?
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