2009/09/27

Stupid, Stupid, War

"Within the next generation, I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs or prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World."
from a letter to George Orwell, dated 21 October 1949.

From letters to Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith; Harper&Row, 1969. By the way, I worked with one of his close relatives in the Royal Canadian Army Cadets in Camp Ipperwash, Toronto, Canada.
PAX VOBISCUM

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