Troy Southgate

Sep 10, 2024

SOME time ago, I wrote a post about the prominent displays of dystopian texts that were appearing in bookshops and speculated that the System was trying to engineer a juxtaposition between the horrors of a future totalitarian regime and the perceived wonders of liberal-democracy. After all, it is certainly in the interests of the Establishment to convince its unsuspecting citizens that our own civilisation is nothing like the semi-fictionalised repression that one finds in the novels of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Franz Kafka.

Even the masses themselves, coated in the saccharine satiety of modern consumerism, have come to regard governmental tyranny as something that is altogether foreign to Western civilisation and which only happens in places like Communist Russia or North Korea. Indeed, the fact that Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are invariably associated with forms of socialism that have descended into brutal organs of dictatorship means that it is even more difficult for most people to comprehend that the same extremist tendencies may be applied within the context of capitalist society.

One dystopian work that attracts far less attention than its counterparts is the 1940 novel, Kallocain, written by Karin Boyle. To demonstrate how it is possible for totalitarian characteristics to manifest in Western civilisation it is worth considering the attitude of the book’s ‘Fellow Soldiers’ towards their offspring. In a society in which the World State monitors every aspect of people’s lives, even to the extent of spying on its citizens in the bedroom, one parent begins to express sadness at the way children are separated from their parents at the tender age of seven and sent off to the military training camp. Realising that he only has a limited period of time in which to enjoy life with his son and two daughters, the central character reflects on the nature of modern children:

“It often seemed to me that the new generation took a more realistic view of life than we had in our own childhood. On the particular day I am talking about I acquired new evidence that this was so.”

On a night when neither he nor his wife had been forced to undertake their usual police or military duty, the father decided to show the children an old trick that he had enjoyed during his own time as a youngster. A large tub of water was filled with water and the lights were dimmed, at which point he took a small amount of sodium and poured it into a toy boat. The sodium was then set alight, and the boat sailed around the tub with a blue flame protruding from its centre. To his dismay, the trick was a complete flop. The oldest child, an eight-year-old boy called Ossu, had already undertaken some military training and was therefore used to building fires and making firecrackers that were designed to represent hand grenades. Understandably, he was unimpressed. More disturbing was the fact that the family’s youngest daughter, four-year-old Laila, was only interested in explosions that “cost the lives of real enemies” and this he found astonishing. The middle daughter, Maryl, offered an altogether different response and yet this was perceived by her father as the most unnerving reaction of all:

“She sat still and dreamy as usual, watched the sizzling jack-o-lantern with wide-open eyes that reminded me of her mother’s. And although I suppose her attentiveness brought me a certain consolation, at the same time it worried me. With unambiguous clarity it dawned on me that it was Ossu and Laila who were the children of the new era. Their attitude was the correct and objective one, while mine was a manifestation of obsolete romanticism. And in spite of the sense of justification she gave me, I suddenly wished that Maryl were more like the others. It did not bode well that she should fall outside of the healthy development of the generation in this way.”

The father has been so brainwashed by the World State, in other words, that he is terrified his daughter is beginning to display the first signs of subversive behaviour. Needless to say, it is fairly easy to transpose this bourgeois attitude to contemporary Western society in the sense that real-life parents also become worried if their children are not doing the things that are expected of them by their peers. Rather than try to educate their own children, parents will actively encourage them to follow the popular trends that smother the more ‘inconvenient’ signs of individuality.

The ‘socialisation’ that takes place under capitalism, particularly at a time when children are expected to adopt the ‘woke’ attitudes that leap out at them from the propagandistic surface of a television screen, is therefore no different to the more openly repressive atmosphere one finds in the pages of a dystopian novel. Predictably, as one might expect, the Right will blame it on ‘Communism’.