perpetual wirebrush cleansing of the'faithful while always
watchful for contagiously faithless heretics. The Order was in
conflict with any person, creed or ideal that did not recognize
its supremacy, and opponents were not forgiven. They were
mercilously hunted down and exterminated without any record
remaining of their brief existence.
The establishment of a militant theocracy had been
absurdly easy. The Christian evangelical movement rose
rapidly from self-imposed obscurity to political dominance,
using a combination of dynamic evangelism, television, money
and modem techniques of advertising and propaganda, winning
elections and enacting laws that discriminated against
homosexuals, assertive women, non-Christians and other
pariahs.
The longheld fear that communism or socialism would
ultimately triumph was startingly revised when the major
communist empires and socialist states collapsed; more
startling was the rapid rise in the vacuum of conservative
religious orders that not only quickly dominated their parent
religions but wrested political control of almost half the world
with blinding swiftness.
The evangalists endured a half century quietly
organizing, clinging to harsh frontier doctrines that tolerated
no deviation from ancient scripture and waiting for the internal
collapse of Great Sodom (the United States), which they were
certain would occur. Liberal democracy was especially demonic
to the protectors of oldtime religion. Women debased in the
marketplace, not as chattel but as aspiring CEOs, flaunting
unspeakable feminism at the waiting faithful. Homosexuals
boldly challenging traditional values.
Freedom of religion disappeared when the evangalists
triumphed at the polls. The first act of the ecuncmical council,
as congress was renamed, was to abolish all other religions in
favor of a state religion established by the Holy Order. The
next act was to purge heretics. Massive roundups and executions
in the early years set a pattern still followed of sanctioned
inquisition. Arrests and executions were a daily routine. Public
trials and executions entertained and terrified the faithful.
The fear of God inspired love of God as terror inspired faith.
Winston's own memory was confused. He thought he
once knew about the spread of evangelical fervor that reformed
the western hemisphere. TV preachers infected an ever
increasing public with negative platitudes that encouraged
isolation and persecution of heretics, homosexuals, free-
thinking women, people of color and anyone anywhere accused
of impure thought. The two primary aims of the Ecclesiastical
Party, which evolved into the Holy Order once political
control was attained, was to establish supreme power in all
parts of the world and to eradicate completely and totally
independent thought.
The Order grasped territory like a surge of locusts.
Disbelief accounted for much of the early successes of the
faithful, a laconic inability by many to believe the zealots
were serious even as evangolitical power thrust in all directions
until blunted by adversaries equally militant and eager for
worldly power. The disbelievers quickly became believers or
vanished.
The book's author wrote that ethnic wars in the
Balkans after the communist collapse spread throughout
eastern Europe and into the Middle East until a renewed
Islamic surge similar to its original conquests overwhelmed the
exhausted survivors and reoccupied as much territory as the old
Ottoman empire at its height. These were the Great Satans,
Winston thought, and the incessant war between them and
Holy Evangelica was fought over the partially-nuked ruins of
what had recently been western Europe. Yaweh and Allah
would be no more than rival gangsters if they were judged by
the rabid violence of their followers.
The Pagans were generally Oriental Asians but
accomodated a large mixture of the planet's races, nor did they
especially suppress polyglot religions. Instead of a single state,
the Pagans were a loose federation of usually cooperative
warlords. Evangelica's perpetual holy war against them was
fought primarily in equatorial lands, ostensibly for conversion
of souls but also for raw materials and slave-wage labor. Power
see-sawed so rapidly that the native populations were never
quite sure who their latest masters were.
The use of nuclear power upon the Great Satans and
Pagans was an irresistable yearning of the more frenzied
evangelicals. Certain retaliatory destruction provided a
reluctant damper similar to the balance of terror that
characterized the old cold war. Visions of thermonuclear
surprise upon their enemies obsessed influential clerics of the
Order. Equally obsessive were fears that the Satans or Pagans
might at any moment make the same attempt. As a result a
nonlitigated agreement to not use nuclear weapons in their
interminable wars existed between the foes, though each
constantly sought a method or opportunity to obliterate the
other two.
Winston closed the book and stared at the floor. He
understood that his flashes of intuition about the past were
really fragments from his not completely laundered
subconscious. As he read he had felt deja vu; he had once known
most of what he read. Doublethink had sealed off his
knowledge, though brief fragments leaked through
occasionally, which usually startled him. At that moment he
wished his diary was near. He felt an intense compulsion to
restore the truth, to correct every revision he had personally
contributed to the big lie.
Julia arrived and they quickly made love on an old four
poster bed, a furnishing of the attic apartment which had
initially attracted them.
Afterward Winston attempted to synthesize what he
had read earlier. Julia nodded often as he spoke.
"That's simply a surface explanation," she said. "The
real question is not why religious zealots contradict power for
faith, but why the subject majority allows bigots and sadists to
victimize them with superstitious hatred."
"What about the soul?" he asked. "How is the soul so
easily jeopardized?"
"Winston, dear, that was not even the question when
the Order took over. Even many Jews, my parents among them,
thought God had abandoned them during the Holocaust." Fate
of the soul was not very important except to fanatical cults of
evangelical Christians, she said. Their leaders terrified them
with eternal damnation if they did not seize political control
of Great Sodom (the former U.S.), but that was a strategy to
galvanize support for a religious insurrection. Supreme power on
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earth was their real goal, Julia said. Humans died but power
was eternal.
Homosexuals were the initial Jews of the religious
takeover of civil government, she said. A homosexual "agenda"
was claimed, made at least as bad as ancient aspersions still in
use that Jews control the world's wealth and keep good and
decent common folk in perpetual poverty. Homosexuals did not
kill Christ, but much public revulsion was generated about
their "unnatural" lifestyle that threatened to undermine
traditional American values.
After that, Julia said, the rest was easy. Jews,
homosexuals and assertive women were driven underground like
every other refugee from the Holy. Order, always awaiting
arrest, forced confession and extermination. Did you know, she
said to Winston, that AIDs sufferers were not only uncared for
but were encouraged to spread the epidemic among gays and
lesbians, racial and ethnic minorities, drug users and
independent-minded persons engaging in illicit sexual
activities?
"Us!" he exclaimed in shock.
"Don't worry my darling," she said in a careless tone.
"We'll both be dead before we get sick."
"Dear Winston," she said quietly after a few moments,
"Why do you think sex is a criminal act, that we risk death
every moment we are with each other?”
"Because it is disloyal," she answered before his mouth
opened. "Because love is disloyal. It threatens absolute power."
"We will abolish the orgasm," a voice shouted from a
wall.
Jack-booted men in black uniforms rushed up the stairs
while others crashed through the attic's windows from ropes on
the roof. Winston and Julia had only the briefest moment to
stare helplessly at each other before they were ripped apart
and kicked to the floor.
A thin elderly man in a black overcoat stood over them.
He wore insigna of the thought police officer corps. Winston
recognized him with a shock as the kindly owner of the
souvenier shop downstairs who had rented him the attic room.
"God's eyes are everywhere," the man said loudly,
raising arm and finger. His was the voice that had shouted
from the wall, obviously a bug installed to spy on the illicit
lovers. "You cannot escape the eyes of God!"
The elderly officer kicked Winston just below the ear.
He saw the boot the instant it crashed into his head and lost
consciousness.
They were separated, of course. Winston did not see
Julia again.
He regained his senses in a cell. He was somewhere in
the Ministry of Love. He had no idea the time,«day or night,
nor would he for many months. He lived among eternal lights;
his cell beamed as bright as a television light stage. He was
left undisturbed at first, but under constant surveillance. He was
hungry and not allowed to sleep. "Smith! You will remain
awake," a voice shouted from a telescreen loudspeaker
whenever his eyes closed or his head drooped. "Pray in the
proper manner!" (which, though compulsory, at least
permitted him to sit on a bench and he was not forced to clasp
his hands and point them upward). He felt almost too
exhausted to maintain a reverent expression but each time he
slipped out of a prayerful attitude or catnapped the
loudspeaker peppered his numbed brain like buckshot.
Others were temporarily crowded into his cell, and
though he recognized one or two the loudspeaker screeched
whenever he attempted conversation. A man he thought a
perfect moranic booster of the Order sat next to him briefly and
moaned over and over, "I am a sinner. I deserve to be punished."
"What did you do?" Winston whispered.
"I sinned in thought," the man screeched. "Thank God
my daughter overheard me talking in my sleep," he said rather
proudly. "She informed the thought police before I became a
sinner in deed."
Then one day -- or it might have been night, Winston
thought -- the high priest he had trusted with his innermost
objections entered his cell. The priest smiled grimly. "You act
surprised," he said as Winston stiffened. "But you knew all
along, Winston. You knew the instant of your first deviant
thought that this was your fate and that I was your confessor."
Winston shook his head, confused, his mind flooding
with self-ordained persecution. You knew I was your Inquisitor,
his betrayer accused.
Winston realized that although Catholicism,
officially portrayed as the parent religion (not Judaism), had
been swept into the dustbin of theology, certain purgatories had
been grafted onto the protestant succession. The necessity of
confession by the accused, publicly demanded for high profile
heretics, Jews and captured Satan/Pagans, was a hybrid from
the truncated papists who at least kept private the sins of the
confessed. For prisoners of Winston's status, minor functionaries
guilty of small heresies, the trials would be perfunctory, a
televised laundry list of sins whose only interest was the
inevitable execution, its form selected by an interactive poll of
viewers whose choice ranged from ancient stoning to
holographic dissipation of human cellular structure, sort of a
swirling crimson fog as the condemned disincorporated.
The woman has already betrayed you, the inquisitor
told Winston. "Now you will betray her," he said.
The torture he always feared began.
Winston was beaten, kicked, forced to grovel to avoid a
bite of whip or a boot in his face. He confessed to more than he,
was accused of. He informed on everyone he knew, and signed
everything. He betrayed Julia. He begged God's mercy. Yet
nothing was enough to prevent pain. He waited impatiently to
be tried for heresy and executed.
His Inquisitor said he was not ready for the release of
death. His impure mind was to be thoroughly cleansed before it
was blown apart. The inquisitions of the past failed because
the condemned died as martyrs, which enflamcd heresy. The
state trials and public confessions staged by the early 20th
century totalitarians were known to be false and lost their
force. The Holy Order did not make that mistake, the
Inquisitor told Winston. "All confessions made here are true.
We make them true. We will burn all evil and illusion out of
you. We will reshape your mind. You will love God in your
heart and soul. Then we will kill you."
Winston and everything that ever related to his
existence would be expunged from memory and record. He would
be, the Inquisitor said, "lifted clear out of the stream of
history."
"What about my soul?" Winston's voice cracked.
"The soul belongs to God,” the Inquistor answered,
anticipating the question, which all heretics asked. "If God
wishes to dispose of a soul, then it is necessary for us to erase
any trace of it." There is no hell such as Dante and the
medievals conjured, the Inquisitor said. The rejected soul
disappears from all memory of having existed. A nonsoul in the
manner its corporeal persona is made a nonperson. The true hell.
Once again Winston was left alone for awhile. He was
properly fed and allowed to sleep. He expanded from near
emaciation to an almost healthy appearance, though most of
his hair had fallen out and his hands were misshapen from
broken fingers. His nose remained mashed but he was given a
bridge to replace broken teeth.
He worked very hard to transform his brain. He
forcibly shut down his heresy, disguised from himself his
continuing hatred for the Order. He attended all religious
services and functions within the huge Ministry. He radiated
purity in form and manner. He strained toward spiritual
oneness with God, which required constant personal abnegation
mixed with abject terror. Yet he hoarded his hatred in a small
place, readied for the instant of his death to flood his being
like an inflated rubber raft.
But even this small refuge was ripped out of him. One
night Winston shouted Julia's name while dreaming. Instantly
awake, he was clearly aware of his final undoing.
Winston was taken from his cell to a large room where
his Inquisitor waited. Across the room was a large cage filled
with birds. Hundreds of birds. Winston loathed birds. Birds
made his skin crawl. He could almost bear to see a bird through
a window but outside near them he felt sick. His worst
nightmare was of being at the center of a swirl of birds.
The Inquisitor nodded and two guards roughly grabbed
Winston and dragged him toward the birdcage. Winston
screamed when he saw they intended to shove him inside the
cage. He almost lost consciousness as he stared at hundreds of
sharp scissorlike beaks. His head throbbed with their shrill
shrieks and whistles. The Inquisitor moved to quickly open the
cage door. Winston felt the guards begin to push him.
"Do it to Julia!" he screamed. "Do it to Julia! Not to
me! i"
"Free at last!" the Inquisitor smirked.
Nothing was left in Winston to resist. A light of
primitive mystery beamed in his brain, dissolving any
remaining molecules of doubt and disbelief hiding in his brain.
He was a true believer, unabashed and unashamed in his
passionately tearful proclamations of his return to the faith.
Born Again, he shouted to all who would hear in the immense
labyrinth of the Ministry of Love. He waited eagerly for his
upcoming trial, ready to reveal and confess everything to the
inquisition court and the great mass transfixed at their
television screens. He exulted in framing what he would say to
the judges and primetime audience, carefully composing his
final testament of faith.
Winston had won victory over himself. He loved God.
George Orwell was the original author of this story.
His novel 1984, written in 1948 just before his death (he
reversed the last two numbers of the year for his title),
projected an iron future of absolute power, perpetual war and
inquisition. Winston Smith labored in the Ministry of Truth,
improperly loved Julia, was forced to betray her and love Big
Brother instead; but Orwell's vision was a secular one. He did
not speculate on a militant theocracy. Robert Heinlein, who
wrote straight science fiction rather than political novels
predicting the future, more than once explored a possible
political takeover by religious sects, usually on the far right
spectrum. He warned of America’s puritanical streak,
predicting that populist sentiment coupled with fervid belief
in frontier values might very well produce an elected
theocracy, which would immediately set about dismantling
the democracy that gave it power. The above story is a hybrid
attempt of both writers' visions.
-MPMc