Oppression is the sincerest form of flattery (2025)

WE ARE encouraged today to regard tolerance as intrinsically good, always and in every possible circumstance wholly admirable. But there is a species of tolerance indistinguishable from indifference, or even disdain, and it can be more insulting, if less dangerous, than outright repression. Hostility is, after all, a recognition of sorts; those who try to suppress what they interpret as noxious views, or to intimidate those whom they see as dangerous enemies, at least pay them the compliment of taking them seriously. But to be left free to say or do as you please simply because nothing you say or do is of the slightest consequence, is a humiliation - who wants to be left alone on the ground that anyone concerned with so trifling an object would merely call attention to his own hysteria?

The climax of Scott's novel Redgauntlet makes this beautifully clear. The moment of catastrophic truth for the quixotic Jacobite dreamer comes when, trapped by King George's troops under General Campbell, he is dumbfoundingly told to take himself off and stop being a nuisance, and this despite the fact that Campbell knows that the no-longer-so-Young Pretender is one of the rebel band. Campbell treats them like naughty schoolboys rather than as foes to be feared. What was a menace in 1745 has become a piece of nonsense after 1760. Redgauntlet is bewildered: ''Is this real? . . . Can you mean this?'' and when it is confirmed that everyone, Charles Edward included, is free to go, he cries out in anguished despair: ''Then the cause is lost forever!''

And so it is. The Hanoverians are now so firmly installed that to worry about a Jacobite threat would be as sensible as fearing frost at the equator. Redgauntlet is, at bottom, a clown,

and clowns pose no threat to serious men, but this forbearance is predicated upon a conviction of Jacobite

impotence and is inseparable from contempt: why should a lion fear a mouse? For his part, Redgauntlet feels demeaned: far better to be hunted and threatened with death than dismissed like a tiresome brat.

In Orwell's 1984 Big Brother treats the proles with a parallel disdain. Facing the apparently insuperable power of the tyrant, Winston Smith goes

on hoping in the proles: someday, shaking off their torpor, they will

rise and overthrow the iniquitous regime. His adversary, O'Brien, scouts this idea of a prole rebellion as a preposterous pipedream. It suits

Big Brother that dissidents should go on dreaming of something that will never happen. Proles and animals, he tells Winston, are free because

nothing they do matters. Provided they work and breed, the proles can be

left alone, turned loose like cattle to roam at will. They have their beer, football, lottery tickets; ''to

keep them in control was not

difficult.'' Dissidents like Winston have to be spied upon, arrested, brainwashed, but why bother to brainwash creatures without brains? They can be granted intellectual

liberty because they have no intellect: they are free because they are futile.

Big Brother's tolerance of the proles is the ultimate insult, for it is an instrument of patronising dehumanisation more repressive at

one level than physical coercion.

The best-trained dogs do not need

a whip.

The censor is, after all, simply an inverted admirer: a censor-free land might be one so secure and unchallenged that it has nothing to fear. Hardy tells how the Bishop of

Wakefield burned a copy of Jude the Obscure, wishing (says Hardy) that

he could have burned the author instead. But burning books is perhaps not the worst thing you can do to them, because it is a kind of backhanded compliment, a sign that you take them seriously, that they are important enough to burn - the Nazis making a bonfire of the books they condemned, the Scottish Socialists publicly setting alight the ballots on Clause 28: what else did they do but advertise what they wanted to destroy?

Hardy was understandably outraged at the vilification of Jude the Obscure (one reviewer dubbed it Jude the Obscene) - it was a major factor in his decision, which he adhered to, not to write any more novels. But it is not inconceivable that David Hume might have preferred even this vitriolic reception to what actually happened to his own masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature, in 1739, when, in his own words, it fell

''dead-born

from the press.''

To be persecuted after birth is doubtless

a sad fate, but is it worse than never to be born at all?

No, burning is not the worst, not if Brecht's poet in The Burning of the Books is to be trusted. He is

indignant that his work is not being burned, since this reflects badly upon its truth content and its power to strike home: ''Burn me . . . burn me!'' he cries. ''Do not treat me in this fashion. Don't leave me out. Have I not always

spoken the truth in my books? And now

you treat me like a liar! I order

you: Burn me!''

Solzhenitsyn was expelled from his homeland for writing the truth, while hired hacks received Stalin prizes for literature. Blessed are you when you

are being persecuted: Solzhenitsyn

and Brecht would say amen.

In an age when everything is accepted because everything is equal, when

our greatest art is casually

absorbed into a commercial culture

as yet another boutique commodity, when tolerance shades imperceptibly into indifference, when the

freedom given to writers is distressingly akin to that given to Oceania's

proles, opposition may well be a boon and a tribute.

Oppression is the sincerest form of flattery (2025)
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