In 1984 one of the basic premises of state control was to be found in the dictum “He who controls the past, controls the future”. This can be seen as a version of the popular quote from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“.
One of the themes in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the way in which the repressive society encourages friends, neighbors and family to spy on one another. The informer was seen as a hero by the state. In particular Orwell writes that parents lived in fear of their children.
The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
This is based on the story of Pavlik Morozov, a child who denounced his father to the soviet state and became part of soviet mythology and naturally part of the the fear of the soviet state.
Now we could dismiss the whole thing as a fiction set in a far away place, in a far away time but this is not what Orwell wants. The same year Nineteen Eighty-Four was published he wrote in a letter*
My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter), but as a show-up of the perversions . . . which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. . . . The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.
Today we are again and again being actively encouraged to destroy not family but society. We are supposed to discover and report “suspicious behavior” for the good of us all – in the name of terrorism. The most reason slick version of the state asking us to denounce anything different comes (via BoingBoing: What to do if you smell a terrorist). It’s about a video released by the LA police department in a campaign called IwatchLA.
The video is slick, sleek and personal. It encourages people to denounce anything unusual – even an unusual smell – and let the authorities decide if its terrorism. This is what Orwell feared. The goal of terrorism prevention is a praiseworthy goal but the destruction of social trust by creating universal suspicion is not the way to go.
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* The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4 – In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950 p.546 (Penguin)