L: A Novel History is an easy and stimulating read for anyone who is interested in politics and the condition of government oppression prevailing now in almost every country in the West and its sphere of influence.

You may be astonished at how closely the story – though set in another country at another time – reflects what is happening now in America.      

 

Terrible crimes are committed. But criminals are not punished – only those are arrested and tried who dare to express opinions not sanctioned by the regime, or are critical of it.

From mid-December 1987, for the duration of the regime there were no criminal trials held except for “political crimes” (which were often televised). Theft and burglary were no longer considered possible, as all goods were held in common. This meant that those best able to defend what they gained possession of by whatever means, kept it.

As no one, except a political criminal, could be accused of having done something wrong, since guilt was collective, the vocabulary of the courts had to change. If the old police arrested a lone youth for a violent attack, and brought him before the court, they could not say that they had seen him mug, assault, rape or murder his victim; they could only say that he was “involved in a mugging situation”, “an assault situation”, “a rape situation”, “a murder situation”. This turn of phrase hinted that he was not an individual responsible for deciding to do a certain deed and carrying it out, but only one of a group – two people at least – who had been present when something had happened. The victim was as much “involved in the situation” as the attacker. The nature of the incident was “social”, its diagnosis “anti-social behaviour”, its remedy lay in more group participation, the method of  remedy was counselling.

Judges and magistrates were abolished in January 1988. All political trials, as well as all “enquiries” − the name given to civil and “old crime” trials − were heard by a jury. The highest court of appeal was the Council. Top Party officials had direct access to the Council for an “enquiry”. Both prosecuting and defending counsel were appointed by the state. For all important trials they were chosen from among the few dozen members of the League of Leftwing Lawyers. This, the League asserted, helped to guarantee “genuinely unbiased judgment”.

What judges were expected to do was “manifest heart”. The important thing in what had once been called a criminal case was to “arrive at an understanding of the quality of the man” they were judging. If the pursuit of his own ends were perceived to be more important to him than “co-operation with the community”, he was “suffering from a condition of false consciousness” and must be sent to a psychiatric hospital for as long as it took to cure him. Many − the incurable − never returned. Defendants quickly learned to claim motives of the politically-moral kind that the BBC had been drumming into its listeners for years: “I wanted to help the young / old / handicapped”; “I heard this person make a racist / sexist / ageist / faithist remark”, and so on. It was a variation  of the “righteous indignation” ennoblement of violent deeds, held as the highest principle of justice by the state itself. Whether the explanation was accepted or not depended mainly on the political status of the defendant. If he was a “special reservist” of the New Police, he would be acquitted. If he was an official of a trade union, he stood a good chance of acquittal. If he was a member of the Party, he was almost certain to be revealed as a benefactor of society.

In a civil case the rule was that wherever the litigants derived from different classes, the “underdog” had the “right to justice”. …

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L insists:

The issue of race is the most important moral issue confronting us.

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Early in his reign, L emptied the lunatic asylums and hospitals of mental cases, even before he emptied the prisons of criminals condemned in “the last era”. Henceforth the only madness − or crime – was opposition to, dissent from, criticism of communism and the regime: or so it was officially. In actuality many of the former inmates were returned to the wards and cells.

In televised and broadcast speeches delivered by various of the Ministers but written by L, it was frequently explained that madness was simply the clear manifestation of alienation, for which capitalism was responsible. Now that capitalism was abolished, and society was “being treated” and “undergoing therapy”, “true madness”, which is false consciousness, would disappear. And that state of “heightened awareness” which used to be called madness could be turned to creative purposes, for it was no longer needed as a “device of escape” from “the unbearable world of the male-dominated authoritarian family”. Self-healing from alienation and false consciousness was easy enough. One had only to “give oneself wholly to the power and the glory of the new order, become part of it without any reservation, without the least atom of the old self being held back: to choose it because there was no other way to free oneself from the torturing blinding crippling responsibility of choice.” The “victims had become the masters.” The cause of the old mental maladjustments had been cured by the revolution. And L announced the appointment of erstwhile patients to positions of authority in the “mental hospital” prisons, in schools, civil administration and the law-courts, which “proved his faith” in their “essential sanity”.

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L wrote in one of the permitted newspapers:

In this country the masses do not choose opulence for themselves in a world of poverty. A man with a social conscience wants the happiness of knowing that he consumes no more than his neighbour consumes. This is moral beauty. If its appearance upsets a visitor from the cruellest nation on earth, a nation of capitalists, exploiters, imperialists and racists, then we shall make no apology for our preference for a log fire over central heating, for a little bread over a superfluity of luxury provisions. As socialists we shall continue to comprehensivize our schools. To take all land into public ownership. To employ every man and woman. Our aim must be to house them all, clothe them all, feed them all, teach them, heal them, organize their leisure. None shall be underprivileged, all shall be made equal. The underprivileged must be freed from all oppression, the oppression of being less lucky, less successful, less energetic or healthy than others. Positive discrimination will liberate women, youth, blacks. Especially the immigrants from those parts of the world which we exploited, raped, robbed and pillaged, who have come to share with us our greater good fortune must be liberated from their oppression. The first duty of the state is redistribution. There is no question of one man earning a reward greater than another. All must be balanced. If one man has a clean job, he must get less money than one who has a dirty job. The state must equalize with due regard not merely to externals but to inner feelings. There must be no prizes for one man to win who was better endowed by the accident of nature with stronger limbs or some fortuitous talent. No one can take credit for anything he does, and no one is to blame for anything he does. As Professor L teaches us, neither achievement nor guilt are individual. Society achieves, society is guilty. …. No man can decide his needs for himself. What he feels are wants and to indulge them is selfish, anti-social. But what others diagnose as his needs, those are his needs. And as his needs are shared with others, the problem of supply is a community problem. …. The state alone must be the source of the satisfaction of all needs. The state must give all, and command all. Nobody must suffer the pangs of doubt as to whether what he is doing is right or wrong. Everyone will have the pleasure of knowing that he is being used. That what he does is what he must do. That therefore he is necessary, and has purpose. And he will be saved too from any temptation to disobedience which could destroy his happiness. For what the state bestows, the state can withhold. He will belong to the state and the state to him, he will be attached to the state as a babe to its mother’s breast. Until the state gives him everything he is not free of purposelessness, he remains alienated, he longs for community and cannot find it. When the state gives him all he has, he will be ready for the last and final stage on earth, the stage of history for which all history has been preparing. He will not rebel. His need to rebel will be gone. But the state has first to conquer the rebel in him. And that it will do. For what the state gives, the state can take away. The state must put them in houses, bring them to school, tempt them with pensions, lure them with kindness. When all have been received inside the shelter of the state, and they know that there is nothing else outside the state, then they will be redeemable. What a harvest will then be promised of men and women for the New Age, the Third Millennium and beyond. But the process of redemption will not be as easy as the gathering-in. They have yet to learn that beyond their material needs there are others, which they have first to discover and then to understand and then to satisfy before they are fit for the absolute community of the human spirit wherein no individual shall have an existence outside of the community, and each will joyfully give up his life at any moment for the preservation of the Greater Life of Universal Man. ….

And –

L wrote in the weekly journal REALITY UPDATE:

There is a reactionary tendency among the working-classes, especially women, and even among blacks who have not yet organized around their own oppression, to try to maintain an anti-social and outdated institution, the Family, one of the chief sources of oppression to women and the young, as a centre of moral indoctrination and the kind of selfish inward-looking support-system which mitigates against the liberation of the community as a whole. The family is a reactionary institution, and only a reactionary will defend it. A radical involved in the struggle will be committed to opposing it as a major hindrance to liberation.

Children could be taken from foster-parents and is [soon after that]  from adoptive and even natural parents, by social workers (who had a statutory right of entry into every home), on the grounds that they were too happy!

But no one should  spend any part of their waking hours alone:

If someone kept to himself to write a book or compose a piece of music he was accused of  “extreme selfishness”.

And where did he get that musical instrument, that pen, that paper ? Did he formally apply for it? For how many hours of use? And who gave him permission to shut that door and take sole possession of that space?

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There had never been such feast-days for spite. In the first week of the Red Republic three people died in the streets of London as a result of being assaulted by an L-ite “RI” (Righteous Indignation) group. No charges were brought against these “avengers of the people”, as the RED TIMES described them, and this immunity was a green light to other avengers. Over a hundred thousand people were “executed” by RI mobs in the fifteen months of the interregnum.

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Read it if you love liberty. It will not disappoint you.

 

Jillian Becker    October 14, 2021