Word: totalitarianization
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Americans for Democratic Action, in a letter to Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, has accused the Navy of imitating "Communist totalitarian policies and devices" in requiring NROTC students to sign a 'stool pigeon" loyalty certificate, it was learned last night. The letter was partially initiated by a Liberal Union appeal to the ADA for national action on the "informer clause" in the oath administered to the Harvard Naval Science students...
LaFollette added that he assumed Secretary Johnson agreed that "it is not announced American policy to oppose communism by imitating communist to totalitarian policies and devices...
...readers, Orwell is known chiefly through last year's Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was mortally ill with tuberculosis when he wrote it. But Orwell's mind had never been more lucid. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the grimmest, the most logically imagined and credible preview of the totalitarian state in print.* It is not so much a satire as a portent. The 18th Century's great Dean Swift, whom Orwell admired and to whom he has been compared, is at best a distant literary cousin. Gulliver's Travels discursively, and sometimes vindictively, pilloried comparatively commonplace human failings...
...Orwell's 1984 was obviously influenced and perhaps inspired by a book called We, a nearly forgotten totalitarian fantasy by Russian Writer Eugene Zamiatin. We was written in 1923, translated into English by Manhattan Psychiatrist Gregory Zilboorg and published in the U.S. in 1924. Orwell read it in a French translation in 1946 and wrote an enthusiastic review of it in London's weekly Tribune, of which he was then literary editor. Orwell's is the better book in every way, but his debt to We is quickly apparent. In the Russian's novel the characters...
...traditions and perpetrated by its own rules, yet given a recognized status by a higher authority, must be an unconscious agent for the spread of ideas hostile to all forms of tyranny. No authoritarian state, past, present or future could tolerate for long such foci of anti-totalitarian infection...