Brave New World
gangstalking | October 21, 2009
Through the eyes of a savage, November 8, 2001
By: Michael J. Mazza (Pittsburgh, PA USA) -
Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World” is both one of the best science fiction books and one of the most brilliant pieces of satire ever written. BNW takes place on a future Earth where human beings are mass-produced and conditioned for lives in a rigid caste system. As the story progresses, we learn some of the disturbing secrets that lie underneath the bright, shiny facade of this highly-ordered world.
Huxley opens the book by allowing the reader to eavesdrop on a tour of the Fertilizing Room of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where the high-tech reproduction takes place. Into this seemingly advanced civilization is introduced John, a “savage” from a reservation where old human culture still survives. Thus, BNW is also a tale of “culture shock” and conflict.
Regular readers of my reviews will no doubt have noticed a penchant for things Eastern European. This extends not only to travel and the purchase of portraits of Tito (just brought a beautiful one back from Ljubljana – it’s enormous!) but also to a genuine interest in the political and social history of the region in the twentieth century in particular. It’s an interest I’ve often found difficult to put into words but Anna Funder managed to get close to my sentiments writing in “Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall” when she said “I think about the feeling I’ve developed for the former German Democratic Republic. It is a country which no longer exists, but here I am on a train hurtling through it – its tumbledown houses and bewildered people. This feeling needs a sticklebrick word: I can only describe it as horror-romance. It’s a dumb feeling, but I don’t want to shake it. The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name. East Germany has disappeared, but its remains are still at the site.” Of course, “Stasiland” describes a very particular aspect of post World War Two Europe but Funder conveys through her book the sort of attraction the states of the former Yugoslavia, in particular, hold for me.
Into the Buzzsaw
If you attended a Canadian university in the past eighty years, it’s possible that, unbeknownst to you, Canadian security agents were surveying you, your fellow students, and your professors for ’subversive’ tendencies and behaviour. Since the end of the First World War, members of the RCMP have infiltrated the campuses of Canada’s universities and colleges to…
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