GEORGE and Jennifer had one child, aged 16, a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired girl named -- in consequence of the Americanization of entertainment in her parents' younger days -- "Honey". She had been unable to accompany her parents to collect disgraced Annie from the House of Harmony as she had been away at the time on a trip to Tibet on a project in world oneness arranged by the college of higher education which she now attended, but shortly after her return she went round to see her grandmother.
Annie, who loved her dearly, received her with delight. In the past she had been continually perturbed by the girl's slavish adoption of all the thought and behaviour implanted by the authorities in school and college and outside, and by the commercial advertisers and entertainers in harmony with those authorities. Now this source of friction was at an end. The problem had been obviated. Annie herself had been put right by her Re-education, and rendered "with-it". Honey, Annie now appreciated, had the inestimable advantage of not just six months of Re-education but 16 years of nothing but the New Education. Her granddaughter's processing had begun almost at birth in an infants' environment even then substantially and ever afterwards increasingly shaped against differentiation of race and sex, and in favour of a human herd of communistic compliance and capitalistic consumer-uniformity.
Annie reborn though she was, could still recall -- albeit now with an induced feeling of guilt in place of pure nostalgia -- the days of her own childhood in the far off 1930s when the playgrounds were full of the fair-haired descendants of Saxon, Viking and Celt, and them alone. That was before the Great Change which followed the 1939-45 war as not only its consequence but its ultimate purpose: a global upheaval brought about by Democracy's directors to crush the contemporary folk revival of the Aryans, and to facilitate racial amalgamation under their dictatorship disguised as representative government.
The dear old golliwogs Annie had known in her childhood had during Honey's childhood disappeared from jam jars, egg cups, mugs and all else, banished as hideous manifestations of "racial hatred", and later on replaced by representations of Materpater, a creature half-male and half-female, half-White and half-Coloured: in short an androgynous hybrid. Dolls other than Materpater were still permitted as a gesture of liberal liberty, providing they served the cause of Harmony, meaning they had to be either black or of varying shades of brown to compensate for the fiendish fault of former white predominance. This colouring of things was no mere superficial gesture of penance but had a deeper purpose preparatory to the colouring of persons. Astute mind-manipulators at the Ministry of Harmony were convinced, and rightly so, that if little girls like Honey could be accustomed from the cradle to cuddling Coloured dolls they would shed all instinctive resistance to bearing and cuddling mulatto children in later life.
Convinced of the importance of the earliest possible start to the process of human moulding, everything relating to infants had come under the indefatigable attention of members of the Ministry by the time Honey reached her early teens. The ambit of their interest ranged from the shape of babie's rattles and the design of cots to the words of nursery rhymes. This resulted in Baa Baa Black Sheep and other such conveyers of incipient racism being banned, and replaced by recommended ditties from the Mothers Manual of Harmony, a copy of which went free to every baby-blessed household, and which included such masterpieces as that which began with the words "We're multicoloured lambkins. Later we'll be multicoloured sheep".
Enid Blyton's once-beloved series of Noddy books had disappeared in their original form, being replaced by a much superior series of tales of intermingling for toddlers wherein the inhabitants of Toytown were all shapes, sizes, colours, sexes and half-sexes; all exceedingly chummy and all absolutely equal. No kind of punishment was depicted. This was not because the power-wielders themselves objected to physical punishment and refrained from using it, far from it, but because those power-wielders, the perpetual party of the real rulers of Democracy, saw the promotion of softness among their subjects as highly helpful to their rule. Thus the spanking of children had been prohibited as barbaric when Honey was quite young.
Error by the Toytowners was instead ingeniously corrected by involuntarily stopping and listening to and obeying the "World Conscience", a 'hi-tec' miracle of a contraption located in Tel Aviv, the acknowledged spiritual centre of the universe, which with its all-seeing eye noted everything everywhere. Perceiving any Toytowner in the wrong, ultra-fine radiations were transmitted to the brain of the wrongdoer, arousing a recognition of the fault and the need to rectify it. If rectification did not shortly follow, further radiations produced punitive pangs in the cerebrum the persistence and severity of which depending on the continuance and seriousness of the wrongdoing. Thereby, no undesirable conduct lasted for long in idyllic Toytown, as you may imagine. As you may also well imagine, members of the Ministry in inventing this fictional device for children derived considerable sophisticated amusement from their secret knowledge that, as will be seen at the end of the story, progress was already far advanced in developing the reality of the device for the enforcement of correct conduct in the public.
As Annie recalled, when Honey's processing had progressed from nursery to primary school she had come to learn quite a lot about this mind-moulding of her granddaughter, not merely from what Honey had communicated, but also from her own observation when taking Honey to and from school to help her mother who at that time went out to work. By then the staff of the Jomo Kenyatta Primary School at Streatham were progressives to the core without exception. Indeed they could hardly have been otherwise since by then school teachers were most highly selected to exclude anyone with the slightest lingerings of old-fashioned attitudes, the slightest remnant of racial feeling, the tiniest trace of White nationalism. It mattered not if in body and dress they were much less clean and tidy than the scruffy tramps Annie had come across in her childhood, or if their academic achievement was distinguished only by its poorness or even its absence. The only degree that really mattered was the degree of their perception of the oneness of all humanity, joined to a perspiring zeal to instil this perception in their pupils.
School started in the morning with the ritual of the "Circle of Sameness" performed, weather permitting, in the playground, and in the assembly hall if wet. The children linked hands, then chanted the 20-verse Song of Sameness which had all to do with breaking down barriers, pushing out prejudices, filling up with love and care for every form of life generously classified as "human". Toleration, it demanded, for all kinds of human behaviour once held to be intolerable. The submergence of the individual in the crowd, it cried for, in favour of the common herd and its collective action, denouncing any competitiveness and rejecting any suggestion of an elite as contrary to sameness. Work for peace, it proclaimed -- peace as the extinction of self-assertion and thus conflict. Of course behind all this show of woolly benevolence required by the Ministry lay the secret purpose of the superiors of the Ministry which was to soften-up the citizens of the future to become submissive servants of the power-wielders behind the scenes. The seating in class and the procedure in all school activities was based on the principle of "pairing" , meaning the coupling of White and Coloured children as juvenile preparation for White and Coloured copulation as adults to produce the desired global mixture of humanity. This ultimate of integration was seen by its genuine idealists as the state of perfection wherein all hurtful divisions had been eradicated. For the hard-headed social engineers in control it was seen plainly and correctly as the reduction of the subject mass to a state of enervation beyond rebellion or even major unrest.
The achievement of this "pairing" throughout the schools of the country necessitated a most complex transport operation absorbing a substantial part of the gross national product. Daily all over England Coloureds were bussed to one school and Whites to another, and with continual change of schedule to maximize the benefit. Thus, while Honey was nominally at the Jomo Kenyatta School at Streatham, she might suddenly find herself spending a day at the Simon Wiesenthal School in Acton or the Mahatma Gandhi School in Lambeth.
In rural areas the operation could and did entail in many cases pupils spending a large part of most days travelling to and fro. Nevertheless the spiritual and cultural experience of "pairing" along with the potency of its physical familiarization even for the remaining small part of the school day, was considered as of redeeming importance far exceeding the mere scholastic knowledge of times past. Moreover even if there had been no such travelling, the talent of the teachers was such that hardly anything of value would have been imparted in the time saved, so its loss did not really matter. The result was that the children generally left school knowing little more than when they started, some even less, and most of them hardly able to read or write or add up; but with this fully compensated for by being full to overflowing with the heavenly talk of "tolerance" and the exquisite feeling of human oneness, and the possession of the technical knowledge of how to operate a television set and thus to acquire more of the same.
Spectacular slovens themselves, the teachers fervently encouraged the children to learn from them the art of slovenliness as the mark of modernity. Herein lay an authentic gesture of emancipation from the bad old world of authoritarian discipline, they burbled and bleated, oblivious of the fact that through the workings of "permissiveness" there operated with superlative success through the disguise of its opposite the most authoritarian dictatorship imaginable. So it was to the satisfaction of their higher headmasters of remote control that the degradation in dress as in all things else was seen by the subjects not as the sign of subjugation as it truly was, but instead as the proof of liberation.
Jeans, which in Annie's early days had been only workmen's dress, had now become unquestionably accepted and universally worn as the daily dress of Democracy from which it was heretical to depart. What more appropriate uniform for the captive hordes of its multiracial masses could there be than this coarse and commonplace garment? Truly it was superbly suitable as the livery of servitude for the slaves of the shadow government exerting its despotism through manipulation of the mind.
It was highly important, teachers taught, to dress alike in jeans as a way of doing away with divisive factors of race, class and sex. Footwear similarly had a socially significant purpose, the favoured form for children being a symbolically sloppy, plastic and canvas creation called "casual"; this being one of the stressed keywords of the new age, evocative of its cherished condition of carelessness meaning freedom from concern and responsibility. With this meaningful footwear Honey was structurally encouraged to shuffle along on her way through life in harmony with the spirit of the age.
CHAPTER 4 The Colouring of Education
AT HONEY'S school, as at all others, a policy of "levelling" had been put into practice, to prevent where possible and to hide where not, low attainment by Blacks and other Coloureds. A "Make English Easy" campaign had resulted in the virtual abandonment of any grammatical structure or uniformity of spelling. Children were encouraged to speak and write as they felt and fancied, free from the fascistic rigidity of the past: a reform so eminently successful that very often Honey's parents and certainly her grandmother could not understand what she was trying to communicate in what was at best a kind of abbreviated Afro-American slang.
Arithmetic was similarly simplified to the effect that as long as one could count up to the extent of the fingers of both hands and the toes of both feet, that was good enough for all save those few destined for some specialization making greater demands, and where calculators could not be entirely relied upon.
Insofar as Blacks might still otherwise show up poorly in comparison to Whites in what few tests were still allowed, "weighing" was resorted to, meaning that many extra marks were awarded to Blacks to compensate for the prejudice, deprivation and persecution of the past. Thereby the educational authorities were able jubilantly to announce that now that a state of multiracial equality had been achieved Black children were able to reveal themselves as even more equal than White children.
This compensatory elevation of Blacks was continued at all points outside school and in adult life. At Universities Blacks who would have failed if White were automatically given at least a pass grade if not honours grade. For recruitment and promotion employers were equipped with conversion tables in their Manual of Harmony supplied to them by the Ministry which enabled them to uplift the raw scores of the Blacks more than sufficiently to hide their deficiencies. Those employers were obliged to prove that they were not discriminating against Blacks, and the only way to do that was to discriminate against Whites.
The textbooks of Annie's school-days had been entirely discarded long ago. Not content with eradicating anything and everything which by any stretch of the imagination might be regarded as conducive to racism or sexism, the new type of school-book, whatever might be its subject, ingeniously found constant occasion to laud Jews and Coloureds, and to disparage Whites, and to put in a call for human oneness. Anti-racism in arithmetic, for example, resulted in illustrations which showed that, in addition, two Whites do not amount to a Black; in subtraction taking a White away from England makes room for one more newcomer from Africa or Asia; in multiplication Coloureds are better breeders than Whites; and in division racial separation is deplorable.
The day Honey had started school her Harmony Register had started too. It recorded any bad (not black) marks for intimations of racism, and any good marks for intimations of positive rejection of an inborn impulse of identification with and particular concern for her own kind, namely White folk. On leaving school for college her Harmony Register had accompanied her, and on leaving college it would be lodged in the archives of the Ministry of Harmony to which employers and local authorities and other government departments and agencies could address enquiries as to her background and her current Harmony rating. Thus there was attached to her throughout life a living indicator of her conditioning as a creature of Democracy to pervert her nature and prepare her for miscegenation.
At school Honey had been fortunate enough to avoid punishments for racism which were fearsome. One was to stand in the corner for the rest of the day wearing a cap inscribed "Racist", after a ritual of self-denunciation before either the pupil's own class or the entire school, depending on the circumstances of the vile offence. For a more serious or repeated instance the culprit was obliged to wear at school for weeks or even months a luminous coat of shame of spectral white, and to deliver daily to every Coloured child at the school a note of abject apology and prostrate contrition, the copying of which from a set model would keep the culprit busy the whole of each evening.
When Honey had entered senior school and later college, the inculcation of Harmony had become even more intense and sophisticated. History, as then taught to her, was not some impartial record of what actually happened, but an instrument for human development whereby the past was recast as the matrix for a designated future. Officially registered historians -- and none other than these approved chroniclers of "correctness" were allowed to operate in this highly important formative field -- held that in the absence of any trace of native civilizations in Africa in antiquity it was wholly justifiable to invent them because of the beneficial consequences of the fabrication.
So it was that Africa was presented as the womb of civilization in ancient times. Born there in its numerous universities and scientific and cultural institutions, great knowledge and art flourished and transmitted to other parts of the world incapable of the creation and only able to copy. Thus ancient Greece and Rome, falsely boosted as great centres of innovation in olden times, were in fact nothing more than artful centres of plagiary: so said the Ministry's makers of historical truth. Billions were expended by international agencies of Harmony ostensibly to excavate in Africa the wondrous ruins of the edifices of the great parent civilization destroyed by White barbarians, but actually in secret to erect those ruins preparatory to their acclaimed "discovery".
In this good cause of the purposeful presentation of history, Cleopatra -- actually a White woman of Macedonian ancestry -- was recast to be projected as a glorious example of the excellence of the Coloured female sitting on the throne of Egypt in the days of the Roman barbarians. Hannibal, an Aryan Carthaginian, was turned into a Black manifestation of martial genius vanquishing those same Roman barbarians.
Nearer at hand, carefully concocted evidence was produced to show that the original inhabitants of England had been Negroes, among them the builders of Stonehenge, whose magnificent civilization, replete with all the fruits of art and science, had been tragically overthrown by invading White barbarians besmeared with woad who had savagely slaughtered every single one of these richly pigmented Hyperboreans in their fabled Atlantis. Hence to the convenience of the myth-makers the disappearance of these Hyperboreans without trace.
By similar conjuring dexterity proof was produced to show that Negroes had reached North America 2000 years before Columbus. There they had created a veritable paradise complete with television, traffic lights and telephones, and even that high point of human progress: McDonalds-type fast-food restaurants with high-rise hamburgers from reconstructed meat. Tragically all this excellence had been obliterated in consequence of the total extermination of its creators due to infection with an earlier form of AID's. This disease had come to them through the deliberate contamination of the maize produced for them by the jealous Whites they kindly employed as labourers on their farms; maize being a principal item in their diet.
Naturally the Black Death had to be done away with as an event in English history because of its obvious susceptibility to undesirable connotation. It was cleverly renamed the "Dirty White Pestilence", and defined as an anticipatory visitation of divine retribution for the White man's subsequent subjugation of his Black brother.
Negro or other Coloured ancestry was progressively discovered for a glittering array of European celebrities from Beethoven to Marconi. Here a potential problem of classification was brilliantly solved by securing the agreement of Jews to be classed as Coloured conditional on being accorded absolute primacy as "the most Coloured". To celebrate the agreement the "Chosen Ones", as they were respectfully referred to in a suitably hushed tone of reverence, even sanctioned the discovery of ancient scrolls, hidden the day before and forged a week earlier, which revealed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ had been a Coloured convert to Judaism who had wisely adopted some deviations of doctrine for the sake of then attracting the Gentiles.
The acme of ingenuity was undoubtedly reached with the discovery that Whites were in origin a degenerative mutation from Negroes, their lack of skin pigment, melanin, being the sure sign of biological blight. With Jew's however, the same explanation could by divine dispensation of Jehovah be taken to show the contrary.
With her education proceeding along these lines it will come as no surprise to learn that Honey's boyfriend was one Ulysses Brown, a colourful character physically speaking whose parents had migrated from a mud hut in South Africa to a council flat in South London, thanks to a mobility and resettlement allowance from the Ministry. Before her Re-education Annie had found it distinctly difficult to accept Ulysses as just another English boy who happened to be a bit more sunburnt, as the Ministry put it.
Once in her unregenerate days curiosity joined to anxiety had prompted Annie to seek out and peep into the 'Heartbeat', the huge disco-hall where Honey and Ulysses spent most of their spare time. She had been nearly stunned by the deafening din from the multiple loudspeakers, almost blinded by the welter of flashing lights, and made quite dizzy by the extraordinary vibrations of the building. Afterwards Honey had explained that, living up to its name, the 'Heartbeat' not only had the very latest and very loudest sound system, but also a unique vibratory system called a 'pulsator' geared to it and affecting the floor, so that every part of the place and every person in it rocked, rolled and vibrated in rhythm with the noise. The rapidity of sound and vibration far exceeding the beat of the human heart, notwithstanding the name of the place, a compulsive and frantic agitation of the whole human body resulted which was wildly exciting for a while, then utterly exhausting for a further while, and which ultimately shortened life by a much greater while.
Realizing that she could not stand it much longer, Annie had struggled to make things out in a scene which to her at that time resembled a short-circuiting preview of Hell. This alarming impression had been increased when she had managed to make out the multiracial musicians. Faces contorted like inebriated gargoyles, bodies jerking as if in the throes of epilepsy, or swaying and stumbling and leaping like demented demons of darkness; they had been frenziedly strumming at the same small set of notes which had evidently been the absolute limit of their artistry, while periodically seeming to relieve flatulence by emitting shrieks, snarls, grunts and sundry other noises some of which appeared to be intended as words.
Then Annie had managed to detect her granddaughter amid the writhing mass of bodies supposedly human. Honey, her features set as in an orgiastic trance, her eyes glazed in fixation, had been gyrating madly in servitude to the sound and the vibration. Alongside her, his arms and legs stabbing the air as if in the terminal stages of some lethal fit, had been Black boyfriend Ulysses, his face rigid in bovine ecstasy as he continually closed to grip her, his hands and arms snaking victoriously around his Anglo-Saxon acquisition like black tentacles.
What Annie had missed by then hurriedly departing had been the sight of Honey and Ulysses using a brief interval in the proceedings to top up on tablets of 'Instant Bliss'. Yet another great end-of-the-century achievement of fastness as a seductive substitute for fulfilment in a race from cradle to grave, this was the superdrug necessary for prolonged performance at such temples of pleasure as the 'Heartbeat'. Most young people and many not so young were to become dependent by 1999 on this staff of life under Democracy.
When a couple of days later Annie had next seen Honey, and had told her of her visit to the 'Heartbeat' and her most unfavourable impression, Honey had retaliated sharply, fluent with the sentiments of her college and companions, scorning her as disgracefully behind the times. The music and the dancing, she had declared was the very latest expression of true Democracy in sound and movement, a liberation from the oppression of set patterns, a revelry in sheer abandonment, a joyful return to the simple yet transcendent pleasure of the jungle to which Black people to our eternal gratitude had shown us the way.
Warming to her task of enlightening backward Annie, Honey had then told her of 'Primera', the oncoming sound of the future, based on the wonderful African culture of the past whereby the grandeur of great simplicity could be achieved by forever repeating with varying sequence and speed just four notes, any four notes, accompanied by the fastest possible drumbeat to uplift the heart to a higher level of living. Annie at that time had been less than enthusiastic for Honey's cultural preferences, but now, after the trouble with Nigger, she had learned to accept them.
As an aside regarding the significance of this cult of the jungle which had come to predominate by the very end of the century, it would be impercipient to estimate it as no more than a phenomenon geared to financial gain alone, and to the benefit of its commercial promoters only. Coupled to this particular vested interest was another and consonant one, profoundly socio-logical, of deliberately disorientating the masses from a natural and traditional pattern of behaviour and scale of values. The aim thereby was a condition of debasement of those masses through which their domination by the masters of the masses might the better be served. The same astute motivation lay behind the promotion of a comparable art of the jungle with its anarchic rejection of order and discipline, its blurring of form, its intimation of weakness, and its reduction to similarity.