by Brian Mckenzie

Created on: May 20, 2007

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

These are the chilling words of O'Brien in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four as he explains to Winston Smith the methods and motives of Ingsoc. As O'Brien explains, Ingsoc is simply interested in pure power, and its method of ensuring it stays in power is violence. "The weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism." he explains.

Orwell's creation is a caricature of one party governments such as the German Nazis, the Soviet Communists, and the Italian Fascists that dominated Europe in the interwar years. North Americans watched with detachment and later puzzlement and fear as those parties provoked war in 1939, but Europeans came to understand the use of violence as a means to first assume then secure political power.

North Americans, accustomed to democratic principles such as habeas corpus, popular elections, and judicial checks on political authority, tend to view political power as moral authority derived from democratic rights, privileges and processes. For them, violence has no place in the political arena, and though there are examples of its use in the U.S. and Canada (the civil rights movement, certain labour strikes), such examples tend to be abberations.

But despotic governments rely on violence usually because they lack the moral authority to govern. Despots seize power, illegally or by exploiting legal processes, and establish their regimes by suspending rights, disassembling systems that check their power, and enforcing strict controls on the people. Violence as a means of maintaining authority is a sure sign of weakness in government, and those who wield power through violence often find themselves hoist on their own petard.

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