Description:
John Waters discusses his latest book 'The Abolition of Reality - A First Draft of the End of History'. This book may become to the reality of the past five years what Winston Smith’s diary proposed it might become within the fictional world of 1984. It is intended, first of all, as a permanent record of a time that only a few noticed while it was happening, a book - as Winston said - ‘For the future, for the unborn’.
In that future it may be hard to persuade people that what happened from the spring of 2020 really did happen. Either the past will have been erased to such an extent that no one will know human liberty ever existed, or else a revolution of human consciousness will make it improbable that human beings could ever have so easily been duped into surrendering the rights and freedoms their ancestors had won in blood.
A fake pandemic was the signal that one morning began the foreclosure on everything that had, until the evening before, been axiomatically central to the idea of liberal, democratic, constitutional republics. The most shocking thing was not so much that this started to happen, but that almost no one seemed to object to it happening; almost no one sought to cite or defend the rights and liberties being overturned. Liberals fell silent; leftists joined in the clamouring for more and more tyranny.
In 'The Abolition of Reality', John Waters describes not just what happened but the meaning of what happened, in the course of what may well be judged by history as the most heinous crime of all time.
