Author: Christopher Isherwood
Quotes of Author: Christopher Isherwood
Now, for example, people with freckles aren't thought of as a minority by the nonfreckled. They aren't a minority in the sense we're talking about. And why aren't they? Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary. Anyone here disagree with that? If you do, just ask yourself, What would this particular minority do if it suddenly became the majority overnight? You see what I mean? Well, if you don't – think it over!
"All right. Now along come the liberals – including everybody in this room, I trust – and they say, 'Minorities are just people, like us.' Sure, minorities are people – people, not angels. Sure, they're like us – but not exactly like us; that's the all-too- familiar state of liberal hysteria in which you begin to kid yourself you honestly cannot see any difference between a Negro and a Swede…." {Why, oh why daren't George say "between Estelle Oxford and Buddy Sorensen"? Maybe, if he did dare, there would be a great atomic blast of laughter, and everybody would embrace, and the kingdom of heaven would begin, right here in classroom. But then again, maybe it wouldn't.}
"So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and – think differently from us and hay faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo liberal sentimentality. If we're frank about our feelings, we have a safety valve; and if we have a safety valve, we're actually less likely to start persecuting. I know that theory is unfashionable nowadays. We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish….
"Where was I? Oh yes. Well, now, suppose this minority does get persecuted, never mind why – political, economic, psychological reasons. There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is – that's my point. And, of course, persecution itself is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?
"And I'll tell you something else. A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it. It hates the majority–not without a cause, I grant you. It even hates the other minorities, because all minorities are in competition: each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest. And the more they all hate, and the more they're all persecuted, the nastier they become! Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn't! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you're being persecuted, you hate what's happening to You, you hate the people who are making it happen; you're in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn't recognize love if you met it! You'd suspect love! You'd think there was something behind it – some motive – some trick… book-quoteIn a few days, I thought, we shall have forfeited all kinship with ninety-nine per cent of the population of the world, with the men and women who earn their living, who insure their lives, who are anxious about the future of their children. Perhaps in the Middle Ages people felt like this, when they believed themselves to have sold their souls to the Devil. It was a curious, exhilarating, not unpleasant sensation: but, at the same time, I felt slightly scared. Yes, I said to myself, I've done it, now. I am lost. book-quoteComparing the two cities - the Berlin I knew in the early thirties and the Berlin I revisited in the early fifties - I have to admit that the latter is, in many respects, a far more exciting setting for a novel or a sequence of stories. Life in the Berlin of 1952 had an intensely dramatic doubleness. Here was a shadow-line cutting a city in half - a frontier between two worlds at war - across which people were actually being kidnapped, to disappear into prisons or graves. And yet this shadow-frontier was being freely crossed in the most humdrum manner every day, on foot, in buses, or in electric trains, by thousands of Berliners commuting back and forth between their work and their homes. Many men and women who lived in West Berlin were on the black list of the East German police; and, if the Russians had suddenly marched in, they couldn't have hoped to escape. Yet, in this no man's land between the worlds, you heard the usual talk about business and sport, the new car, the new apartment, the new lover. book-quoteThey have planned a life for you – from the cradle to the grave and beyond – which it would be easy, fatally easy, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist's command. Wake up, wake up – before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don't really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don't reach for the whisky, that won't help you. You've got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity. book-quoteAzınlığın da kendine göre bir saldırganlığı vardır. Çoğunluğa kafa tutar, kendisine saldırılsın ister. Çoğunluktan nefret eder -nedensiz değil tabi, onu teslim ediyorum. Hatta öteki azınlıklardan bile nefret eder, çünkü bütün azınlıklar birbirlerine rakiptir; her biri kendi çektiklerinin en kötüsü, kendi uğradığı haksızlıkların en ağırı olduğunu öne sürer. Daha çok nefret ettikçe, daha çok baskı görürler, daha da aksileşirler! O halde, her an nefretle karşılanan insanlar neden iyi huylu olsunlar ki? Baskı görürken, size yapılanlardan, size bunları yapanlardan nefret edersiniz; nefret dolu bir dünyadasınızdır. Değil mi, sevgi görseniz bile sevgiyi tanımazsınız! Sevgiden kuşku duyarsınız! Ardında bir şeyler gizliyor sanırsınız; bir çıkar, bir numara... book-quoteAzınlıklar büyük olasılıkla bizlerden farklı görünen, davranan, düşünen ve bizde olmayan kusurları olan insanlardır. Onların görünüşlerinden, davranışlarından hoşlanmayabilir, kusurlarından nefret edebiliriz. Ayrıca, neler hissettiğimizi güya liberal bir duygusallıkla örtmeye çalışmaktansa, onlardan hoşlanmadığımızı, nefret ettiğimizi itiraf etmek daha iyidir. Duygularımızı açıkça dışarı vursak, bir emniyet sübabımız olursa da yargılamaya kalkışmakta daha az aceleci davranırız. Biliyorum, günümüzde pek tutulmayan bir görüş bu. Hepimiz, bir şeyleri yeterince uzun bir süre görmezden gelmeyi başarırsak, o şeylerin ortadan kalkıvereceğine inandırmaya çalışıyoruz kendimizi... book-quote
