brave real world

We take dystopian novels as great parables of societies as we fear they may become, subject to the domination of the totalitarian State that becomes a machine for controlling private relationships, and even consciences.

Our most common dystopian reference is George Orwell's

1984

, where the dictatorship achieves the perfection of its instruments of domination, and Big Brother, the omnipresent supreme leader of Oceania, watches over us from the screens.

It is an absolute power that creates a new reality that can be erased and rewritten according to the needs of the official ideology.

Happiness is forcibly imposed under a uniform mold of behavior.

This is what a novel before Orwell's,

Brave New World

, by Aldous Huxley, teaches us, the brave new world that Miranda offers in

The Tempest,

by Shakespeare, beautiful creatures, beautiful humanity.

In this new world, peace and well-being reign, but human beings are manufactured in laboratories, and education is taught through slogans that are repeated until they become fixed in memory.

Or

The Handmaid's Tale,

by Margaret Atwood, which takes place in an uncertain future in Gilead, formerly the United States, where a sect of fundamentalist fanatics imposes a police-style theocratic regime.

Women are only useful for giving birth to children, under the threat of execution or exile.

The societies that these novels describe, subjugated by total tyrannies that seek to destroy the individual by nullifying their freedoms, are dystopias that do not remain the impossibility of fiction.

Far from functioning only as parables of what we reject as a future system of life, they were possible in the last century, the century of the great totalitarian models, and they continue to be so in the 21st century, when the threats against democracy multiply, even there where their institutions seem firmest to us.

The archetypal totalitarianisms of the 20th century, as described by Frank Dikötter in his book

Dictators,

can be seen as real dystopias: they were based on a single party, and to function as implacable machines of power they depended on a supreme and infallible leader, his omnipresent figure. cultivated with care and perseverance;

from those that arose in countries where liberal democracies were in a state of deterioration, Hitler or Mussolini, to those that were the fruit of revolutionary cataclysms and wars, such as Stalin and Mao Zedong, all surrounded by a mythological aura.

In imagined dystopias, and in real ones, the sole leader begins to have an omnipresent image in the lives of citizens, and his image becomes deified through the propaganda apparatus that insists on keeping alive what in the Totalitarian marketing has been called the cult of personality.

Perhaps no other recent dystopian novel brings us closer to current reality, and places us in the realm of what we have already seen and experienced, than

Prophet Song

, by Paul Lynch, winner of the Booker Prize in England last year.

It does not occur in any distant time, nor in a mythological country, but in real Ireland, in the present time.

A totalitarian party comes to power, decrees the suspension of guarantees, and under the state of emergency unleashes a wave of repression that takes opponents and dissidents to prisons, represses demonstrations with bullets, sows terror in homes, multiplies the disappearances;

A state of rebellion is then created, and civil war breaks out.

It is a novel of impeccable craftsmanship, written in somber tones and that never neglects the tension, which grows as we progress in knowing the fate of the central character, Eilish Stack, a mother of a family who sees how her world is destroyed under the weight of the relentless political persecution carried out by the secret police, the imprisonment of her husband Larry, the bombing of her home, the death of her children, the flight across the border into the United Kingdom along with thousands of others who emigrate in search of of refuge, in the hands of human trafficking gangs.

Everything seems unprecedented because it happens in a country where until the day before democratic rules, constitutional guarantees, courts of justice, independent media, all those factors of daily life that are taken for granted, were in place.

But what if a new Government suddenly appears that denies all that?

There has been a coup d'état, or worse, that Government has been freely elected by the citizens themselves.

Dystopia, we are seeing it, can become an everyday story.

It's not just that we fear it could happen.

It has happened, it is happening.

It is the possible dystopia, the real dystopia.

The dystopia that we have at our doors.

It is the angel with the flaming sword that expels you from the democratic paradise.

Sergio Ramírez

is a writer and Cervantes winner.

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