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 events that only a few comprehended — in the depths of their meanings and significance — while they were 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 — if there is a historiographical record of the times to come — as the most heinous crime of all time.

About the Author

JOHN WATERS (b. 1955) Having started his career in 1981 with the Irish Music journal Hot Press, John Waters was a columnist with The Irish Times between 1990 and 2014. His first book, Jiving at the Crossroads (1991) became a massive best-seller. He went on to write and publish nine other books, including An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Ireland (Duckworth, 1997), Was it for this? Why Ireland lost the plot (Transworld Ireland, 2012) and Give Us Back the Bad Roads (Currach Press, 2018). He has written a number of plays for stage and radio and contributed to the American magazine First Things and the British magazine The Spectator. Since September 2020, he has been publishing his work twice weekly on Substack, via his newsletter/website John Waters Unchained. The Abolition of Reality is his eleventh book.

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