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Towards the end of the reign of the late unlamented Shah of Iran a certain lowly citizen named his beautiful cat Shah-in-Shah, King of Kings, a title claimed by this king who was the son of a common soldier. The culprit was arrested, and disappeared into Iran’s system of prisons, tortures and hangings. It is safe to assume that the Shah, while a petulant tyrant, could not have approved of the unfortunate being executed for calling a cat a king, but then he would not have known about it. Rulers more than anyone else may complain that they really cannot be expected to keep an eye on everything. Our age of terrors is often characterised by the grotesque, the inconsequent, the simply silly, and this incident is such a perfect example it must be cherished by connoisseurs of the politically surreal. But surely what must interest us is not the Shah, nor even the victim, whose fate is too familiar to merit much notice, but the state of mind of the man responsible. If, as is usual, the machinery of the secret police was simply transferred from shah to ayatollahs, then the same official was probably at it for years, but he must have retired by now, growing roses and generally cultivating his garden. How does he see himself? Is he secretly thinking, but what got into me? What got into me is the secret theme of the thinking of successive waves of people who were part of persecution’s machineries, but later became appalled at the past – at themselves. As for the many citizens who thought, ‘And quite right too, he shouldn’t have insulted our dear Shah’, then there isn’t much to be done about them, for the lovers of authority, no matter how cruel, will always be with us. And they will have forgotten about it by now, as the white supporters of apartheid may now murmur, ‘I was always a bit of a liberal you know.’

Direct and unambiguous censorship, as part of state control, is easier to combat than the indirect results of it. Books, works of art, and their authors, may be banned, reviled, made non-books and non-people, but what is hard to see is a prevailing wind of opinion, most particularly if it blows fitfully. Jack Cope, the writer, having been a communist, wanted a passport to leave South Africa, where he was under threat. At last he found himself sitting opposite the relevant official. ‘Ach, hell, Mr Cope, look at it from our point of view. How can we give you a passport? You are a commie and you are a liberal too.’ Impasse. Recently Jack had written a little tale about a bird caught in power lines. A linesman saw it, notified base, the machinery for power was shut down for the district, a man climbed up and rescued the bird, and with tears in his eyes watched it fly away. The official with life and death in his hands – passports were that then – confessed he hadn’t read Jack’s books, he didn’t read commie books, but he remembered a nice little story, and he told Jack the tale of the sparrow. ‘I wrote that story,’ Jack modestly confessed. ‘Ach, hell, man, but that is a nice story.’ And he gave Jack his passport. Never say that literature cannot have practical uses. Meanwhile South Africa’s prisons, some of the cruellest in the world, continued to flourish, and so did censorship, which was arbitrary, to say the least. For instance, Black Beauty was banned, for reasons obvious to the white censor. Many writers’ books were banned, mine among them, and then we authors might hear they were on sale somewhere, but then banned again, all this giving rise to much satirical laughter. If you are white – and privileged, or privileged anywhere, then it is easier to maintain a stoical attitude towards persecution, petty or otherwise, and easy to make jokes. The white progressive writers could fight with ridicule, but the appealing little scene of the white immigration official, white writer and released bird could never have happened with a black writer, and they fled from the country when they could. But I wonder about the books not written, and here I come to my concern. When certain winds blow they wither everything that is unprotected. Let us imagine a poor black man – these days it could be a woman – who has managed because of frightful sacrifices by his parents, and then himself, sometimes walking miles to school every day, to get himself some kind of certificate, and with that, a clerk’s job. He has read enough to know that his everyday experiences could make tales that would be printed and admired. He dreams of writing them. But he lives, let us say, in old Soweto, and his working conditions make it hard for him to sustain creative energy, and then he cannot help observing how the black writers still in South Africa are treated. Those who have fled, sometimes a few steps in front of the police, are in exile in London and New York and in universities which these days so often give shelter to victims of persecution. He heard some are drinking too much, dying young, often not writing much. In the evenings he sits at a table where his mother and then his wife have cleared the supper things, he lights the oil lamp, he gets out his exercise book, he takes up his biro, and then – he stops. What he would like to write about are his daily struggles, the miseries of poverty, the attentions of the police, the efforts of his women to feed him and the children, how it feels to watch and – this is the worst – how his talented children are going to waste. He knows that simply to describe his life could be seen as an act of sedition; these days everyone knows what the daily lives of people are in luckier countries. He sits on, staring at the bricks of his wall, which he may have built himself. Would he have to leave his home, his family? Who would look after them? His exercise book remains empty. His own talents, let alone his children’s, will remain unfulfilled.

How many of such people were there? How many now in various parts of the world? In Zimbabwe the police may sit in on writers’ meetings, nothing secret about it; or they harass writers, or influence reviewers and editors against them. They drop in to say to a writer they hear such and such a book is being planned, but it would be better to think again. At this very moment, everywhere from China to Indonesia to South America to parts of Africa, a woman or man is thinking, But I daren’t write it. Talent is not necessarily allied to a readiness for martyrdom, or even courage. Why should it be? Such is our time’s history that our paradigm has to be an Ernst Toller, Solzhenitsyn, the killed or persecuted writers of some Muslim countries. A good thing for writers to be talented, but to be noticed it is even better if they are in prison or fighting cancer or, like Rushdie, sentenced to death. Writers as victims, that’s our mental set, but we scarcely notice the wasted or disappointed ones.

There are times and places when we collude with tyranny, in ways more direct than simply not noticing what goes on. In the old Soviet Union writers might claim proudly that they were developing censors that stopped them writing anything critical about communism. A shocking thing: but we all have inner censors, and often don’t suspect it. It is hard to step outside a prevailing way of thinking, particularly when you are convinced you are living in a free society. If you travel outside your culture, let’s say to the Fat East, or to a Muslim country or even somewhere in the United States, you may catch a glimpse of how we seem to others – or are not seen at all. In Iowa or Dakota for many people a state boundary can be their horizon. Britain – what’s that? In China Europe seems simply to drop over the edge of the world. If Europe ceased to exist tomorrow millions of people would not even notice.

An interesting indication of how we think is books that do not get published, or, if they do, are scarcely noticed. One example, among many: Arthur Deikman’s book The Wrong Way Home, about cults and their characteristics. By now we are pretty well informed about cults, but Deikman went on to point out that many of our institutions, from big businesses to gentlemen’s clubs, share the characteristics of cults. Surely there could not be a more useful tool for examining our culture – but no. It was ignored. Perhaps it was too close to the bone.

The most powerful mental tyranny in what we call the free world is Political Correctness, which is both immediately evident, and to be seen everywhere, and as invisible as a kind of poison gas, for its influences are often far from the source, manifesting as a general intolerance. The history books will say something like this: ‘When the certitudes of communism began to dissolve then collapsed with them – but slowly in some countries – the dogmas of Socialist Realism; but at once stepped into the vacuum Political Correctness. This began as a sensitive, honest and laudable attempt to remove the racial and sexual biases encoded in language, but it was at once taken over by the political hysterics, who made of it another dogma. In no time, from one end of the world to the other, everyone was saying, “It is Politically Correct”, “I am afraid it isn’t Politically Correct”, as if ordered to do so. There could hardly be a conversation without it, and PC was used often as the Victorians used “It isn’t done”, meaning socially improper, or to bolster the orthodoxies of “received opinion”, or even to criticise the eccentric. The new tyranny soon took over whole universities, particularly in the United States, departments of universities, colleges, schools, dictating habits of criticism, suffocating thought in some areas of scientific research, dimming the natural ferments of intellectual life. The submission to the new creed could not have happened so fast and so thoroughly if communist rigidities had not permeated the educated classes everywhere, for it was not necessary to have been a communist to absorb an imperative to control and limit: minds had already been thoroughly subdued to the idea that free enquiry and the creative arts must be subject to the higher authority of politics.’

Truly, we cannot stand being free. Mankind – humankind – loves its chains, and hastens to forge new ones if the old ones fall away.

The trouble is that people who need the rigidities, dogmas, ideologies, are always the most stupid, so Political Correctness is a self-perpetuating machine for driving out the intelligent and the creative. It is forming a class of people – researchers, journalists, particularly educators – who are exiles in their own culture, sometimes kept in inferior work, or even unemployed, and yet they are often the best, the most innovative, the most flexible.

In a certain prestigious university in the United States two male faculty members told me they hated PC but did not dare say so, if they wanted to keep their jobs. They took me into the park to say it, where we could not be overheard, as used to happen in the communist countries. Militant feminists were in charge.

In a good school in California I was taken to task by pupils for Political Incorrectness, in The Good Terrorist, which they were being ‘taught’ in class. Being ‘taught’ meant going through it to find incorrect thinking. Again, a young teacher took me aside to say she hated what was going on, and she was leaving teaching altogether, because this was what teaching had become.

In Wales I heard of a teacher, much loved by the pupils, who taught literature as it should be, out of her own love and enthusiasm, but she had been eased out of the department. Her ideas were considered old-fashioned. She was the kind of teacher of whom you hear people say: I was so lucky, I had this teacher who taught me to love books.

The sad question has to be, with this pattern so firmly established in our minds, when we do succeed in driving out the nasty new tyranny – if we do – what will replace it? The intolerances of religion were succeeded by communism, their mirror image, which set the stage for Political Correctness. What next? What should we be looking out for, what should we be guarding against?