"Life is Easier With Guilt" Public Information Campaign

This is part 2 of our look at crime in Scarfolk (see last week’s post about 'Real British Crime').

In 1972, Scarfolk Council decided that the "presumption of innocence before being proven guilty" was a bit too presumptuous.

A council spokesperson said that "such legal bureaucracy completely ignores the rights of guilty people who want to be legally recognised as guilty but have either committed a crime that has unfortunately gone undetected, or are, through no fault of their own, awaiting trials which could take many months, even years to rightfully establish their guilt.

The spokesman also pointed out that people may be guilty of actions that are not yet considered crimes and underlined the importance of recognising these people’s culpability to ensure peace of mind.

In the spring of 1973, the government's propaganda department launched a campaign that promoted guilt as a desirable attribute. It was so successful that many people feared they might not be guilty enough and committed horrific crimes to nurture in themselves feelings of self-worth and wellbeing.

The campaign featured a policeman whose nickname was "PC Fang". Allegedly, he had the ability to instil a deep sense of guilt in even the most innocent citizens. Some say he achieved this by using supernatural powers; others say he used a hammer.

 

A frame from a lost public information film that played at cinemas during the advertisements. 

A T-shirt compulsorily worn by children.

Mandatory De-education Classes

Post-Truthism is nothing new. Following the Truth Reform Act of 1976, it became every citizen's civic duty to attend de-education classes. The state instinctively felt that knowledge and the educated people who wield it destablize governmental plans, especially those that routinely and deliberately disregard verifiable facts.

According to one de-education textbook: "A good or 'Schrödinger' fact is simultaneously true and untrue until such a time that someone in authority tells you which, though they may change their mind or substitute the fact entirely for another piece of information, fabricated or otherwise, that suits their personal or political needs."

It could take many years for a citizen to unlearn everything, particularly because they first had to learn the complex method of how to unlearn. (Also see the How to Burn Books book).

Additionally, because de-education classes were compulsory (and expensive), some people opted instead for lobotomies by backstreet barber-surgeons, who, it was later revealed, received government funding. These unregistered practitioners would lay their patients' heads on the bottom step of a staircase, then release a Slinky attached to a sledgehammer from the top step. If this procedure was unsuccessful, they would force the patients to binge-watch ITV talent shows such as Opportunity Knocks or the BBC's Come Dancing programme.

"People Are Dangerous" (1974-1975)

During the People Purges of 1974 and 1975, the many people who peopled Scarfolk were alarmed to learn that they were now the kinds of people that the government categorised as "people".

With no clear definition of what the state meant by "people", the mayor, who had previously declared himself a man of the people, tried to alleviate anxiety among his people by saying he didn't want to drive a wedge between people; he only intended to arrest those kinds of people who he deemed not to be "people people".

He said that he of all people knew that the most effective way to crack down on these people was with "people power": People working together to observe people, being able to tell people apart and then reporting those people to the appropriate people in authority.

On the 13 August 1975, the only people not in prison were six government officials, members of Scarfolk police force and a man called Dennis Peoples who suffered from a rare psychiatric syndrome called Clinical Lycanthropy which led him to believe he was a puffer fish.

The Fact Ban (1976)

In 1975 the government discreetly tortured citizens to find out what they thought of its leadership. The results revealed that many participants thought the state "cheerfully totalitarian","despotic, but in a nice way", and "I'll say anything you want as long as you stop waterboarding me and give me back my eye."

The government sensed a need for change and announced that it would be introducing more liberal attitudes to its policies, particularly those relating to facts and information.

Facts had always been problematic for the government because of their inflexibility. Though the use of facts in state administration was strongly disparaged and had largely been expunged from political life, some civil servants stubbornly refused to yield to inexplicable reversals in party policy.

An internal council memo to employees read: "Facts do not serve the best interests of a successful government and we must not permit them to hinder our healthy economy with their tyrannical, oppressive insistence on what is and isn't true. If you must employ a truth, ensure that you are liberal with it -  untamed, unedited facts can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Ideally, you will create your own facts so that you can retain control of them."

In early 1976, as part of its Truth Reform, the government went a step further and initiated an all-out ban on unsanctioned facts, as can be seen from the above council leaflet distributed to employees. Until the end of the decade all facts were created and authorised by a new governmental department called the Fact Office or F-OFF for short.

I-Spy Surveillance Books

In the years before digital surveillance and the government's Snooper's Charter, it was much harder for the state to spy on its citizens.

Without the technology we have today, the government had to rely on manpower, specifically from society's most innocent members - minors. Children in the UK especially were much easier to manipulate and were largely oblivious to the creeping diminishment of their civil liberties.

I-Spy books were published by the state and given as gifts, as well as distributed to schools, youth clubs and infant terror organisations (see "The Infant Liberation Front"). The books transformed the tedium of surveillance into play, encouraging children to routinely observe and record the actions, speech and private correspondence of people who the government deemed to be enemies of society. These included "free-thinkers, beneficiaries of welfare and other degenerates. [...] Extremists, potential extremists, and those whose profound lack of extremist attributes is extreme in itself, are also worthy of suspicion and censure."

The completed books even prompted children to spy on themselves, which many found difficult, even with the mirrors provided.

Each completed book was sent to a local government councillor whose job it was to forward the data to the relevant renditions team, and also to decide if any compensation was due to the child; for example, if the surveillance data they had submitted led to the arrest and execution of a parent.

More about surveillance in Scarfolk here:
"Unlearn Privacy Cards"
"We Watch You While You Sleep. TV Signal Intrusion"
"Roy, The Telekinetic Child-Owl"

Children's Nuclear Warning Poster (1979)

In the late 1970s the nuclear arms race was almost as popular as squash. 

On the face of it, Scarfolk council wanted to prepare children for the probability of a nuclear strike by Russia, China or the Shetland Islands without unduly frightening them with words and phrases such as 'apocalypse' and 'modicum of extinction'. 

In 1979 the council produced a poster campaign which substituted negative words for more pleasant, child-friendly ones. 'Flopsy Bunny', for example, became a euphemism for 'the complete annihilation of the known world'.

However, the government's true motive for the campaign became clear later that year when it adopted a cute, long-eared rabbit as its mascot in civic literature and public information films. It also vigorously promoted a soft-toy 'Flopsy Bunny', as well as a fluffy, nuclear mushroom cloud called Arthur. 

In the run up to Christmas children begged their parents and Santa Claus for the aforementioned playthings and there were even riots in Scarfolk toy shops.

This bait-and-switch permitted the council to take the population's desire for 'Flopsy Bunny' (or total annihilation depending on one's interpretation) as consent to proceed with its plans to build a nuclear missile silo cum leisure centre below Scarfolk primary school. The Parent-Teacher Association at first protested the project but withdrew when they were given free sauna passes.

The SCS Living-Eye Surveillance Computer (mid-1970s)

Unfortunately, there's only scant reference to SCS (Scarfolk Clinical Security) in our archives. All we have is a screenshot from one of their television commercials and a page from a pamphlet given out by family doctors in the mid-1970s.

In 1973, SCS caught the government's interest when it claimed that it could combine and reduce the state's annual budgets allocated to the war on crime, censorship, organ donation and breakfast catering.

As you'll read below, the company proposed that reluctant citizens physically participate in the state surveillance process. Though the scheme was voluntary when it began, it quickly became mandatory.

 

Click to enlarge

However, in 1976 the scheme suddenly collapsed and SCS went into liquidation. The company had already collected the initial 17,001 eyes that were required to run its living-eye surveillance computer, when it realized that it had neglected to invent an eye-to-computer adapter cable.

The now redundant eyes were returned to their donors with a complimentary display stand (actually, an egg cup with 'thank you' painted on it) and a letter that read: "Be proud that you can look yourself in the eye in the knowledge that your eye was once the nation's eyes and ears".