Summary: <br> Podcast: lecture by Bruno Waterfield recorded at the Battle of ideas 2016<br> <br> Across Europe in the 1930s a battle opened as totalitarians of <br> the right and left sought power over man’s soul. This was not merely an <br> exercise in traditional tyranny or authoritarianism but an attempt to <br> break down informal relationships, to assault sovereignty and <br> independence at the level of the nation and the individual. To destroy <br> those boundaries of freedom that make us human, even to attack the mind <br> itself. In Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual sets <br> out the totalitarian project. “The real power, the power we have to <br> fight for night and day, is not power over things but over men,” he <br> tells Winston Smith. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and <br> putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing.”<br>
