big brother is here.....

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    This article was written before the Iraq invasion but it is more truethan ever. Ol' Eric Blair was a pretty smart guy....



    Orwell's 1984

    By Don Rivenes Nevada City, CA
    Nov 22, 2002, 07:06
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    Eighteen years after 1984, it may be time to review Orwell's "1984" written in 1948. He stated three mottoes: Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery, and War is Peace.

    Ignorance is Strength.

    Orwell - "The invention of print made it easier to manipulate public opinion and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time. What opinion the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference."

    Columbia Journalist review Neil Hickey May 2002 - "Worst case scenario is that some transnational company that knows little and cares less about your community, and whose main allegiance is to its stockholders and advertisers, will own your local daily and weekly newspapers, all your television and radio stations, the cable system, the Internet service provider, several of the national networks that serve you, your local video stores and movie houses, many of the magazines and books you read, and all of the sports teams in your area. That would allow endless cross-promotions of the owner’s interests, and probably very little hard news about anything having negative impact on advertisers or on the company itself. Everything you read or see, every opinion, every image, and every jot of information would arrive through one corporate filter. The top ten companies that own TV stations increased their share of the industry’s $20 billion annual revenues from 41 percent in 1995 to 54 percent today."

    Orwell - "For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves, and when they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."

    News item Nov. 15, 2002. Congress will boost its salaries to $155,000.
    News item Oct. 30, 2002 Nationally, 17 percent of children 17 and younger lived in poverty in 1999. In 1999 the poverty line for a family of four with two children was an income of $16,895 a year.

    Orwell - "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

    Comment - The Media revels in reliving the anniversary of past events, told from their viewpoint: Kennedy assassination, Iran-Contra, Bay of Pigs, 9/11, Civil War, the 60's.

    Green party news 10/7/02 -- Today Peter Camejo went to the gubernatorial debate, invitation in hand. In front of about 35 reporters, he was told "You're not invited to this event" over and over again until he was forced to leave the building. The San Francisco Chronicle ran an online poll all day on Monday and the results showed a staggering 87% wanted Peter to be included in the debates.

    KPFA interview November 2002 - Bob Mulholland chair of the California Democratic Committee ridiculed proportional representation. He said why should 5% of the public have representation in the legislature?

    Pew research center poll 1999 - "Most gun control measures that are being considered get very strong support, and by strong support I mean 75 percent or greater."

    Orwell - "Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph."

    Orwell - "Doublethink means to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed. Blackwhite as applied to an opponent means the habit of impudently claiming black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts."

    Nation Nov. 25, 2002 - "Bush claimed Iraq possesses a fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used "for missions targeting the U.S.". Previously he insisted that a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed the Iraqis to be "six months away from developing a weapon". These lies now lead 71% of the public to think it is likely that Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attack."

    N.Y. Time June 3, 2002 - " In a stark shift for the Bush administration, the United States has sent a climate report to the United Nations detailing specific and far-reaching effects it says global warming will inflict on the American environment.
    In the report, the administration also for the first time places most of the blame for recent global warming on human actions -- mainly the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The U.S. recommends adapting to inevitable changes instead of making rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse gases to limit warming, which is the approach favored by many environmental groups and countries seeking to enact the Kyoto Protocol, a climate treaty written during the Clinton administration that was rejected by Bush."

    Orwell - "In our society those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it is impossible."

    Freedom is Slavery.

    Orwell - "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. Alone, free - the human being is always defeated. Thus freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom."

    Orwell - A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure always remains the same.

    University of Arizona Poll - There were at least 435 safe seats in the 2002 House election.

    Orwell - "The ideal was a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes."

    Bush September 2001. "If you are not for us, you are against us."

    Center for Constitutional Rights - Congress overwhelmingly approved the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, better known by its acronym, the USA PATRIOT Act.2 The House vote was 356-to-66, and the Senate vote was 98-to-1. To an unprecedented degree, the Act sacrifices our political freedoms in the name of national security and upsets the democratic values that define our nation by consolidating vast new powers in the executive branch of government. The Act enhances the executive's ability to conduct surveillance and gather intelligence, places an array of new tools at the disposal of the prosecution, including new crimes, enhanced penalties, and longer statutes of limitations, and grants the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) the authority to detain immigrants suspected of terrorism for lengthy, and in some cases indefinite, periods of time. And at the same time that the Act inflates the powers of the executive, it insulates the exercise of these powers from meaningful judicial and Congressional oversight. The courts have observed that even the use of deadly force is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment if used in self-defense or to protect others. . . Here, for Fourth Amendment purposes, the right to self-defense is not that of an individual, but that of the nation and its citizens. . . If the government's heightened interest in self-defense justifies the use of deadly force, then it certainly would also justify warrantless searches.

    Christian Science Monitor Nov. 6, 2002 - "The CIA's bald assassination-by-drone of a top Al Qaeda official this week marks a new aggressiveness in the war on terror and crosses a threshold in the tactics the US is willing to use. "If you're at war and out there shooting soldiers, shooting the head soldier who happens to be a civilian is not beyond the pale of ethics in my opinion," says Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA. "This isn't a political situation, an assassination of a head of state. I think that's what Clinton and Bush are saying – this is an exigency of war." But it does raise another issue with Admiral Turner: "How do we know who was in that truck or car? How good was our intelligence as to whom we were getting here?" he asks. In February, for example, the Predator was used to kill three suspected Al Qaeda leaders in eastern Afghanistan, including a very tall man who supposedly looked like Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. It turned out that the three people killed were local peasants trying to salvage scrap metal from the detritus of war.

    Special to ZDNet November 18, 2002 - Homeland Security--Big Brother is here? It creates a Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA). One dark possibility is that this effort will link up with the Defense Department's Information Awareness Office, run by former national security adviser John Poindexter, which is reportedly creating large-scale data warehouses to analyze everyday activities like credit card purchases and travel reservations. One dismaying feature of the Department of Homeland Security is that the final version of the bill partially immunizes the new agency from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

    War is Peace.

    Orwell - "In a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at. In spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war. All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labor."

    Orwell - "In past ages, a war was something that sooner or later came to an end. But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. By becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. Thus war is peace."

    Fox News Nov. 17, 2002. - "Pentagon launches Operation Infinite Justice. What we're engaged in is something that is very, very different from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Bosnia, the kinds of things people think of when they use the word 'war,' or 'campaign,' or 'conflict,'" Rumsfeld said. "He stressed that fighting terrorism will take a long time and, to a degree not seen before, will require economic, financial, diplomatic and political action in addition to military force."

    Time magazine Nov. 17, 2002. "Some 57 percent favor a "long-term war to defeat global terrorism"

    Orwell - "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war."

    Japan editorial August 2002 - When Armitage was in Japan, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stressed the need for U.S. preemptive strikes against Iraq, saying, "...the entire world must know that we will take whatever action is necessary," and "The risk of inaction is far greater than the risk of action."

    Conclusion

    Though Orwell was writing to warn of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, he also was concerned with government control in so-called democracies. Given the power of money in campaign financing, two-party control of elections, lack of citizen voting interest, media conglomeration, conservative control of the courts, and the flagrant disregard of civil rights by the Executive branch, it is not too soon to be deeply concerned with the unilateral decisions of the U.S. in world events. The thought police are not here yet, but Ashcroft and Poindexter represent a "clear and present danger" hearkening back to Nixon.

 
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