Posted on 06/12/2008 6:52:30 PM PDT by moneyrunner
I Googled “memory hole” and the search led me to the chapter of George Orwell’s “1984” from which this useful phrase was taken. It occurred to me how closely the MSM gets to replicating the Ministry of Truth. While the MSM does not go back and collect back copies of its papers, inconvenient facts printed earlier are forgotten. The broadcast media are a little closer to 1984, with their ability to edit its records and tapes.
Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.
For example, it appeared from The Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.
Or again, The Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today's issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston's job was to rectify the original figures ...
(Excerpt) Read more at moneyrunner.blogspot.com ...
What’s great about the Internet is the ability of free people to capture history in one, then dozens and then millions of different computers networks so that the original records are preserved. The way the MSM reacts to this is with name-calling and claims of hate speech.
For a prime example, see Little Green Footballs. It has captured the Obama website which constantly needs to "correct" it's reality.
Beyond that, I guess I just have trouble deciding what to take seriously, among names like "Little Green Footballs," "Real Clear Politics," and other absurdities and near absurdities.
Obama’s original certificate of live birth (if he indeed was born in Hawaii or was it Kenya?) has been lost in the Memory hole, along with all traces of his early years living with his loving grandparents (”white folk” as Obama affectionately calls them. We are being victimized by the MSM which must be hiding the truth from us similar to what the MSM did with JFK in 1960-63. JFK’s serious health problems, extra-marital sex life, and addiction to “feel good” drugs administered by a “doctor” who made plenty of visits to the White House to make JFK seem “normal” weren’t revealed until years after November 22, 1963. Obama has many serious secrets that he doesn’t want revealed. Somebody break into the Memory Hole and tell us the truth.
George Orwell had a very insightful vision of what a society controlled by the left would be like. “Ignorance is Strength” one of the slogans of the party in 1984 could very well be the motto of the current Democrat Party. Also Newspeak a language that deliberately limits vocabulary and thus critical thought can be seen today in the dumbing down of the public discourse. The MSM in America today strongly resembles the Ministry of Truth in 1984. Orwell got the year wrong but his book continues to be prophetic.
Orwell chose 84 as the reverse of 48 but “prophetic” he was: “’Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’ “.
The object of power is power, understand?
Orwell chose 84 as the reverse of 48
Makes sense. But why did he use 1948 as his basis? What was so significant about 1948 to Orwell?
About the time he finished his book.
I know he chose 1984 as the reverse of 1948, the year his book was published. And many of Orwell’s details in 1984 were based on the left in England in the 1930’s and 1940’s as well as the Former Soviet Union. However, his vision of how the left uses language and propaganda, as well as force, to destroy the human spirit is truly prophetic about the left in the world today. 1984 was written at a time when the British and American media were praising Stalin and the Soviet system and declaring it the salvation of mankind and the wave of the future.
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