Posted on 03/20/2013 1:13:41 PM PDT by Mozilla
George Orwell published the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. It is a satirical vision of a future society dominated by omnipresent government surveillance and public mind control. Individualism or any independent thinking is prosecuted as a thought crime. Since we now live in a world that seems closer to Orwell’s vision, a world where more and more it seems individualism is discouraged, a closer appraisal of Mr. Orwell’s work might be in order. Oh, you don’t see the connection? Take a look at Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village or President Obama’s warning to achievers, “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
We live in a time when our government and a compliant press cause words and concepts to be reinvented whenever convenient. It is a world Orwell would have recognized. He wrote of a world where alternative thinking is a crime so the language has been reduced and meanings altered to discourage “thought crimes“. One character even says, “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
Just a short time ago the nation was racked with introspection about the legality of using water boarding during interrogation of captured terrorists or even the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Now there is silence as the president, with the aid of the great ethical philosophers, orders targeted assassinations around the world and his attorney general contends they have the legal right to kill an American citizen on American soil even if he poses no immediate threat of harm.
Remember the ceremony when the body of Chris Stevens and three other Americans were returned to the United States? You would have sworn that the ambassador was a close personal friend of Ms. Clinton and the vice-president. It was “Chris,” “my friend Chris,” and Chris this and Chris that. You simply had to conclude these people were close; they might have even had lunch together just a few days before the ambassador died. Not so: This was the same man who had tried for six months to get additional security for the mission in Libya but his friends had not even bothered to read their close friend’s Emails. Orwell’s so called Ministry of Truth couldn’t have done a better job of obscuring the truth of the matter.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid currently blames Republican filibusters for any and all inaction by the senate. Mr. Reid was not always of that mind. A few years ago, Mr. Reid told us, “The need to muster 60 votes in order to terminate Senate debate naturally frustrates the majority and oftentimes the minority . . . But I recognize this requirement is a tool that serves the long-term interest of the Senate and the American people and our country.” (Congressional Record, S.11591, 12/8/06) The media’s job when discussing filibuster seems to be erasing memory of Reid’s earlier support for the rule, or as they would say in Orwell’s world — let the earlier statements disappear down the Memory Hole.
When Mr. Obama or his minions at MSNBC talk about government, they always talk of investments in big, grandiose projects. We are reminded of an earlier age when government built Interstate highways, developed the Tennessee and Missouri River Valleys, put a man on the moon and created the massive infrastructure that now supports a country of 300 million. Who can forget Rachael Maddow, with Grand Coulee Dam as a backdrop, reminding us of what government spending accomplished in the good old days.
The White House Press Office and the main stream media — but I repeat myself – don’t want you to know that building great things is not in the cards for 21st-century government. As Rich Lowery wrote, “We excel at studying things, and putting up obstacles to building them. We delay, cavil, and sue. We protest and micromanage. It is not the age of the engineer but of the bureaucrat, the lawyer, and the environmental activist.” So we talk of shovel ready jobs while only shoveling money into the financial black hole that we call the federal government.
There are two classes of wealthy people. Liberal billionaires become wealthy only so they can bestow benefits on society as opposed to those on the right who become wealthy only to enrich themselves and to hell with society. It’s not always easy to tell which category a particular individual falls and Victor Davis Hanson had that problem when considering Al Gore. “When watching Al Gore . . . I can no longer remember whether he is supposed to be a selfless public intellectual who, at enormous financial risk, started a new progressive television channel to promulgate long-needed awareness about politics and the and the environment, or whether as a rank speculator he scrambled to push through a secretive deal to sell his $100 million inflated interest in that channel to an anti-Semitic, anti-Western news conglomerate, run by an authoritarian Middle East dictator laden with oil-cartel profits − right before new higher capital-gains taxes might lessen his take by 5 or 6 percent.” Have some sympathy for Hanson, it’s not always easy to tell, especially when Orwell’s Newspeak is becoming the language of the 21st Century.
Orwell’s Thoughtcrimes are mirrored today in the hate crime designation applied to any crime in which a favored societal segment is the victim. The Thoughtpolice of 1984 have their counterpart in today’s America but it comes under the name of political correctness which holds there are thoughts not fit for publication or words you simply cannot say out loud and the self-appointed elite will let you know what they are from time to time.
Orwell was more prescient than even he knew.
What is amazing to me is the fact that folks actually think that the people on the “gubmit” are somehow smarter than we are.
Given that the vast majority of our congresscritters are failed lawyers who couldn’t successfully convict a videotaped murderer, from whence does this belief come?
As did Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead)........et al......
George Orwell saw the future of our Government
Aldous Huxley saw the future of our society.
That people elected to the government are smarter than the rest of the population is a tenet of leftist ideology and a natural conclusion of the humanist religion.
I re-started 1984 this morning.
It’s prescient.
Orwell didn’t “have it right”.
His book was a story with a warning. Most people who read it, figured that out.
The problem was SOME people, libtards specifically, read it, and regarded it not as a warning, but AS A BLUEPRINT they decided to enact.
Orwell only appears to have it right because some people read the book and thought “Let’s Do That!” and went about doing that. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, these people didn’t think of it on their own.
It is amazing how so much of what Ayn wrote we are living today. Almost word for word.
I’ve recently reconnected with a bunch of high school class mates. 1984 was required reading. I must have been the only one who didn’t think it was a guidebook! I’ve never seen such a bunch of ill informed lefties.
Yeas indeed. Both books, Brave New World and 1984, have predicted the future correctly as well as Atlas Shrugged. I might add Fahrenheit 451 in their as well because it predicts a future where people can’t dissent and book burning is all the rage. They lead meaningless lives.
Our population is made of people who are ill informed and dumbed down by society.
“George Orwell saw the future of our Government
Aldous Huxley saw the future of our society.”
Spot on.
But don’t forget Mike Judge, Idiocracy.
She had a good perspective, growing up in early Soviet Russia......
FROM WIKI:
She was twelve at the time of the February Revolution of 1917, during which she favored Alexander Kerensky over Tsar Nicholas II.
The subsequent October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted the comfortable life the family had previously enjoyed. Her father’s pharmacy business was confiscated and the family displaced.
Our population is made of people who are ill informed BY A GOVERNMENT-MEDIA COMPLEX and dumbed down by GOVERNMENT-EDUCATION COMPLEX.......
Huxley wins hands down.
Mike Judge only a close second since he came after Huxley.
Huxley was right on the money. Sex is for kids but the state owns us all.
If I recall this correctly.
Wasn’t it a semi-famous Darwinist/Humanist that said the only reason he accepted evolutionary theory was for the sex?
So did Anthony Burgess when he wrote A Clockwork Orange.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4C6xkjMqdg
Aldous and his brother Juilien (1st Dir. of UNESCO) were absolutely disgusting human beings. Why is it that the “humanists” are the ones that want to wipe out most the humans?
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