Posted on 11/15/2008 11:31:11 PM PST by neverdem
Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.
....... The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.
The Ministsry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further. The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed '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 rectify. In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building. As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconsicious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence. |
This post needs to be read by every FreeRepublic member.
Ping!
JoMa
Not too long before the Jones Town thing occurred, Jim Jones was travelling through the south, putting ads in local papers advertising “evangelistic church meetings” where he would give a little talk, like Obama, saying nothing, pass the collection plate and sell tapes. My MIL, who was into the whole charismatic thing back then, and I went to one of his meetings in Franklin, TN at one of the mainline churches there. My main impression of him was one of a paranoid person. I just remember him going on about his having been involved in a wreck where the devil had tried to kill him. He didn’t talk communism, nor religion either. Just a lot of mumbo jumbo the best I can remember. I think he was just doing the “evangelistic meetings” to finance their expenses. In retrospect, his meetings must have been routinely scheduled during the week when women would come to them. Ha. Evidently my MIL and I didn’t fit the leftist profile.
Certainly some notable Christians in Germany, but not all...
On April 20, 1939, Archbishop Orsenigo celebrated Hitler's
birthday. The celebrations, initiated by Pacelli (Pope Pius XII)
became a tradition. Each April 20, Cardinal Bertram of Berlin
was to send "warmest congratulations to the Fuhrer in the name of
the bishops and the dioceses in Germany" and added with
"fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are
sending to heaven on their altars."
"[Adolf Hitler is] the tool of God, called upon to overcome Judaism..." - Father Wilhelm Senn, a Catholic priest, writing in a Catholic publication, May 15, 1934
And in 1941, Hitler himself proclaimed to General Gerhard Engel: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."
The main thing that the Christian community in Germany rose up against in earnest in the Nazi program was the forced sterilization and euthanasia of the "unfit," and they were able to beat it back.
Bump for later
I have a religion aside from my Catholism: minarchism.
Placemark
1984’s “IngSoc” was itself a Doublethink misnomer, just like “Ministry of Love” (which was about torture). In fact, IngSoc was intended to be an amalgam of English and American societies at the time.
The characteristics of Oceania are:
1. Anyone who doesn’t agree with the Party, EVEN WHEN THEY ARE CORRECT, is an enemy of the state. Hence, even top officials in the regime can be denounced as traitors. There is no middle ground, no room for compromise.
2. The War: One minute the enemy is Eurasia, then it’s Eastasia. The name of the enemy can even switch mid-sentence. The reason for this is that the three superpowers are fighting each other at all - the whole thing is a propaganda invention to unite the people within each superpower, boost support for the military, and the stories of great victories in far-off countries are used to boost morale and economic activity.
3. The revisionist culture of DoubleThink is used to convince people that whatever the regime says, is based on recordable fact even when it’s not.
4. The vitriol directed against Goldstein the man, flies in the face of the fact he’s the only political figurehead who’s actually talking sense. But he’s talking about stopping the war, rebuilding the country, and cutting the crap, which obviously the regime itself doesn’t want to hear.
5. The Anti-Sex Brigade is a sop to personal morality instigated by the regime to get people to focus on its wants not theirs; however it is a quasi-religious movement as it placates the most spiritually-minded proles.
6. The surveillance society. One thing that suppresses dissent is the feeling that “Big Brother is watching you”.
Any of these dubious qualities can be attached to ANY government, socialist or fascist, republican or democrat, religious or secular.
The book is an indictment of any political elite that gets so drunk on power that it begins to serve itself instead of the people, becomes intolerant of criticism or rejection from the people, and relies on fear and paranoia to keep the people on its side.
You do a fine service. Thanks as always for the pings.
My pleasure!
That is, ALL political elites.
Cincinnatus is long dead. We await our Sulla.
May God confound the godless Marxist!
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor. But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus. . Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Manifesto of the Communist Party 1848
I’ve been saying the same for years. Not so succinctly or expertly but the same. It bugs me that he has to call them Orwell’s children. Although it works to get the point across. They are Orwell’s murderers more like as they are erasing all knowledge of him or what he warned us of.
Just an aside: It is necessary to read C.S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man” to get just WHY man behaves in this manner. It IS puzzeling. Lewis does an excellent job of explaining it. Also the mechanics of just how it will come to pass and the inevitable conclusion of human kind on ‘this’ earth.
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