For those of you who have not read 1984 by George Orwell, there is a type of offense called Crimethink. This is a type of crime where you do not have to do anything wrong, you just have to think it. You will be disciplined. There is also Crime Speak where you use the wrong word or phrase. This is a punishable offence. There is Newspeak where old words are reworked to take the meaning out of them. "Differentlyabled" rather than crippled developmentally delayed rather than retarded, in other words sanitary engineer not garbage man, sex worker and not whore.
In this novel, homes have a television in them with a camera in them and Big Brother is watching them. The home is under surveillance. The public is never alone and even thinking can be a form of crime. I won't tell you how it ends. You gotta get the book.
He also wrote " The Animal Farm" in which the animals get rid of the farmer and his family and take over. They have an egalitarian agreement which assures the animals that they are all equal. Soon the pigs move into the house and begin living like humans. They observe "All animals are created equal but some are more equal than others".
A cursory review of Orwell's life reveals that he was exposed to Fascism (large corporations and the gummint collude) and Communism (Classically the workers own and manage the means of production and there is no gummint.) He saw them both up close and personal in the Spanish Civil War when he lived in Catalonia. He was in the Indian Imperial Police so he had no use for colonialism. This resulted in his novel "Burmese Days."
I think you know where this is going. We are there. Our cell phones tell our location, our calls are logged, our emails are regularly read, our correspondence is logged. We are urged to trust the gummint. This from the people who assured us that Saddam had WMD, that the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred and that The Maine was sunk by the Spanish and not a provocateur.
I have reached age 70, Dear Reader and I find I have many more brain cells left than I would have expected given my life style. I know what I know. It is SSDD. (Same Shit Different Day.) The folks who believe in political parties are chumps. Fools or as H.L. Menken, the Sage of Baltimore called them The Boobery instead of The Citizenry meaning a group of folks who are not very bright. They are Marks. Mae West and W.C. Fields were in a movie called "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break." They were prescient. Such an apt description of our public life. Guess who plays the sucker. Hmmm...
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn
what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived." H. D. Thoreau.
NSA lies and lies and lies. Brazenly. Both parties are in favour of extensive surveillance. Government is inherently about the reduction of freedom.
Orwell will soon be banned as a wacko right wing socialist fascist commie nudist along with Thoreau. The good thing about the digital age is that it is hard to erase every pdf file that exists.
God Bless You, George Orwell!
If we become illiterate we have no defense.
Rev. Leviticus Jackson
More to come
