70 Years Later, It's Still '1984'

Matthew Feeney

Inside Sources

 In October 1947 Eric Blair, known today by his pen name George Orwell, wrote a letter to the co-owner of the Secker & Warburg publishing house. In that letter, Orwell noted that he was in the “last lap” of the rough draft of a novel, describing it as “a most dreadful mess.” 

Orwell had sequestered himself on the Scottish island of Jura in order to finish the novel. He completed it the following year, having transformed his “most dreadful mess” into “1984,” one of the 20th century’s most important novels. Published in 1949, the novel turns 70 this year. The anniversary provides an opportunity to reflect on the novel’s significance and its most valuable but sometimes overlooked lesson.

The main lesson of “1984” is not “Persistent Surveillance is Bad” or “Authoritarian Governments Are Dangerous.” These are true statements, but not the most important message. “1984” is at its core a novel about language; how it can be used by governments to subjugate and obfuscate and by citizens to resist oppression.

Orwell was a master of the English language and his legacy lives on through some of the words he created. Even those who haven’t read “1984” know some of its “Newspeak.” “1984” provides English speakers with a vocabulary to discuss surveillance, police states and authoritarianism, which includes terms such as “Big Brother,” “Thought Police,” “Unperson” and “Doublethink,” to name a few.

The authoritarian government of Orwell’s Oceania doesn’t merely severely punish dissent — it seeks to make even thinking about dissent impossible. When Inner Party member O’Brien tortures “1984’s” protagonist, Winston Smith, he holds up his hand with four fingers extended and asks Smith how many fingers he sees. When Smith replies, “Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!” O’Brien inflicts excruciating pain. After Smith finally claims to see five fingers, O’Brien emphasizes that saying “Five” is not enough; “’No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four.”

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Paul Joseph Watson on Social Media Censorship

Paul Joseph Watson

What must happen next. It's crucial that you sign up at http://summit.news/newsletter 

KEY ARTICLE: Platform Access is a Civil Right - https://humanevents.com/2019/05/03/pl...

‘Dystopian approach’: SEC gives blessing to MasterCard’s idea of cutting off right-wingers

RT

Blocking payments to individuals or groups by financial service firms impedes freedom of speech in a free society, journalist Ben Swann has told RT, following reports that MasterCard is allegedly on course to censor the far-right. 

The New York-based firm is reportedly being forced by left-leaning liberal activists to set up an internal “human rights committee” that would monitor payments to “white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists.”

“The problem is that everyone has their own views and, in a free society, the idea of a free society is that you are free to have your belief systems, as long as you’re not harming anyone else physically,” Swann told RT America. “But your belief system belongs to you and you have the right be wrong. White supremacists have the right to be wrong.”

MasterCard is not the only holder of purse-strings that is mulling the selective banning of individuals from their services and funds. Patreon and PayPal have previously barred individuals from receiving payments using their platforms, due to their extreme views.

But unlike crowdfunding platforms, being cut off from one of the leading American multinational financial services corporations will, most likely, have a much greater impact on the financial stability of an individual or a group, especially after the US Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly blessed MasterCard’s undertaking. By doing this, Swann believes the government granted “big corporations the ability to control what voices are heard.”

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"What Anarchy Isn't" Booklet

Larken Rose

We just put in the order for the first 10,000 copies of the "What Anarchy Isn't" mini-book/pamphlet. 

Right now, the price is $1.67 per book, with a minimum order of 30 copies (for $50). 

You can send payment to: 

by GooglePay to: larken@larkenrose.com …

by Bitcoin to: 1NX7kpuHJpegRKh53YF9aw79hd6LBcbLT3 …

by PayPal to: tootruthy@gmail.com 

However you order, be sure to GIVE ME AN ADDRESS to mail the books to, once we have them. 

(You can contact me at larken@larkenrose.com) To download a free PDF of the whole book, use this link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yd18waixbva...

Let’s Discard The ‘Right’ To Be Insulted By Free Speech

Richard Enos

Collective Evolution 

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” As a child, this well-worn phrase was the perfect antidote to whatever insulting name-calling I had to endure from other children. Those times I did remember to use it, it seemed to give me back some strength and made me feel good. For all of us, the perspective behind this phrase can turn an ‘insult’ into what it truly is: mere words, a string of vocal utterances without innate meaning or power, unless the recipient were to interpret them as such by taking them personally.

The very phrase ‘She insulted me,’ is at best a relative and not an absolute truth. More accurate would be the phrase ‘She said something and I took it personally,’ because these two things are always required for someone to be insulted. It is not a matter of whether or not she intended to demean, offend, or humiliate me; if indeed she did, though, the truth about it is simply that ‘She said this with an intention to insult me.’ In the end, this never proves the insult to be true; it just proves that she is a person who tries to insult others.

If personal frailty makes us take offending statements personally–and many of us still fall into that category, at least some of the time–the experience always provides an opportunity for us to come to grips with how we feel about ourselves, and continue to do the personal work required that renders us invulnerable to insult. From this more powerful place, we can then deal with those who would insult or demean us in a much more effective manner.

Understand that I am not advocating that we individually or collectively suffer in silence when hateful and prejudicial speech is directed at us; I am suggesting that if we have allowed ourselves to be emotionally impacted by such speech, and have given these words power over us, we are unlikely to be able to deal with the situation in an effective manner.

[...]

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Varlam Shalamov: 45 things I learned in the Gulag

Varlam Shalamov
The Paris Review

For fifteen years the writer Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Gulag for participating in “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities.” He endured six of those years enslaved in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most hostile places on earth. While he was awaiting sentencing, one of his short stories was published in a journal called Literary Contemporary. He was released in 1951, and from 1954 to 1973 he worked on Kolyma Stories, a masterpiece of Soviet dissident writing that has been newly translated into English and published by New York Review Books Classics this week. Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything in Kolyma, except how to wheel a loaded barrow. But one of his fragmentary writings, dated 1961, tells us more.

1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

2. The main means for depraving the soul is the cold. Presumably in Central Asian camps people held out longer, for it was warmer there.

3. I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face).

4. I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

5. I realized that Stalin’s “victories” were due to his killing the innocent—an organization a tenth the size would have swept Stalin away in two days.

6. I realized that humans were human because they were physically stronger and clung to life more than any other animal: no horse can survive work in the Far North. 

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Elon Musk Warns:AI could become an ‘immortal’ digital dictator

inhabitat.com

As if the world didn’t have enough dictators to worry about, Elon Musk says that our future authoritarian leaders will be AI. Musk has previously warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence, particularly if control of it is concentrated the hands of a power-hungry global elite. He suggests that an AI dictator would know everything about us (thanks to being connected to computers across the planet), would be more dangerous to the world than North Korea and would unleash “weapons of terror” that could lead to the next world war. To top it all off, unlike human dictators, an AI dictator would never die.

According to Musk, this dark future awaits us if we don’t regulate AI. “The least scary future I can think of is one where we have at least democratized AI because if one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world,” Musk said in the new documentary Do You Trust This Computer? “At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”

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Latest news in the war on alternative media

Kurt Nimmo
Another Day In The Empire

Now that the fake news meme has gone global thanks to the establishment media, authoritarians are using it to arrest journalists.

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The Imperial President’s Toolbox of Terror: A Dictatorship Waiting to Happen

The Rutherford Institute

The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts empower whomever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability. In this episode of On Target, John W. Whitehead examines the presidential powers that will be inherited by the next president—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler.

BBC Correspondent Confirms Use of Secret Courts But Can’t Report It

True Publica 

This article first appeared yesterday, February 10th, was posted on bbc.com and was written by the BBC’s Home Affairs Correspondent Dominic Caciani. This piece echoes one that truepublica published just a few months ago entitled The Use Of Secret Courts Confirms The End Of Democracy In Britain. If you have not read it either, you should. The use of secret courts should raise the hairs on the back of your neck as it demonstrates an alarming rise of authoritarianism in Britain today.

The first paragraph of the trupublica piece reads as follows; “The use of secret courts is a place where trials take place that is not open to the public, nor generally reported in the news and generally no official record of the case or the judge’s verdict is made available. Often there is no legal allegation. The accused is usually not able to obtain the counsel of an lawyer or confront witnesses for the prosecution, and the proceedings are characterised by a perceived miscarriage of justice to the benefit of the ruling powers of the society. This is the stuff of cold war Russia and Nazi Germany – right? Think again.”

BBC Headline – Secret trial: One off – or the first of many?

BBC Correspondent’s Sub Headline – BREAKING: Reporter can’t tell you what’s happened.

 

Possibly the worst headline I’ve ever written. But before I’m accused of completely failing to perform basic contractual duties, allow me to explain why those seven words are rather important.

Since 2013, the BBC and almost every other leading news organisation in the UK has been locked in a bizarre battle to tell you the truth about Erol Incedal. “Who’s he?” I hear you ask. He’s a student from London who was accused of preparing some kind of major terrorism plan. And then after two trials he was found not guilty of that allegation. But I can’t tell you why.

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Philip Zimbardo Thinks We All Can Be Evil

New York Times

In 1971, you conducted a psychological experiment at Stanford. You split your 21 student-subjects into guards and inmates, with you as the superintendent, and had them run a prison out of a basement. You had to abandon the experiment after six days, because it spiraled violently out of control. Now, 44 years later, there is a movie about it. 

Do you like it? 

I’m delighted with it. It conveys for the first time to a general public what this kind of experiment is like. There is another movie called ‘‘Experimenter,’’ about Stanley Milgram’s research, which also premiered at Sundance, and the second half is confusing. At one point, Milgram walks out of his lab, and behind him is a huge elephant. I saw the director at Sundance, and I said, ‘‘Why did you have an elephant?’’ He said, ‘‘People like elephants.’’

I had always believed that the Stanford experiment started very professionally, and that in your role as superintendent, you got caught up in it the same way the guards did. But in the movie, it’s as if you were this dark, eerie, almost sadistic figure right from the very beginning. Were you?  

No. I had a reputation at Stanford. I was one of the most lovable professors there.

The movie makes it seem as though the study was irresponsible — that you were abusive from the very start. Do you worry that this will change what people think of the study?  

Yeah. If there is a weakness, it’s that there is not a sufficient transformation with my character. You see it in the guards. They start off playing a game, and then there is a point at which they each, one by one, flip and become more and more extreme.

Have any of the prisoners or guards seen the movie yet?  

No, nobody has.

David Eshleman, one of the most abusive guards, told me that he doesn’t think an evil environment turned him evil. He claims that his motivation was actually to try to please you.

He said he was trying to do something good.  

Everything he created was really off the charts. I mean, he forced the prisoners to simulate sodomy: ‘‘Bend over. You’re a camel. Hump him.’’

Sometimes the evil acts captured in the original footage of the experiment seem as if everybody’s hamming it up.  

Oh no, not at all.

Do you think Eshleman’s only now saying he wanted to do good because he feels embarrassed by the way he behaved?  

Yes. I think it’s a rationalization after the fact. He began as an actor, and he ended up as a mean, cruel guard, no different from the guards at Abu Ghraib.

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America Is Ripe For Authoritarianism

CJ Werleman
RINF

The pitiful state of the economy makes the U.S. vulnerable.

America is on the precipice of a fascist uprising. While liberals have consistently leveled the f-word against opponents on the right, much the same way conservatives have appropriated socialist or Marxist against those on the political left, there is now data showing that proto-fascist movements are on the rise.

The kindling for the fire of fascism has already been lit. While the Republican Party holds at least one branch of the federal government, America will never be able to deal intelligently and earnestly with the economic policies that have destroyed the working class and all but decimated the middle class. A GOP congress guarantees that Democratic efforts to raise the minimum wage, reform the tax code and repair our crumbling infrastructure will be thwarted, all in the name of protecting the rich from paying their fair share.

Long-term unemployment promises to be the norm, as well stagnant and poverty-level wages, foreclosures, crippling personal debt and bankruptcies, the evaporation of savings and retirement funds, the outsourcing of jobs, the continued dilapidation of our schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and airports, and the regulations that safeguard our food, water, and clean air. All this comes courtesy of obscene profits, bonuses, taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks and compensation being doled out to our corporate overlords.

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"Show us the poo!"

Comment: Truly hilarious in a tragic sort of way. It's an example of how little authoritarian followers can take their jobs waaaaaay too seriously. Kudos to these women for illustrating how ridiculous people can be once they don any kind of uniform no matter how lowly. You can see the full article at the link below.

---------------------

 London Evening Standard:

Amber Langtry, 35, was walking her dog with a friend on New Year's Day when a lone Tower Hamlets Enforcement Officer accused her of not clearing up after her pet.
When she explained to the officer that he'd made a mistake and asked to see the offending evidence, he refused to show her, then pointed to a spot in the opposite direction to where Miss Langtry's dog had been. He then proceeded to issue her with a ticket and called the police.

Will the World Grow More Authoritarian in 2014?

The Atlantic

Judging by 2014's crowded election calendar, this will be a landmark year for democracy. The Economist estimates that an unprecedented 40 percent of the world’s population will have a chance to vote in national polls in 2014. We'll see races in populous countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, the United States, and, most notably, India, where 700 million people are expected to cast ballots in what Fareed Zakaria has called the “largest democratic process in human history.”

But here’s the catch: The “biggest year for democracy ever,” as The Economist is billing it, follows a year that in many ways was characterized by the ascent of authoritarianism. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad, with the help of Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah, gained the upper hand in the country’s devastating civil war. In Egypt, the crucible of the Arab Spring, the Egyptian military overthrew the democratically elected Mohammed Morsi and launched a heavy-handed crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and other pockets of opposition. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan silenced political opponents and stifled freedom of expression—at least, that is, until a corruption scandal and plans to redevelop a park sparked a backlash against his increasingly authoritarian governing style.

The phenomenon extended beyond the Middle East. Russian President Vladimir Putin consolidated his control at home and abroad, playing an essential role in Syrian diplomacy, purchasing Ukraine’s loyalty for $15 billion, and detaining and releasing adversaries on a whim. In China, Xi Jinping emerged as the country’s most powerful leader in decades. Freedom House reported a worldwide decline in Internet freedom, noting, amid Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. spying, that “an uptick in surveillance was the year’s most significant trend.” On several occasions—Russia granting asylum to Snowden, China establishing an Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea—authoritarian governments deliberately taunted their democratic rivals … and got away with it.
These trends may have accelerated in 2013, but they’ve been apparent for some time now. In its 2013 “Freedom in the World” report, Freedom House noted that more countries registered declines in freedom than gains in 2012—for the seventh year in a row (this despite the fact that the number of electoral democracies in the world increased slightly in 2012). Two years earlier, the organization asserted that “freedom’s forward march” had actually peaked at the turn of the 21st century.

Below is the percentage of countries that Freedom House has labeled as “free,” “partly free,” and “not free” in its reports from 1989 to 2012. You can see how the breakdown between the three categories begins to flatline around the year 2000. The world settles into stasis at roughly 45 percent free, 25 percent not free.

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The Shift towards an Authoritarian Future: Why the West Slowly Abandons its Civil Liberties

  V-For Vendetta (2006)

RINF Alternative News
Werner de Gruijter, Arnout Krediet and Sven Jense 

Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic who construct an image of toughness – tough on crime, on terrorism, on humanistic-inspired idealism etc. – are tapping into a sensitive spot that blocks critical thought among the public. Obama‘s brute and harsh reaction on Edward Snowden‘s revelations is just another example. Somehow it seems like ,,We, the people…” lost track of ourselves. Four main reasons why we abandon our once hard fought civil rights.

Many countries in the West, like Britain, France, Spain the US and the Netherlands have experienced in recent years an exponential increase in technological surveillance and a resolute decline in parliamentary and judicial control over state police and secret service. Issues like the ban on torture, the possibility of detention without charge, privacy and freedom of speech were in the public debate reframed in favour of state control. And everybody accepted it. To be fair, there was some opposition – but it lacked intensity. Why is this happening?

To give an example, under former British Prime Minister Tony Blair 45 criminal laws were approved creating 3000 new criminal offences. British writer John Kampfer argues that in the past ten years more criminal offences were made in his country than in a hundred years before. All this was legitimized by the idea that a ‘terroristic’ virus attacked Western civilization. Of course, there is some truth in it – but these risks were grossly exaggerated. Still, we fearfully went along with the proposed measures.

This cultural shift towards perhaps a more authoritarian future for the West is no coincidence of nature. It is manmade. If the opportunity is there, top down induced shifts happen only if politicians, corporations, media pundits and other cultural icons are able to find the right symbols and techniques to get a new message across.

But first, besides these techniques, famous American psychologist Abraham Maslow is probably aware that there is also something else which stimulates our apathy in this respect. He signified the importance of leisure time for our own personal well being as well as for the well being of the community as a whole – it creates so to speak the possibility to make well informed decisions. 

Currently our leisure time is under assault. Thirty years of income stagnation in the midst of rising prices – people have to struggle to earn a living – meant that for most of us there is less time for critical thought.

But it has even been made harder to reflect on important issues since politicians and opinions leaders use marketing tools in order to seduce. Remember that soon after the 2008 banking bailout the discussion was reframed in such a way that government spending instead of the unregulated financial sector itself, was the root cause of all ‘evil’ – this message was repeated like a commercial, over and over again. This technique of repetition effectively neutralizes critical thinking. Hence, Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebels, was on to something when he famously stated: ,,If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Long after Goebbels died, psychologists experimentally discovered that it is a natural tendency of human beings to react more receptive to whatever kind of message the more they are exposed to it. They call this ,,the law of mere exposure”. We should question ourselves if this habit is healthy for our general welfare.

Furthermore, psychologists discovered that our ability to think critically is severely limited when we act under stress. Frightened people tend to perceive reality through a prism of simple right and wrong answers, leaving the complexities aside. Scared, we are easily fooled. Politicians and corporations can’t resist the temptation to manipulate this animal instinct – like when we started a war without having been shown any serious proof of its legitimacy.

One could expect that the mainstream media in its role as guard dog was attacking those politicians that create black & white polemics. However, currently most (privately owned) media echo the voice of corporations, which these days doesn’t differ much in substance from that of the government. As a result alternative and more nuanced voices are underrepresented in cultural discourse which, again, makes it harder to produce well informed decisions.

And, when considering the information that is filtered thru to a broad audience – one also notes the slow, but steady disappearing of the separation line between news media and entertainment. 

American academic Daniel Hallin argues that the average time for sound bites politicians are given in media performances has shrunk from forty seconds in the 1960s to ten seconds in 1988. Hallin’s crucial point is that he believes that the biggest victim of this still on going process is the careful scrutinizing of social problems. This results in so called ‘horse race’ news – news about politics presented as a game of ,,who’s the most witty” in which politicians try to be popular instead of reasonable. The blur of catchy one-liners reaching the audience creates a further alienation from reality.

Taken together an assault on leisure, repetition of information, fear policies and the transformation of our media outlets from guard dogs to lap dogs create a situation wherein our spirit for the common good slowly dissolves into an ocean of noise, distraction and misinformation.

Meanwhile, the social environment which politicians, corporations and media gurus are constructing produces anxieties and illusions in order to make profits or political gains. Together these social forces act as a gravitational pull for government and corporate empowerment. That is to say, they pull away strength from the people to participate in the maintenance of a mentally healthy, meaningful democratic environment.

Thomas Jefferson once argued that a government should fear the power of the people. In that respect the apathy with which the audience in general responds to the revelations of Snowden is a cynical demonstration of our time frame. Although, however little, a message this confronting does still stir society a tiny bit. We are not completely brain-dead – and there is some hope in that. 

Probably the best question contemporary Westerners can ask themselves is: will today’s power structure be able to obscure these clear violations of human civil rights or is this message too loud to ignore? 

Or to say it more bluntly than that: will there be a transition to a meaningful democracy in the West or to an advanced form of authoritarianism? What’s your point of view…