From George Orwell (1903–1950), British novelist, essayist, and journalist:
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot
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Tag Archives: George Orwell
He Said That? 8/21/18
Government Eyes Are Watching You: We Are All Prisoners of the Surveillance State, by John W. Whitehead
The state and its corporate partners have constructed an electronic Panopticon. From John Whitehead at rutherford.org:
“We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche…. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy… We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other people’s Villages, but we are all prisoners.”— Patrick McGoohan
First broadcast in America 50 years ago, The Prisoner—a dystopian television series described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of humankind to meekly accept their lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of their own making.
Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly tranquil retirement community known only as the Village. The Village is an idyllic setting with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.
While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.
The series’ protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan, is Number Six.
Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.
“I am not a number. I am a free man,” was the mantra chanted on each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by McGoohan.
In the opening episode (“The Arrival”), Number Six meets Number Two, who explains to him that he is in The Village because information stored “inside” his head has made him too valuable to be allowed to roam free “outside.”
Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.
To continue reading: Government Eyes Are Watching You: We Are All Prisoners of the Surveillance State
Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Intelligence, Privacy, Surveillance
Tagged Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Panopticon, The Prisoner
Ten Ways the Democratic Northern Hemisphere Nations Became the Orwellian West, by Doug “Uncola” Lynn
If we’re not already in Oceania, we’ll get there soon. From Doug “Uncola” Lynn at theburningplatform.com:
In his book, “1984”, George Orwell envisioned a future crushed by the iron grip of a collectivist oligarchy. The narrative told of the INGSOC Party which maintained power through a system of surveillance and brutality designed to monitor and control every aspect of society. From the time of the book’s release in 1949, any ensuing vision of a dark dystopia depicting variations of jackboots stomping on human faces, forever, has been referenced as being “Orwellian”. This is because Orwell’s narrative illustrated various disturbing and unjust conceptualizations of control, crime, and punishment.
For example, “Newspeak” represented the language of mind control, whereas “crimethink”, “thoughtcrime”, and “crimeface” manifested as transgressions against the state. Guilty citizens were captured by the “Thought Police”, and the ultimate punishment consisted of“vaporization”; which eliminated every last vestige of a person’s existence.
In the horrifying world of 1984, the nation of Oceania was divided into three concentric groups: The Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the Proles, or proletariat. The Proles constituted 85% of the population and lived in extreme privation. The Inner Party represented the elite powerbrokers who led lives of comprehensive luxury compared to the minions in the Outer Party.
But in the real world of today, it is the globalist billionaires who own multiple mansions, fly private jets and ride in eight-cylinder limousines to climate-change conferences where policies are decreed to lower the carbon footprint of the proletariat. It is the wealthy elite of the westernized nations who have sacrificed individual freedom upon the altar of Collectivism as political correctness has stifled free speech and enslaved citizens drown under oceans of debt.
At the same time, megalithic multi-national corporations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, have become the eyes and ears of Big Brother; always watching and ever listening.
Indeed, Orwell was near prophetic in describing the proliferation of listening devices in both public and private settings as well as “telescreens”, which simultaneously broadcast propaganda while relaying live video feeds back to the Party watchers. And just as free will and individuality were sacrificed to the extreme demands of Collectivism in the fictional nation of Oceania, so do the globalists and corporate oligarchs of the twenty-first-century desire a new world government fused together by technology and the circular, magnetic dynamism of the hive-mind.
To continue reading: Ten Ways the Democratic Northern Hemisphere Nations Became the Orwellian West
Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Intelligence, Literature, Privacy, Surveillance
Tagged 1984, George Orwell
He Said That? 4/30/18
From George Orwell (1903–1950), English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic, 1984 (1949):
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink
Do Brits Understand Irony? from The Burning Platform
Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Privacy, Surveillance
Tagged George Orwell, Great Britain
He Said That? 1/10/18
From George Orwell (1903–1950), British novelist, essayist, and journalist, from a review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, New English Weekly (21 March 1940):
[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
He Said That? 6/22/17
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.
Prisons of Pleasure or Pain: Huxley’s “Brave New World” vs. Orwell’s “1984”, by Uncola
Visions of human enslavement can be frightening and painful, or mind-numbingly blissful. From Uncola at theburningplatform.com:
Definition of UTOPIA
1: an imaginary and indefinitely remote place
2: a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions
3: an impractical scheme for social improvement
Definition of DYSTOPIA
1: an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives
2: literature: anti-utopia
Many Americans today would quite possibly consider Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” to be a utopia of sorts with its limitless drugs, guilt-free sex, perpetual entertainment and a genetically engineered society designed for maximum economic efficiency and social harmony. Conversely, most free people today would view Orwell’s “1984” as a dystopian nightmare, and shudder to contemplate the terrifying existence under the iron fist of “Big Brother”; the ubiquitous figurehead of a perfectly totalitarian government.
Although both men were of British descent, Huxley was nine years older than Orwell and published Brave New World in 1932, seventeen years before 1984 was released in 1949. Both books are widely considered classics and are included in the Modern Library’s top ten great novels of the twentieth century.
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley was born to academic parents and he was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, a famous biologist and an enthusiastic proponent of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution who was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”. Huxley’s own father had a well-equipped botanical laboratory where young Aldous began his education. Given the Huxley family’s appreciation for science, it makes perfect sense that Brave New World began in what is called the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre” where human beings are artificially grown and genetically predestined into five societal castes consisting of: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon.
To continue reading: Prisons of Pleasure or Pain: Huxley’s “Brave New World” vs. Orwell’s “1984”
He Said That? 10/24/16
SLl will be on vacation 10/27-10/30 and will resume posting 10/31. Happy halloween, and to our readers in jurisdictions where marijuana is legal, Happy Hallowed Weed!
From George Orwell (1903–1950), English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic, “Politics and the English Language.” (1946):
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
He Said That? 3/9/15
A word of advice from George Orwell to all the media and political hacks who toil assiduously to bury the latest revelations about Hillary Clinton (private email) and husband Bill (Jeffrey Epstein sexcapades), in the same boneyard they have buried countless other scandals since this amoral and ruthless couple first burst on the scene in the early 1990s:
Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.
From As I Please, 1943-1945.
For those who have grown weary of the Clintons and their many courtiers, SLL recommends the TV series Game of Thrones. While none of the characters in that series are models of moral perfection, they are refreshingly uplifting compared to Lord and Lady Macbeth Clinton.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 