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In a sense, “1984” is largely a book about the human capacity to maintain a grip on the truth in the face of propaganda and power.

There are a lot of unpleasant things in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Spying screens. Torture and propaganda. Victory Gin and Victory Coffee always sounded particularly dreadful. And there is Winston Smith’s varicose ulcer, apparently a symbol of his humanity (or something), which always seems to be “throbbing.” Gross.

None of this sounds very enjoyable, but it’s not the worst thing in 1984. To me, the most terrifying part was that you couldn’t keep Big Brother out of your head.

Unlike other 20th-century totalitarians, the authoritarians in 1984 aren’t that interested in controlling behavior or speech. They do, of course, but it’s only as a means to an end. Their real goal is to control the gray matter between the ears.

“When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will,” O’Brien (the bad guy) tells the protagonist Winston Smith near the end of the book.

We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.

Big Brother’s tool for doing this is the Thought Police, aka the ThinkPol, who are assigned to root out and punish unapproved thoughts. We see how this works when Winston’s neighbor Parsons, an obnoxious Party sycophant, is reported to the Thought Police by his own child, who heard him commit a thought crime while talking in his sleep.

“It was my little daughter,” Parsons tells Winston when asked who it was who denounced him. “She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth Alive?Why Don’t We Hear Much About Julian Assange?

September 11, 2019

Is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth Alive?Why Don’t We Hear Much About Julian Assange?

In Orwell’s dystopian fiction 1984, the government’s mission through the Ministry of Truth is to supply its people with news, entertainment, books, films, plays and songs, packed with the information it wants the people to know. It constructs lies to fit the narrative it wishes to establish and sets about rewriting historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line.

Have we slept walked our way into 1984 with the curious witchhunt of Julian Assange?

From the time Wikileaks published Collateral Murder in 2010, exposing the slaying of Iraqi civilians at the hands of merciless US Apache soldiers, in what became the biggest news story of its time, the United States has wanted Julian Assange silenced and forgotten.

He has lived in a state of confinement since May 2010 when he was arrested and jailed in the United Kingdom, lived under house arrest for a further 18 months in England and then sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy from June 2012 .Yet many people think Assange was in a position where he could simply walk free.

Has there been a well crafted smear campaign to dehumanise Assange and coax the public into forgetting him? How else could he have been detained within two tiny rooms devoid of sunlight for more than six years without public commentary and concern? The apparent dismantling of Assange’s character and disinformation has been thorough. Most people do not know the specifics of his case, but “believe” he is an arrogant rapist and an ungrateful, badly behaved houseguest, smearing faeces on the embassy walls and being cruel to his cat. These disputed claims are now so well accepted it’s inconceivable that they could actually be lies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

USSA Social Credit: The U.S. Denied Entry to Student Because of His Friend’s Social Media Posts

August 29, 2019

USSA SOCIAL CREDIT: THE U.S. DENIED ENTRY TO STUDENT BECAUSE OF HIS FRIEND’S SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS

A Harvard student has been denied entry to the United States because of what one of his friends posted on social media. Ismail Ajjawi reportedly had his visa canceled after hours of questioning at Boston’s airport by the USSA.

Silicon Valley is already hard at work manipulating behavior, taking on the role of anauthoritarian government, and attempting to punish people for not acting the way they see fit. But it’s gone a step further. The government is now rejecting entry to the country for foreigners based on their friends’ actions and social media posts. This is the dystopian future George Orwell warned us about in his iconic book, 1984.

Written 70 years ago, 1984 was Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984, the year, has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever.

Ajjawi’s friends posted “political points of view that oppose the United States, reported CNET. The U.S. government is obviously probing visa applicants’ social media profiles and punishing people for their friends’ opinions. Ajjawi, from Lebanon, didn’t actually do anything wrong. He’s “guilty by association.” The U.S. government is one of totalitarian control and wants ultimate power over everything, including your very thoughts and opinions. This is a truly horrific time in human history.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokesperson Michael McCarthy said in an emailed statement that he couldn’t offer specific details on Ajjawi’s case due to confidentiality clauses. “This individual was deemed inadmissible to the United States based on information discovered during the CBP inspection,” he wrote. Ajjawi, who got a scholarship to study in the U.S., returned home to Lebanon over the weekend. He and the university are working to resolve the matter before classes start next Tuesday.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Forget 1984, We’re Facing a Brave New World

August 27, 2019

Forget 1984, We’re Facing a Brave New World

I see quite frequently, people warning that the US is becoming an ‘Orwellian nightmare,’ or that we’re living in a country that’s fast becoming a new 1984. I think they’re wrong. It’s worse.

We here in the US look at what China’s doing as if they’re on a reality TV show. Seeing what they’re doing with surveillance and their social credit system as if we’re watching some kind of dystopian entertainment series fashioned after the George Orwell book, 1984. Our burgeoning dystopia isn’t as overtly dystopian as Orwell warned against, and that’s the problem.

If you haven’t read 1984, you really should. I’m not really a fan of the storyline since it’s pretty crappy but the message still comes through, and it’ll give you an idea of why people reference it so much when talking about governments gone awry. Then, get yourself a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and you’ll start to see the problem. The story’s a little better, but not much. The message is more apropos, however.

1984 was about a government that would ban information and rule with a leather boot on your throat, whereas Brave New World was about a system that would slowly seep into our life like a drug. In other words, Orwell warned us about a dystopia that we wouldn’t be able to stop, Huxley warned us about a dystopia that we would beg not to stop. The US isn’t becoming Orwellian, it’s becoming Huxleyan.

Social credit systems are coming.

In 2013, China started its social credit system, coordinated by the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission. What they’re planning to do by next year is to have a comprehensive credit system under one roof that will cover pretty much everything in the lives of its citizens. It’s already well on its way.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nineteen Eighty-Four Turns 70 Years Old In A World That Looks A Lot Like The Book

May 14, 2019

Nineteen Eighty-Four Turns 70 Years Old In A World That Looks A Lot Like The Book

This month, George Orwell’s legendary novel Nineteen Eighty-Four turns 70 years old, and the warnings contained within the story are now more relevant than ever. Orwell’s predictions were so spot on that it almost seems like it was used as some type of accidental instruction manual for would-be tyrants.

In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is an all-encompassing surveillance state that keeps a watchful eye on everyone, in search of possible rebels and points of resistance. Censorship is the norm in this world, and is so extreme that individuals can become “unpersons” who are essentially deleted from society because their ideas were considered dangerous by the establishment. This is an idea that is very familiar to activists and independent journalists who are being removed from the public conversation for speaking out about government and corporate corruption on social media.

Orwell is famous for coining the term “double-speak,” which is a way to describe the euphemistic language that government uses to whitewash their most dirty deeds. For example, in Orwell’s story, the ministry of propaganda was called the Ministry of Truth, just as today the government agency that was once known as “The Department of War,” is now called the “Department of Defense.”

There was also never-ending war in Orwell’s story, the conditions of which would change on a regular basis, keeping the general population confused about conflicts so they give up on trying to understand what is actually going on. Some of these predictions were merely recognitions of patterns in human history, since the idea of “unpersons” and war propaganda is nothing new. However, Orwell had an incredible understanding of how technology was going to progress over the 20th century, and he was able to envision how technology would be used by those in power to control the masses.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Orwellian Hate Crime Database to Be Set Up For Thought Criminals in Michigan

April 9, 2019

Orwellian Hate Crime Database to Be Set Up For Thought Criminals in Michigan

Only in a world where the novel 1984 has become the evening news can we get a state’s Attorney General working with the Department of Civil Rights to create a database for people committing “hate and bias incidents that don’t rise to the level of a crime or civil infraction.”

This “hate crimes unit” apparently comes on the advice of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which issued a report about a rise of extremism and hatred within the state of Michigan. This itself is more than ironic, since it was reported last year that the organization had to pay $3 million for falsely labeling the Quilliam Foundation as an example of “anti-Muslim extremism. ”

Nevertheless, the SPLC still seems to be the go-to group for databasing the speech of the public at large; they’ve previously been linked to Google, currently the largest such de facto database in existence.

Predictably, then, there has been pushback right out of the gate for those who have received the label of hate-monger from the SPLC and, by extension, the government of Michigan. As The Detroit Newsreports:

Church Militant/St. Michael’s Media in Ferndale is listed by the law center as an “anti-LGBT” hate group. The group’s editor-in-chief, Christine Niles, rejected the label and said, to her knowledge, the group’s presence on the list is a first.
“We’re not entirely sure what that means,” Niles said, noting that the group and its work is faithful to the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage being between a man and a woman. “We have a right to believe that without being called a hate group.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How 1984 turned into an instruction manual

February 19, 2019

How 1984 turned into an instruction manual

“Sometimes [two and two are four], Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

One of the key themes from George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 is that the Party can do and say whatever it wants.

And more importantly, you must believe it, with all your heart. No matter how absurd.

That’s doublethink. It is impossible for two plus two to equal three, four, and five simultaneously. But if the Party says it is so, it is so.

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If you can’t make yourself believe two contradictory facts simultaneously, that makes you a thought criminal — an enemy of the Party.

Thoughtcrime is thinking any thought that contradicts the Party.

Facecrime is when you have the wrong expression on your face. For instance, if captured enemy soldiers are being paraded through the streets, looking sympathetic is a facecrime.

Newspeak is the language of the Party–one that has painstakingly been removed of unnecessary words, or words that might contradict the Party’s ideals.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

During daily two minutes hate, citizens shout and curse whatever enemies the Party shows them.

And the face of the Party, Big Brother, is watching you. He helps you be a better citizen.

This isn’t just some random literature lesson. Understanding Orwell’s 1984will help you understand 2019 America.

For instance, one California state senator is working on her own version of Newspeak.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Technology: Distracting, Disturbing, Deceiving & Deluding Ourselves to Death

January 28, 2019

TECHNOLOGY: DISTRACTING, DISTURBING, DECEIVING & DELUDING OURSELVES TO DEATH

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Image result for huxley amusing ourselves to death

Something as mundane as using the restroom at work sometimes ends up triggering deeper thoughts about technology – its benefits, deficiencies and danger to our culture. I’ve been using the same restroom at work for the last twelve years. They remodeled the restroom a few years ago with the latest technology – automatic flushers, automatic soap dispensers, automatic spigots, and automatic towel dispenser. This technology is supposed to make things better, but from my perspective the technology just added complexity, glitches and unnecessary complications.

First off, these technological “improvements” did not eliminate any humans from the equation. The housekeepers responsible for the restrooms continued to be employed. Prior to the remodel they would fill a metal bin with individual paper towels and fill the soap dispenser with liquid soap. Now they have to insert a roll of paper towels in the electronic dispenser and a cartridge of soap in the electronic soap dispenser.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ten Ways the Democratic Northern Hemisphere Nations Became the Orwellian West

June 5, 2018

Ten Ways the Democratic Northern Hemisphere Nations Became the Orwellian West

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.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the people who control America manufacture our consent to their rule

June 3, 2018

How the people who control America manufacture our consent to their rule

Modern dictatorship, as Walter Lippmann pointed out in 1921 about “the manufacture of consent,” is the “creation of consent” and “is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic,” so that we now have artificial ‘democracy’, which George Orwell prophetically allegorized in his 1949 novel 1984. But here is the real version of it, today:

On May 26th, a youtube was posted titled “TIME Editor Literally Admits He’s For Gov. Propaganda!” It’s about, and discusses this: Richard Stengel, who was a former Managing Editor of TIME magazine (2006-2013), and then the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy (2014-2016), had hosted, on April 20th, at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a Workshop for College and University Educators — in other words, for professors — and this workshop was titled “Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News”. Stengel and his panel of ‘experts’ were teaching these professors how to recognize ‘Fake News’, and Stengel made clear there that it’s whatever violates America’s “master narrative.” (Truth-falsity has nothing to do with it, he and they were teaching.)

After a lot of unquestioning questions from his academic audience, and only near the very end of the entire workshop, an unidentified attendee asked a questioning question:

Q: I’m going to kind of go against the grain here and challenge us to … think about the media cartels, which control and dominate the way that the discourse is shaped. Is that not fake news in certain ways? … So for example, I’ll talk about the events in Gaza three weeks ago. Every American — every mainstream American and world outlet wrote a title that said, “Palestinians killed” or “die in clashes with Israel.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

1984: The UK is Illegally Detaining Two Journalists, Seemingly Making Them Vanish

May 31, 2018

1984: The UK is Illegally Detaining Two Journalists, Seemingly Making Them Vanish

The UK government is responsible for the illegal arrest, sentencing, and detainment without trial of two journalists: Julian Assange, who recently had his Internet and communications cut off; and Tommy Robinson, all without any type of legal concession. Argue as you may about Robinson and his colorful past, including shortly being a member of BNP when he was in his twenties, but it’s what got him arrested this time that is the more shocking part of the story.

Robinson was arrested, charged and sentenced to prison for covering the existence of a Leeds Crown Court case of Islamic pedophile-grooming rape gangs. Further, the UK media has been issued D-notice takedown requests for articles on the grooming rape court case, as well as coverage of Robinson’s own arrest and sentencing, Infowars reported.

View image on Twitter

The judge in Tommy Robinson’s case, Denise Marson, pulled a neat trick today.

She threw him in jail for 13 months, and banned anyone in the UK from talking about it.
A thread on how she did it. (h/t @nickmon1112)#FreeTommy #FreeTommyRobinson

4:31 PM – May 25, 2018

Robinson, real name Stephen Lennon, streamed an hour-long Facebook Live outside the court on Friday. It had been watched more than 250,000 times before he was abruptly arrested.

Lennon had filmed himself as he read out the defendants’ names and the charges they faced and confronted them as they arrived at court before sentencing by the jury.

According to the judge, Lennon (Robinson) could have caused the trial to be retried and cost taxpayers “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds,” despite the fact that the court case was highly publicized in the media and Robinson was just reporting publicly available facts, according to journalist Lauren Southern.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2018: When Orwell’s 1984 stopped being fiction

May 7, 2018

2018: When Orwell’s 1984 stopped being fiction

This is the moment when a newspaper claiming to uphold that most essential function in a liberal democracy – acting as a watchdog on power – formally abandons the task. This is the moment when it positively embraces the role of serving as a mouthpiece for the government. The tell is in one small word in a headline on today’s Guardian’s front page: “Revealed”.

When I trained as a journalist, we reserved a “Revealed” or an “Exposed” for those special occasions when we were able to bring to the reader information those in power did not want known. These were the rare moments when as journalists we could hold our heads high and claim to be monitoring the centres of power, to be fulfilling our sacred duty as the fourth estate.

But today’s Guardian’s “exclusive” story “Revealed: UK’s push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance” is doing none of this. Nothing the powerful would want hidden from us is being “revealed”. No one had to seek out classified documents or speak to a whistleblower to bring us this “revelation”. Everyone in this story – the journalist Patrick Wintour, an anonymous “Whitehall official”, and the named politicians and think-tank wonks – is safely in the same self-congratulatory club, promoting a barely veiled government policy: to renew the Cold War against Russia.

It is no accident that the government chose the Guardian as the place to publish this “exclusive” press release. That single word “Revealed” in the headline serves two functions that reverse the very rationale for liberal, watchdog-style journalism.

First, it is designed to disorientate the reader in Orwellian – or maybe Lewis Caroll – fashion, inverting the world of reality. The reader is primed for a disclosure, a secret, and then is spoonfed familiar government propaganda: that the tentacles of a Russian octopus are everywhere, that the Reds are again under our beds – or at least, poisoning our door handles.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Total Control: New Measures Toward Global Totalitarianism

April 26, 2018

Total Control: New Measures Toward Global Totalitarianism

For those who have read “1984” by George Orwell, it is almost prophetic in its depth and accuracy. The reason that the warning has not been heeded is that change takes place with glacial slowness. Sometimes the changes take so long they dull the senses and we become inured to “more bad news,” or we just discount it continually. No matter what our reaction, the march toward global totalitarianism proceeds, with or without our consent or even our attention.

The slow march is deliberate. The reason for this is simple. The generation/group of people between the ages of approximately 40 to 60 are of an age who still have a sense of nationalism and grew up/experienced their formative years without that complete socialist indoctrination inflicted upon the youth of today. For the youth, there is no escape from it on their own, because they have no point of reference with which to identify and compare it to what has been forced upon them now by indoctrinators (termed “educators”). The new “all for the communal hive” mentality has been crafted by those in power and carried out by teachers.

So, a deliberate and systematic “ratcheting” up and down of the speed Wcof changes (the institution of new totalitarian controls) varies. Those in power need to eliminate those between 40 to 60 years old, or “engulf” them by numbers of the new manipulated youth and then just “vote” them out of effectiveness. The “Tyranny of the Majority” perfected to an art form. Obama couldn’t finish the job in 8 years…but the sporadic ratcheting just took a new twist.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oceania, ‘Tis For Thee: The World of ‘1984’ Forming Now

April 7, 2018

Oceania, ‘Tis For Thee: The World of ‘1984’ Forming Now

“Oceania” was a nation described in George Orwell’s “1984” as being comprised of Britain (called “Airstrip One,”) and the United States. There were two other superpowers, namely Eurasia and Eastasia. Other lands rich in resources were contested over, such as Africa and assumingly South America…lands never kept by any of three Super-states for any significant period. The “flux” in conquests was exactly what the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) of our time would have termed “necessary” to justify large expenditures: War as the focal purpose, rather than the exceptional event.

We see a parallel in today’s world with huge defense budgets and troop deployments keeping the contracts on the move and siphoning off a considerable amount of national revenues to keep the patriotic war machines moving…respective of each nation. The psychology: keep the population agitated and on a continual war-footing, using a “threat” (either real, created, or imagined) to accomplish this.

You are witnessing the final alignment of those spheres of influence that are almost identical to the novel that Orwell wrote. Look at the situation with the alleged Russian poisoning of an intelligence operative and his daughter in Britain. The United States showed “solidarity” with Great Britain by expelling 60 Russian diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle, Washington. Russia countered by ordering the expulsion of an equal amount of American embassy personnel.

Yet the interesting fact is that the other nations who followed suit in the “humanitarian crusade” of the alleged Russian poisoning of former FSB agent Skripal and his daughter? The poisoning may have been done by the British, not the Russians. The U.S. State Department has made several statements to the tune that the Russians do not “see eye to eye with us or share our values of freedom and democracy.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

1984 is in Full Bloom

March 21, 2018

1984 IS IN FULL BLOOM

When I read this forwarded email from Yojimbo from HollyO this morning it seemed surreal. I swear it sounded like a scene from 1984, the movie. I can’t believe this is happening in this day and age. I think we are all being naive regarding how far our ruling class will go to suppress free speech, freedom, and our liberties as human beings. We are living in dark times, despite the delusion of wealth, health and supposed democracy.

A virtual police state is being created, with government surveillance agencies conspiring with the social media mega-corps to control and monitor our every thought, action, or conversation. If anything, as this Fourth Turning progresses, it will get worse. We are already at war, we just don’t know it, and we’re losing. I need to repost the Hangman poem as a reminder what will happen.

I have a Pdf of Holly’s article on my hard drive. I will email it to you directly if you contact me at quinnadvisors@gmail.com.

Email from HollyO:

The landline rang yesterday which was unusual because no one ever rings me. I picked it up and heard, ‘Heddlu.’ Then the phone was put down on the other end.

I went into shock, then moved fast. I opened protonmail and fired a message to Yojimbo to contact Admin, signed out, wiped what I had under my immediate control, then heard a car pull up.

The last thing I did was burn a PDF to a thumb drive, then trashed the file. I ejected the thumb drive, capped it and heard a knock on the door.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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