Monday, May 30, 2005

Just re-reading Orwell's 1984

I have just begun re-reading 1984 by George Orwell. By the time I got to page 4, and read the mantra of big brother, "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" I felt a chill go through my body. Further on, "And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-if all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past" ran the party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

What made me pick up 1984 again? Bill Moyer's closing address at the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis on May 15, 2005. Several things that he said made me think of George Orwell, again and again. I was driven to go to my bookcase to pick up my copy of 1984 and dust it off. Moyers noted that right-wingers had been after him for years, and "they" were the people "obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate... the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq's oil...the people who turned faith based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets...the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy."

He noted that the conventional rules of beltway journalism, which “divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.” Moyers quoted Jonathan Mermin, “if the government is not talking about it, we don’t report it.” In other words, we are only fed what our government wants us to hear, something that in years past was called propaganda, but is now the “news.”

Most chillingly, Moyers quoted the following from 1984: Syme (a writer of the totalitarian society’s dictionary) explained to the protagonist Winston, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” “Has it every occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no though, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

Aren’t we a nation slipping into that unconsciousness? People blindly following right wing religious leaders who promote hate of those not of their particular religious stripe, promote stripping the rights of women and gays, and whose literal interpretation of the Bible is used to their own ends in order to promote their own world view. We are unconscious as a whole, to the lies of the Bush administration, blindly believing all that we hear from news sources owned by just a few corporations. Corporations that sift out the truths they want the American public to hear, and discarding the rest. We are bombarded with fear mongering, homophobia, and the evening news that consists of blood, guts, gore and crime. Be very afraid America, you are not safe in your own homes or in your own country, be very afraid, it all seems to say. We are told that those who disagree with the administration are unpatriotic, and all liberals and Democrats are atheists.

Chilling passages from 1984 by George Orwell:
• The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the Party.
• …the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual Puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship.
• “Who care?” she said impatiently. “It’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.”
• In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.
• The primary aim of modern warfare [in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party] is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.
• But it was also clear that an all-around increase in wealth threatened the destruction – indeed, in some sense was the destruction – of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. if it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. it was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For is leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once the had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.
• On Party member discipline, the simplest stage called crimestop: Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. [my words…leading to the need for blackwhite]
• Blackwhite: …this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. …no change of doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness.

How many of these points sound like our current administration? Scary parallels exist. As our educational system declines, as the religious right tries to change our views of science (“Intelligent design” instead of the science of evolution), as they use Orwellian language, “Clean Skies” and “Healthy Forests” and as our population becomes glued to ‘reality’ TV and is fed sanitized news, our nation cruises into the fictional 1984 environment. A remark by a foreign student from Romania, keeps repeating itself in my mind, “the education is your country is so poor, it seems like your government wants to keep people too stupid to figure out what is going on.” That, from a young woman who grew up in a former communist state.

Where are we going America? It doesn’t look good from here.

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