It was a bright, cold day on the campaign trail, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
In The Lyin’ King, Denis Campbell observes that Mitt Romney has repeatedly told more than 700 lies since he began campaigning for president in 2011 . . .
Mitt Romney is nearly to China with his digging now. When even National Public Radio, the mildest, least controversial of any network leads with “Romney Goes On Offense, Pays For It In First Wave Of Fact Checks,” you know you are in trouble.
But Romney was right out of trouble again when the media shifted rapidly from exposing his lies to characterizing his deceit-saturated debate performance as “strong” and “commanding.” The Romney/Ryan campaign’s calculated decision to blatantly lie their way to Election Day and the media’s subsequent abandonment of all journalistic responsibility are only the latest examples of how political depravity has been normalized by the politicians complicit in it and the “journalists” who cover political campaigns.
Political depravity is the new normal. Bush v. Gore legalized it, the Patriot Act compels submission to it, Citizen’s United. makes it permanent. Americans are being subjected to blatant voter suppression, massive surveillance, a vast expansion of police power, and relentless government violations of the Bill of Rights. Obama is further to the right than Nixon was, the Wall Street/corporate establishment has absolute control over Congress and the courts, journalism is dead, unions are dying, and we’re all on a one-way ride to serfdom on the Austerity Express.
One would think that Republicans would be satisfied.
In the first part, I talked about the false comparison of Orwell to Huxley and how features of the writing made it easy to mistake each author’s purpose and scope. However, there is something else. Neil Postman was not alone in thinking, in 1984, that we dodged a bullet and instead took a pill. I understand the feeling and shared it. It seemed like, as Lord Boyd Orr had said in 1966, “Give the people a choice between freedom and sandwiches, and they’ll take the sandwiches,” but we had already been shot but did not know the blood stain.
We were aware, then, that the public of democratic nations was placidly accepting outrages that would lead to atrocities, but I would propose that it took 2003 and George W. Bush to demonstrate to us how well television and the fragmented Internet have made every year 1984. Indeed, the television, which Postman saw as an abstracted medium that forbade long-form discourse and non-pictorial conceptualizing, would eventually resemble the view screen of 1984 as much as the Soma of Brave New World, especially cable news, where anything not at full volume and alarm was mere caesura for a day of emotional extremes and informational abbreviation. The Memory Hole was far easier to achieve by accident than plan.
I criticized Postman for a misplaced emphasis on the fiction of 1984 whereby he missed the systemic critique of the novel. The novel’s appearance in the midst of a nation enacting a policy called Austerity, where everyone was to “pitch in” to get “England” back on its feet after the war, is conspicuous and screams out for a comparison. Specifically, within the fiction and outside of it, a System of power is above the people, and the people are the enemy of power itself. Big Brother is an image or visage for a system, but the true power is no person or party — just the continuing flow of resources and labor from the people to an indifferent end. This is what is frightening. The group in charge was never fascists or Stalinists or Churchill or anyone else: it was capital.
Austerity today (the “new Austerity” in Europe and deficit mania in the U.S.) is different in cause, but the same in effect. Both ask nations to turn their GDP over to repayment of debt rather than intervention in markets to stimulate employment. The language used in both instances is similar, too: “Get back on our feet” and “recovery.” However, nation states and capital have had quite a bit of time and learned a few lessons.
We can see, in the gap of attitudes and responses of the public, the effect of social and cultural mutation. If we can see a greater or lesser increase in the effects of social control, then we can understand, I believe, just how thoroughgoing Orwell’s book was a description of an ongoing project that has now succeeded.
So when you Google geo-engineering the top featured sites are these “wack job” new age spirituality types or this one from the equally “wack job” Bible thumpers from someplace called “Godlike Productions”.
How else would we catch such villians like Levi Detweiler. Possesion of alcohol and “overdriving” an animal? Is that “illegal” or did they just make that up.
Update #2: It has been brought to my attention that my initial analysis on the subject of this diary, originally titled “SCOTUS legalizes TORTURE and creates legal ‘unpersons'”, and then edited to state 9th Circuit . . . is factually incorrect. I apologize for the confusion and will be writing a thorough dairy tomorrow based on the facts of the ruling by the 9th Circuit court.
I have left the full text of the original diary intact below the fold and will be glad to be further corrected. I seek to learn as well as to share what knowledge I have.
But I will ask this: When? When do we start to see accountability, for the super rich, for the Corporations and their CEO class, and for the crimes and other excesses of the politically powerful. When?
The Military Industrial Complex meets the Terroism Industrial Complex.
In his widely reported London speech earlier this month, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, described how people constantly offer him ideas for fixing that country’s problems. One of the more unusual recommendations, he suggested, came from a paper that advocated using a “plan called ‘Chaosistan.’ ” McChrystal said it advised letting Afghanistan become a “Somalia-like haven of chaos that we simply manage from outside,” but there was no further explanation of its origins.
Duke University, 2006. 3 years later, how much more has been learned?
Blogging the future looks like it might be some scary shit.
Because, lets face it, invisibility in the hands of the Oligarchy means we WILL have Secret Police, and Secret Police means freedom is dead and thought crime is next. When you can crush political dissent, what can’t you do?
I have had many questions asked about my screen name and sig. Some people have accused me of being a Right Wing troll. Others have doubted my sincerity because of the meaning of my screen name. I thought I might explain my choice and point out a few facts, for those who may be interested.
We have replaced the two minutes hate with the 24/7 hate/lie cycle.
My hope is to challenge that, and to bring truth to light as best as I can.
One of the first books I read as a young man was George Orwell’s 1984. Politically it opened my eyes and unplugged me from the matrix. I re-read the book once a year and every year since then. It serves as a reminder for what is at stake.
But many would like to tell us that Government is always evil. They fail to recognize that the same can be said of Big Business.
Big Business can be Big Brother too.
In fact, Big Business may be worse than Big Government sometimes. Good Government can check Bad Business. Good Business has not once stopped Bad Government, and both Good/Good and Bad/Bad can exists as well.
The question is how we keep both accountable. If we kill good government to save Big Business, Big Business will become Big Brother. That is the heart of true Mussolini Fascism, a combination of Big Business and Bad Government.
And the wall between the reality of that and the reality they would sell us can be called the Ministry Of Truth.
The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. The were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided: the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within a half a kilometer of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
Each day we see a precept from 1984 personified before our eyes. Part of my purpose in writing is to educate people to the real truth, as I perceive it from my progressive liberal perspective. Many may not agree with my views. I do not place a premium on agreement. Rather, the importance I place is on the FACT. That is where the truth shall be found.
No one in their right mind who is not a fool can look at our Corporate controlled media and not see a similarity to Orwell’s Ministry Of Truth. The Right Wing Noise Machine is fully aware that their policies are not in the interest of the Average citizen of Earth. In order to convince the poor that they want free market fiscal conservative economic policies they have created a place that can be best described as the debate between fact and false. To deny fact, science and reality and equate it with falsity and lies. This is an important part of their agenda.
Thus
Ignorance = Strength
The issue is whether you will make your own decisions, do you own research and form your own opinions, or if you will allow programmers to pre-program you.
If we remain ignorant, we give strength to those who would exercise total power over us, whether they are Business or Politically oriented
Fact: Of the 3 people who the Bush/Cheney Regime admits to waterboarding, American citizen Jose Padilla, who is accused of planning to obtain and detonate a dirty nuclear bomb in the USA has been imprisoned on American soil since May 8, 2002. They even put him on trial here. His case was heard by the Supreme Court, the highest court in the empire.
The strange thing is, the WMD that Padilla was accused of seeking was never found, have yet to surface and can not be proven through evidence.
That whole evidence thing isn’t such a big deal though since we have denied American citizen Jose Padilla his Constitutional rights to a trial by jury.
Oh. About Jose Padilla. Did I mention he is almost certainly insane by now? 7 years of solitary confinement, torture and long periods of induced sensory deprivation will do that to a person over time, give or take a few years.
