Posted on 11/18/2014 12:00:06 PM PST by SeekAndFind
If only George Orwell could see us today. When he wrote “1984” back in 1948, he probably never imagined that the “totalitarian, bureaucratic world” that he imagined would ever actually become a reality. But that is precisely what is happening. We live at a time when the government monitors billions of our phone calls and emails and hardly anyone gets upset about it. We live at a time when corporations systematically collect our voiceprints and our televisions watch us. We live at a time when reporters that try to dig into the misdeeds of the government have their computers hacked, and when nearly one out of every three Americans has a file in the FBI’s master criminal database. The control freaks that run our society are absolutely obsessed with watching, tracking, recording and monitoring virtually everything that we do. We truly are becoming a “1984” society, and if we continue on the path that we are currently on eventually our world will be transformed into something more hellish than anything that George Orwell ever imagined.
These days, virtually every type of government surveillance is taken to the extreme. For example, there is definitely nothing wrong with normal undercover police work. But these days, almost every single federal government agency conducts extensive undercover operations. At this point, even the IRS and the Department of Agriculture rely on undercover operatives to spy on ordinary citizens. So the next time you are visiting a tax preparer, buying a yacht or attending a peaceful political protest, the person standing next to you just might be a government spy…
The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show.
At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice.
At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers, accountants drug dealers or yacht buyers and more, court records show.
Government undercover work has become so extreme that sometimes undercover agents from one agency end up investigating undercover agents from another agency. In fact, there have been times when agents from different government agencies have pulled weapons on each other without even realizing it…
The extent of those secret operations within the departments can be so high that it leads to severe overlap, such as one undercover agent investigating an alleged criminal, who also turns out to be a fed on duty, law enforcement officials said.
“There are all sorts of stories about undercover operations gone bad,” Jeff Silk, a longtime undercover agent and supervisor at the Drug Enforcement Administration, said in an interview. “People are always tripping and falling over each other’s cases.”
Silk added that in some instances, agents even draw weapons on each other before realizing they are on the same side.
The government also uses a vast array of electronic methods to spy on all of us.
For instance, it has recently been revealed that the Justice Department places devices that emulate cell phone towers on Cessna airplanes and flies them around major cities. These devices are then used to trace the phones of potential targets…
The U.S. Department of Justice is putting devices that emulate cellphone towers in Cessna aircraft and flying them around the country to track the locations of cell phones, a practice that targets criminal suspects but may also affect thousands of U.S. citizens, according to a news report Thursday.
The program is run by the Department of Justice’s U.S. Marshals Service and has been in operation since at least 2007, according to the report in the Wall Street Journal, which cited two unnamed sources. The aircraft are flown out of at least five metropolitan-area airports and can cover most of the U.S. population, it said.
Cell phones are programmed to connect to whichever nearby cell tower has the strongest signal. The fake cell towers trick phones into thinking they have the strongest signal, then read the devices’ unique registration numbers when they connect, the Journal report says.
And of course this is just one example of how the government uses technology to monitor us. For quite a few more examples, please see my previous article entitled “15 Signs That We Live During A Time Of Rampant Government Paranoia“.
At this point things have gotten so bad that even our public schools are training our children for life in a “Big Brother” police state.
When I was growing up, it would have been unthinkable for men with guns to come storming into a classroom. But now it is a regular occurrence all across the nation. And sometimes the students are not even told that a drill is taking place. The following is an excerpt from a news story about one of these drills that just took place down in Florida…
Lauren Marionneaux, a seventh-grade student at Jewett Middle Academy, said it was about 9 a.m. Thursday when the principal announced the school was going on lockdown.
Students huddled into classrooms waiting for further instructions. Instead, they started hearing voices in the hallway.
“A lot of people started getting scared because we thought it was a real drill,” Lauren said. “We actually thought that someone was going to come in there and kill us.”
Two police officers burst into Lauren’s classroom with their guns drawn — one carrying, what Winter Haven police said, was an AR-15 rifle.
Would you want your little girl to feel like she is about to die?
I certainly would not.
But this kind of thing is done to condition our young people to life in a police state. They are going to grow up thinking that it is normal for heavily armed men in dark suits to storm in and lock everything down.
Even though we are not in prison, we are being systematically trained to act as if we were. Our police forces are being increasingly militarized, and all law enforcement authorities are now trained to bark orders at the general public and treat them like dirt. Most of the population fears those in authority these days, and that is precisely how those in power want it.
And as John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute has pointed out, anyone that dares to resist this brutality is squashed like a bug…
For example, police arrested Chaumtoli Huq because she failed to promptly comply when ordered to “move along” while waiting outside a Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant for her children, who were inside with their father, using the bathroom. NYPD officers grabbed Huq, a lawyer with the New York City Public Advocate’s office, flipped her around, pressed her against a wall, handcuffed her, searched her purse, arrested her, and told her to “shut up” when she cried out for help, before detaining her for nine hours. Huq was charged with obstructing governmental administration, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.
Oregon resident Fred Marlow was jailed and charged with interfering and resisting arrest after he filmed a SWAT team raid that took place across the street from his apartment and uploaded the footage to the internet. The footage shows police officers threatening Marlow, who was awoken by the sounds of “multiple bombs blasting and glass breaking” and ran outside to investigate only to be threatened with arrest if he didn’t follow orders and return inside.
Eric Garner, 43 years old, asthmatic and unarmed, died after being put in a chokehold by NYPD police, allegedly for resisting arrest over his selling untaxed, loose cigarettes, although video footage of the incident shows little resistance on Garner’s part. Indeed, the man was screaming, begging and insisting he couldn’t breathe. And what was New York Mayor Bill De Blasio’s advice to citizens in order to avoid a similar fate? Don’t resist arrest.
Yes, we still have a bit more freedom than the poor souls in George Orwell’s “1984“, but our liberties and freedoms are eroding a little bit more with each passing day.
And just like in “1984”, most of the population has come to accept the status quo as the new “normal”.
So is there any hope that we will wake up, or will our society continue to march toward oblivion?
<>So is there any hope that we will wake up, or will our society continue to march toward oblivion?<>
The only possible peaceful solution rests with divesting power from DC. That can happen when the states take their place once again in the Senate.
Article V Now!
I think it’s closer to Hayek’s statement in “The Road to Serfdom” about America and Britain having a soft totalitarianism.
Thanks. Interesting article and good food for thought.
“I think it’s closer to Hayek’s statement in “The Road to Serfdom” about America and Britain having a soft totalitarianism.”
1984 and The Road to Serfdom were both written in England in the 1940’s as observations on the increased influence of Socialists, Communists and leftists in the British government and among British intellectuals.
Hayek, the economist, focused on the destruction of the economy. Orwell, the journalist, focused on the use of language, propaganda and the ability of a small group of totalitarians to control a larger society.
Both books should be read together as astute observations on the leftist influences that are so powerful today.
The perfect storm of the unintended consequences of technology, terrorism and the decision to militarize the reaction to 9-11.
On the day after 9/11 I was working in my office and talking to some young 20 something co workers. They were asking me what I thought was going to happen.
I told her it was not the terrorist that we should be worried about. I told them that the government might take advantage of situation and use it to crack down on internal issues. This was before the Patriot Act.
After the PA passed, many of its components had to do with banking regulations that we being imposed on our bank. Every time one of them went by my office, they would look in and say, “You were right.”
I got a Linked In message from one of them a couple of weeks ago. He said, “Boy, you must have a crystal ball...what everyone thought was ‘good’ turned out to be very intrusive.”
1984. We have arrived.
I’m re-reading 1984 right now and if anyone thinks there is no difference between the government described in the book and the one we have no, you need to re-read the book. There are VERY big differences. Stupid comments will get a response to re-read the *&^%ing book.
I think “1984” might almost be a step up from where we’ve been heading. It’s been more of a descent into a third-world banana republic than anything else — the trappings of a constitutional system but with an all-powerful dictator who has the media in his pocket and can use the full force of the government against his political and personal enemies. In such systems, the general population gets poorer and poorer while the dictator and his cronies lack for nothing except scruples.
Post of the day. Don't forget the feral mob living on government handouts and abusing the honest citizens with the complicity of the governing elite.
Lick the boots. Because we haven’t yet arrived at the final destination doesn’t mean the comparison isn’t valid. The differences are only ones of degree, not sort.
Instead of just screed, tell us what these VERY big differences are in your opinion. Oh, ,, and welcome to FR.
I realize this question was not directed at me, but the very biggest difference is that in 1984, sex is stigmatized and see as something that needs to be done “for the party,” i.e., just for the purpose of making children who can then serve the government well.
Our government seems to encourage as much sexual perversity as it can, making the ability to have sex with whomever one wants with 0 repercussions some kind of lofty mission.
On that note, there are many similarities that I will not deny. We are not yet at the point where political dissenters get their faces chewed off by rats, but we are certainly heading that way.
I mean, we all know it’s only a matter of time until Pelosi chews off somebody’s face.
If this person truly thinks that George Orwell “never imagined 1984 would come to pass” then they don’t understand tha nature of the beast. Of course he imagined it would come to pass, why would you bother to write works like 1984 (or Animal Farm, or Brave New World, or the Book of Revelation) if you did not think they might come to pass?
It is surely true that there are differences. I have read the book multiple times and I know it very well.
That being said, many things happening now are eerily reminiscent of 1984. We have media campaigns targeted to distract us from what’s really happening, we have a government who are acting as if they can erase things they have previously said (they can’t, but they sure do try), and increasingly, we are seeing an increase of income disparity between “party” (politicians, pundits, etc.) and “proles” (average working voters or middle class who are being shafted financially by Obamacare, etc.)
I don’t think that there is “no difference.” But as far as metaphors go, it’s a very good one.
The media stuff is very true.
The big difference the level of control and the use of the information gathered.
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