Posted on 02/19/2009 4:08:22 PM PST by Avoiding_Sulla
In the dystopic world of George Orwell's 1984, all news and historical records were governed by the Ministry of Truth.
I have played with this cognomen over the years by identifying the mainstream media (MSM) with various appellations such as the Ministry of (mis)Information, and MinInfo whenever MSM's manner of coverage of a story revealed its bias favoring most any form of statism.
Over the last two years, unlike any time in my long life, the MSM has warranted the name Ministry of MisInformation more than ever. It got to be an open joke among my acquaintences of how open the bias could get.
"Have they gotten around to framing every picture of Bush with a dunce cap on top?"As the bailouts came into play last year, I observed that once news sources like the AP and newspapers like the NY Times were bailed out, they would be well along to becoming official state organs along the lines of the USSR's Izvestia and Pravda, reporting and printing only what those holding their purse-strings wished to see made known."It can't belong before every frame of Obama has him walking on water."
Now, as if the MSM hasn't done enough to show they can be trusted to be good Ministry of Truth employees, I have to hand it to my old buddy Fran Porretto with succinctly showing how much more they are worthy:
America got to its current state because of permanent government deficit finance, government debasement of the dollar, government redistribution, and government meddling in the economy, most particularly the credit market. Not one of these things was contemplated by the Founders or authorized by the Constitution of the United States. Washington proceeded with them anyway. Not one economist of any standing would disagree that our troubles are rooted in the very policy arrogances I just enumerated. But politicians, to whom government is the one and only "solution" to any and every "problem," have proposed that we address our difficulties by intensifying the very practices that produced them.The fact that such a concise review of the why, and excuses for, the Obama stimulus and the TARP before it, can only be found on a relatively obscure website. Nowhere in the MSM are they discussed as a consistent group of related issues where logic would bring the listener or reader to Fran's conclusion. The fact these facts are never allowed to be built into an argument filled with legitimate observations and concerns anywhere in MSMdom tells us how in love with total state control visible MSM employees either are (true-believers) or think they must demonstrate they are (cynical self-servers).
With such able employees already well stationed in various MSM outlets, how soon before the Ministry of Truth emerges, fully grown and indomitable?
That MSM has gotten so thoroughly unconcerned with its bias, that its members have gotten completely shameless with their cheer-leading for growing state controls, tells us how in danger we are to fulfilling one of George Orwell's most terrifying institutions.
I think it’s time that the concept of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is laid to rest, *not* because it didn’t come to pass, but precisely because it *did* come to pass.
That is, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” didn’t end with the year 1984, any more than computers ended with the IBM AT, which also came out in 1984.
So where did we go from 1984? The surveillance state today leaves 1984 in the dust. DNA profiling didn’t begin until 1985. There are tens of millions of surveillance cameras everywhere today. “Data mining” finds connections between people that even the Sherlock Holmes of secret policemen would never find. GPS tracking of cell phones, satellite pictures of individual homes on the Internet, drone aircraft patrolling the skies.
And after 9-11, “1984”, as a verb, went into overdrive. People are regularly searched before using aircraft, trains or buses. Passports are now full of biometric data. Heck, biometric data itself is now common. Policemen scan fingerprints at traffic stops and have cars that can check thousands of car licenses a day.
The US government will soon control all medical records, etc., etc., etc...
Face it, 1984 was “the good old days”, when there was still some privacy.
You mean because it came to fruition and so few recognize it, we may as well forget worrying about the dystopia?
There’s no hope from the proles, so to speak?
Yes, I remember that. That it wasn’t more widely covered reinforces the point of this thread.
How long before that TV interview goes down the memory hole?
How long before the reporters and producers are “reeducated” or disappeared?
The challenge is just to be aware of the many and myriad means of obsessive voyeurism and anal retentive record keeping being used.
That is the sequel to “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. People so amazed by the scope of the surveillance and obsession with data that they don’t actually mind it as much. They equate nanny-statism as “caring” and efficient, instead of the opposite.
As two asides, the first modern police state was created by the first emperor of China. That is, its elements would be recognizable in a police state today. The basic techniques haven’t changed.
Second, in East Germany the obsession had become so profound that records were kept of the routes citizens would take in the course of their day, walking around. They noted consumption of toilet paper and razor blades, pencils and how often toilets were flushed. All was entered in to the millions of dossiers. Sloppily.
And this showed the fatal flaw of Big Brother. Obsession with minutiae is not a sign of efficiency, but of inefficiency. A government that spends all its time treating adults like a class of kindergartners, is ignoring the important issues that government is supposed to pay attention to.
It sees the petty things in life as “easier”, which is one of its main goals. To make the jobs of secret policemen and bureaucrats “easier”.
This is seen in England right now, with millions of CCTV cameras, but nobody is watching the TV monitors. Only a functional moron could spend his day watching nothing on a dozen TV monitors, and functional morons are too valuable, literally, as truck drivers, to be wasted doing that. Functional morons do not get bored, unlike everyone else.
But because CCTV cameras are everywhere, the government figures it doesn’t need more police on the streets. They don’t see the difference.
This is why, in the US, millions of dollars are being spent to create software that can tell if something suspicious is happening on a particular monitor, so it can alert a human. But it will likely fail, because software can’t read body language or readily tell if something illegal is happening.
Remember when the Clinton administration rifled through the FBI files of hundreds of its political opponents? The biggest surprise was how wrong those uncensored files were. The millions spent on compiling information about even national leaders resulted in data so distorted from reality as to be almost useless.
And this, too, needs to be pointed out in the sequel to 1984. That it isn’t a revolution that brings down the surveillance state, but just its own weight. Buried under a pile of paper it kept like a crazy old man with stacks of newspapers to his ceiling.
personally i think of the msm as the ministry of funny walks.
**Face it, 1984 was “the good old days”, when there was still some privacy.**
The only thing from 1984 we do Not have is (at least don’t know of i) ...
ROOM 101
I’m sure Fuhrer Obama will see to that Immediately.
It was not unnoticed on the pages of FR or any other roughly anti-Left website, the attempt to deify Obama (halos, back-lighting). Expecting the bama to solve all problems, such as global warming (leaving aside GW in a fantasy), is the opposite extreme to blaming bush for all ills such as Katrina the storm (aside from fact that the response to Katrina that is NOT a federal job to begin with).
I am sure it is not wasted on either of you that there has been a long time effort to separate Americans from their religious underpinnings. To some extent it has worked. People disconnected from their family churches which had unhinged from their origins. Many factors involved in that unhinging, but a large part certainly was due to earlier court-decided educational vacuums aided the misguiding the next generation of theologians. That this was a thoughtful long-term effort has now been proven in that we now hear that the courts in New Jersey have allowed open Muslim prayer in skools where such things had long been declared unconstitutional.
Yet the attempt to totally eliminate the JudeoChristian God as a thought construct has failed. Why? Because every American still retains the ability to think of Him and know what He represents. That no man has His supernatural abilities. Thus all Americans can still think to tell their statist tormentor "sorry bub, but you are not God." Your being able to conjure that thought sticks in the craw of the statists and it appears it always will.
Orwell was writing as if the soviet system had arisen in England. Yet the same Godless 1984 never even came to pass in the USSR. It still hasn't in China today. Of course there is a price to pay for saying such things to the face of the tormentor. Chinese Christians have and are still paying dearly.
God forbid any American will have to face that challenge: to pay dearly in position, liberty, pain and flesh, for telling a Marxist commissar that bama is not and never will be God.
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