Obama's Orwellian Inaugural Address

On Monday, President Barack Obama delivered a monumental address to the nation. It wasn't monumental in terms of rhetoric -- in fact, it wasn't even memorable. It was monumental because it signaled for the first time just how grand Obama's ambitions for the left are. No longer is the left content to wage a war against Constitutional principles on behalf of a Marxist philosophical system. Now they will attempt to convince the American people that Constitutional principles dictate Marxism.

Obama opened his address by quoting the Declaration of Independence: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The Declaration of Independence sets forth a vision of limited government designed to avoid tyranny. But Obama, employing all the linguistic slight-of-hand in his multitudinous bag of tricks, had a plan to turn the Declaration inside out.

He began by rendering the document meaningless. As it turned out, "when times change, so must we." More importantly, when times change, so must our concept of liberty. Obama said, "our generation's task [is] to make these words, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American." But what do those high-sounding phrases mean? Obama said they have no meaning: "Being true to our founding ... does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time."

It is simply a lie to state that our founders did not have a singular definition of liberty. They did. It is expressed in the Declaration itself. Liberty, says the Declaration, is freedom from government "abuses and usurpations." It is not government guarantees of healthcare, pensions and food stamps. The Constitution was ratified in order to preserve the founders' vision of liberty and to prevent a "good government" from usurping power in order to achieve the social engineering the left adores.

Obama knows this just as his progressive predecessors knew this. That's why Woodrow Wilson despised the Constitution. So does Obama. But unlike Wilson, Obama realizes that the American people still like the Constitution. And so he must somehow read his anti-Constitutionalism into founding philosophy itself.

And so he turns liberty into a meaningless word. But it is there that the magic show truly begins. Once liberty is meaningless, how can government preserve it? Only by giving each individual his or her heart's desire. As Obama said, "preserving our individual freedoms," he said, "ultimately requires collective action." This is Orwellian in its reversal of language. Individual freedoms require government to leave us alone, aside from protecting our lives and property rights.

What of those individuals who define liberty in the way the founders defined it? In Obama's Orwellian world, they are anti-liberty, because government is liberty. Obama used the phrase "We, the people" -- the first words of the Constitution -- no less than five times. Each time, substituting "government" would have been more accurate. For example, "We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity." How? Via government redistributionism. "We, the people," said Obama, "will respond to the threat of climate change." How? Through the government.

And the Constitution is meaningless unless it is being wielded as a club against those who actually value the founding ideology for which it stands.

I wonder how many school systems these days assign any of Orwell’s works for reading.I would bet close to none.

Let me partially rectify that:

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth
.......
The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.
The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.
The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.
Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.
When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.
In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.
There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.
And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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Government is liberty. Freedom is tyranny. Individualism is collectivism.