Posted on 09/20/2017 4:45:23 PM PDT by Sean_Anthony
"if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
Just two or three generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written to explain how freedom is lost to totalitarianism and the intolerance that accompanies it. Big Brother, a term that many people still casually use to describe an all-knowing governing authority, comes right out of 1984. In the society that Orwell describes, all citizens are continually reminded that “Big Brother is watching you,” by way of a constant surveillance through the pervasive use of “telescreens” by the ruling class.
Orwell’s warnings about totalitarianism written in novel form in Animal Farm and 1984 came shortly after Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was published at the end of World War II. But it took the shocking revelations from books on Nazism and Soviet Communism, by scholars like William Shirer and Robert Conquest in the 1960s to really make Orwell relevant to the masses educated in American public schools. And it was not just an academic exercise, insofar as Stalin was at that time brutally crushing all resistance, enforcing the Soviet model of totalitarian control on East European countries that became satellite states of Moscow.
It does seem like that at times...
I prefer to think liberty means the right to NOT listen to what some government stooge tells me.
It's a neat little meme, which has been misused, AGAINST GOPers AND CONSERVATIVES, by mental midgets, who have either never read the book, or attempted to read it and still don't understand 1984, especially.
Funnily enough....the very people who have weaponized this concept, with which to impugned others, are the very ones, who, given 1/2 the chance, would absolutely turn America into a full blown 1984!
Hillary! has explained in her best-selling book that the lesson to take from Orwell is to not listen to those who cast doubt on our leaders, the press, and experts.
I would suspect that she considered them both, taking the opposite intentions of the author, as blueprints for her plans for world domination.
Glad she got royally sacked.
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