Severely Wounded, But Not Crippled

Trey Smith

In an increasingly phantasmagorical world, here’s my present fantasy of choice: someone from General Keith Alexander’s outfit, the National Security Agency, tracks down H.G. Wells’s time machine in the attic of an old house in London. Britain’s subservient Government Communications Headquarters, its version of the NSA, is paid off and the contraption is flown to Fort Meade, Maryland, where it’s put back in working order. Alexander then revs it up and heads not into the future like Wells to see how our world ends, but into the past to offer a warning to Americans about what’s to come.

He arrives in Washington on October 23, 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a day after President Kennedy has addressed the American people on national television to tell them that this planet might not be theirs -- or anyone else’s -- for long. ("We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be faced.") Greeted with amazement by the Washington elite, Alexander, too, goes on television and informs the same public that, in 2013, the major enemy of the United States will no longer be the Soviet Union, but an outfit called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and that the headquarters of our country’s preeminent foe will be found somewhere in the rural backlands of... Yemen.

Yes, Yemen, a place most Americans, then and now, would be challenged to find on a world map. I guarantee you one thing: had such an announcement actually been made that day, most Americans would undoubtedly have dropped to their knees and thanked God for His blessings on the American nation. Though even then a nonbeliever, I would undoubtedly have been among them. After all, the 18-year-old Tom Engelhardt, on hearing Kennedy’s address, genuinely feared that he and the few pathetic dreams of a future he had been able to conjure up were toast.

Had Alexander added that, in the face of AQAP and similar minor jihadist enemies scattered in the back lands of parts of the planet, the U.S. had built up its military, intelligence, and surveillance powers beyond anything ever conceived of in the Cold War or possibly in the history of the planet, Americans of that time would undoubtedly have considered him delusional and committed him to an asylum.

Such, however, is our world more than two decades after Eastern Europe was liberated, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War definitively ended, and the Soviet Union disappeared.
~ from And Then There Was One by Tom Engelhardt ~

It amazes me that, no matter how frequently we're told that al-Qaeda has been seriously wounded, it continues to be such a supposedly feared enemy. It is like the cat with nine lives. No matter how many higher ups we neutralize, the threat never diminishes.

Think about the number of reports within the last decade. We took out the head -- one bin Laden -- and several operational commanders and yet the War on Terror hasn't skipped a beat. This represents a weird paradox for the US Commander-in-Chief (Bush or Obama). To prove that our military might is needed and capable, the president must announce successes in our continuous war against the Axis of Evil. He must show that we are wounding our supposed adversary. But he can't tell us that we've crippled them...because if al-Qaeda was said to be crippled, then the rationale for our continued militarization and increased mass surveillance would be greatly lessened.

Accordingly, he must straddle the line between saying that we are winning this war, BUT the war itself is far from over. Yes, we hold the upper hand, but our hand must remain on the throttle, lest we lose our superior position.

So, we continue to build the largest military and mass surveillance system the world has ever known in order to combat ragtag outfits skulking around in caves and other out of the way locales. It seems a bit surreal, doesn't it?

Don't Like Them Dismal Numbers? Change 'Em!

Trey Smith

A while back I presented to you another miniseries featuring George Orwell's novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, as a backdrop to what is going on in the US today. If you will remember, one of the posts had to do with the Ministry of Truth. That's where the story's protagonist, Winston Smith, worked. His job was to rewrite history so that it matched up perfectly with Big Brother's current political agenda. For example, if a few years back Big Brother had predicted x and instead y occurred, all references to x were scrubbed from history and replaced with y. In this way, Big Brother's prognostications always turned out to be right on the nose.

Keep this theme in mind as you read the following snippet by Dr. jack Rasmus posted at CounterPunch.

Facing the prospect of a 2nd quarter GDP report showing economic growth less than 1% (some professional forecasting services predict as low as 0.5%), and a year to year growth of the US economy likely to come in at barely 1% – compared to a 2011-12 already tepid 1.7% – today [July 31] the Obama administration will announce a major revision of how it calculates GDP which will bump up GDP numbers by as much as 3% according to some estimates. That’s one way to make it appear the US economy is finally recovering again, when all other fiscal-monetary policies since 2009 have actually failed to produce a sustained recovery.

Today’s GDP definition revision is not the first time that politicians, failing in their policies, have simply rewritten the numbers to make the failure ‘go away’. But this time, the GDP revisions will be made going all the way back to 1929. So watch for the slowing US economy GDP numbers from last October 2012 onward to be significantly revised upward.

Instead of an actual, paltry 0.4% GDP growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2012, a weak 1.6% in the first quarter 2013, and the projected 0.5%-1% for the 2nd quarter 2013 — all the numbers will be revised higher in the coming GDP estimate for the 2nd quarter 2013. The true GDP growth rate of the most recent April-June 2013 period, projected as low as 0.5% by some professional macroeconmic forecasters, might not thus get reported.

Did you notice the truly Orwellian aspect to this change? Not only is the Obama administration changing the numbers so today's picture magically will appear rosier, but they concurrently are rewriting 84 years of history at the same time!  Before we know it, the old calculations will disappear as if they never existed in the first place.

We've been down a similar road before. Unemployment used to be calculated one way -- a far more accurate way -- but the new formula hides a lot of the actual depressing numbers. This is why, in some months, the creation of jobs doesn't keep up with population growth and yet the unemployment rate magically decreases.

For a long time, people have said that the truth is in the numbers. Sadly, this is not accurate. When you know how to cook the calculations and formulations, you can turn numbers on their heads and most people will be none the wiser!

Attempting to Rewrite History

Trey Smith

While the 10-part 2013/1984 miniseries is now in the rear view mirror, it is not like I plan never to make reference to Orwell again! I have spent the past few days ruminating about how the rhetoric from the NSA apologists during the brief debate about the Amash amendment in the US House last week reminded me of the chief function of Oceania's Ministry of Truth: Rewriting history.

The centerpiece for those who sought defeat of said amendment was that putting a halt to the NSA's indiscriminate vacuuming up of telephonic metadata -- particularly the data of millions of innocent Americans -- would leave the US open to another terrorist attack like 9/11. Without this valuable tool, they argued, we would once again become sitting ducks.

It sounds like a plausible argument...IF you neglect the facts concerning the months before the 2001 attack. As it turns out, both the FBI and CIA -- using intelligence methods already in place -- had tried to warn the Bush administration of the growing threat. Both agencies had picked up quite a bit of intelligence that indicated that an attack -- utilizing airplanes as weapons -- was in the offing, possibly within the borders of the US itself.

The problem was NOT that these spy agency were hamstrung because they lacked the necessary tools to figure out what was going on -- the problem was the lack of political will to act on the intelligence information already gathered!  In other words, even though the program being debated in the US House last week [supposedly] did not exist at that time, our intelligence community still was close to being on top of the situation.

But these facts did not undergird the position of the naysayers, so they threw them aside.  They sought to rewrite history so that it bolstered their political agenda.  The mainstream media played its trusty role by amplifying this historical rewrite by not pointing out that the history involved pointed in the other direction.

In the coming weeks and months, the NSA apologists will utilize this historical rewrite again and again.  In time, if we don't challenge them, history itself may become rewritten.  If we allow them to lie long and loud enough, it won't matter what is true because most people will come to accept the falsehood as a historical fact and today's Ministry of Truth will have accomplished its main objective.

2013/1984, Part 10 (Final)

Trey Smith

Julia, Winston Smith's love interest in Nineteen Eighty-Four -- a fellow thoughtcriminal -- sums up in one word the greatest fear of Big Brother and the Inner Party: love. The powers that be in every generation fear love, in all its various manifestations, more than anything else.

Why is love so anathema to authoritarianism? It is because when people truly love they embrace a sense of wonder and community. They want to help others become the best they can be and, most importantly, it is that much harder to motivate such people to hate.

Hate is a crucial component to any top-down system. Certain groups of people are chosen to be demonized and scapegoated. The populace is manipulated to view this demonized group (or groups) as the source of their own lack of success and security. Your life would be so much better, the leaders shout, if not for these miscreants who are messing things up for everyone.

The sad irony, of course, is that it is the leaders themselves who are insuring that the majority of the populace lacks the ability to be secure and successful.  Behind the scenes, they are crafting a system where all the benefits flow to them, but no else.  They connive to impoverish their own people and then use that impoverishment as the whip to get the people to focus their anger and desperation on the demonized groups.

This gambit works time and time again.  That's why the elite keeps employing it.  And it will continue to work until we can learn to cast aside hate for love.

~

For all the talk of Christian fundamentalists in this nation -- both in politics and in "private" lives -- it seems to me that love is THE missing component.  I thought this was the central message of the ministry of Jesus, to love your enemies as yourself.

But you wouldn't think that listening to these people!  They talk about mistrust, fear, loathing, punishment and hate far more than they talk about love.  Even when they mumble the word, their actions don't match up at all with its meaning.

~

If you love people, you don't spy on them! You don't try to rip away their dignity and privacy.  

I understand that, in this modern world, some forms of surveillance are a necessary evil, but this necessary evil should be reserved SOLELY for people who you believe have ill-will towards you.  It should be reserved for those individuals of which you have a strong suspicion that they mean to do you harm.

Spying indiscriminately on everyone says that you don't trust anyone.  Trust is a necessary component of love.  If you can't trust people, then you can't love them and, if you love no one, then you can't even love yourself.

That's not the kind of world I want to live in.  In fact, I refuse to live in it.  So, regardless of what the talking heads say, I choose to continue to love.

What about you?

2013/1984, Part 9

Trey Smith

In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is divvied up amongst three superstates -- Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia -- who spend all their time fighting over the "disputed territory", predominantly Africa and the Middle East. At any given moment, Oceania is allied with one of the two superpowers against the other, but this alliance changes frequently. Not unlike the current USA, Oceania is in a perpetual state of war.

Or are they?

Since the Inner Party controls all information, there is no way independently to judge if Eurasia or Eastasia actually exists! From time to time, supposed prisoners of the then-opposed superpower are paraded through the streets, but these could be nothing more than faceless Proles from within Oceania's own borders. There are frequent missile attacks on the city, but it is unclear to the reader if the attacks originate from an outside power OR they are simply staged by the Inner Party to keep the population terrified. This intentional ambiguity leaves readers unsure of what to think.

A recent article at ProPublica, Who Are We at War With? That's Classified, shows that citizens in the US today live under a similar type of ambiguity.

In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”

“Because elements that might be considered ‘associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.”

In other words, we Americans know little about these purported enemies. I'm not suggesting that none of them exist, though it IS possible. All we think we know about them is based on the purposely nebulous descriptions from political leaders.

Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law who served as a legal counsel during the Bush administration and has written on this question at length, told ProPublica that the Pentagon’s reasoning for keeping the affiliates secret seems weak. “If the organizations are ‘inflated’ enough to be targeted with military force, why cannot they be mentioned publicly?” Goldsmith said. He added that there is “a countervailing very important interest in the public knowing who the government is fighting against in its name."

Like the citizens of Oceania, these individuals, groups and "forces" regularly are brought to our attention by our leaders in order to heighten our sense of fear and uncertainty. It is these faceless and often unknown enemies that are used as a justification for the evisceration of our rights, liberties and freedoms.

We genuinely don't know if these enemies constitute a bona fide threat to our nation.  Heck, we genuinely don't know if some or all of these enemies are real or not!

2013/1984, Part 8

Trey Smith

I could stretch out this miniseries for several more days, if I wanted to, but I've covered the main points I wanted to address...with three exceptions: one being the telescreens and the other two of which I will address in tomorrow's posts. These television-like devices figure prominently in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and, surprising as it might seem to many, this is one aspect of his dystopian tale that we are moving toward at breakneck speed.

Telescreens are mounted everywhere in Oceania, including in the homes of members of the Inner and Outer Party. Not only are they equipped with the ability to see and hear everything in the vicinity of each screen, but Big Brother (in the form of an unknown representative) can instruct or threaten people when they don't behave in the proper manner. For example, if an individual smiles, sings, laughs or expresses warmth towards another person, you can be sure that the voice on the telescreen will tell you to "cut it out" or else!

More than anything else, it is the telescreens which allow Big Brother and the Inner party to rule with such an iron fist. When the populace is under constant surveillance and the expectation of any degree of privacy has been cast aside, the powers that be are in complete control. They can snuff out any opposition or rebellion before it even begins. The moment they perceive the smallest incongruity, they either can intimidate people back into line or, if the "problem" appears more serious, they can send their thugs to arrest the recalcitrant individual.

While we don't have such telescreens in the world today, our government is utilizing a number of strategies to accomplish much the same thing. As I have written about before, the number of ways we are being spied on keeps growing. Phone calls are no longer private. Neither is any form of internet communication. Our letters are being photographed and the information stored. License plate readers and cameras of all sorts are being used to track our comings and goings. In-vehicle communication and safety features can now be used to listen into our conversations while we are in our vehicles and to remotely-control those vehicles without our knowledge. And domestic drones are flying overhead in many locales collecting who knows what!

Remember what I wrote above -- it is one of Orwell's central points -- When the populace is under constant surveillance and the expectation of any degree of privacy has been cast aside, the powers that be are in complete control. This is where we are headed, notwithstanding any of the gobbledygook that President Obama or Congressional leaders try to feed us. They can talk all they want about safeguards and protections, but this is the rational and logical conclusion of such strategies.

No government needs this vast amount of information from individuals not suspected or accused of any wrongdoing UNLESS they plan to utilize it in some way. These programs have little to do with protecting us from so-called terrorism and far more to do with setting up the apparatus of absolute elite control.

If we don't fight these efforts today in every way we can, the day will arrive soon when opposition will be virtually impossible. The government will know about our displeasure almost from the moment we write, say and think it. We will be silenced and/or whisked away before we can "infect" other people.

Big Brother then will reign supreme.

2013/1984, Part 7

Trey Smith

The last ministry featured in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is the Ministry of Truth. As with the other three ministries, its purpose is the exact opposite of its title. Instead of dispensing truth, its whole purpose is to spread propaganda through the distortion of facts, disinformation and outright dishonesty.

In the US government, you can find these same principle at work in a number of ways, including the misleading names given to federal legislation. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act purposely leaves a lot of children behind! The US Patriot Act has very little to do with the subject of patriotism and almost everything to do with providing the federal government with the legal framework to spy on innocent Americans.

Remember the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009? As it turned out, it helped very few families save their homes. Almost every act in the last few years that includes the word "jobs" in it has done very little to create or protect jobs. If the word "reform" appears in the title of an act, you can be very confident that it doesn't include much substantive reform and basically maintains the status quo.

~

The protagonist in Orwell's story is Winston Smith. He works for the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite history so that whatever current political perspective dominates at any given moment is reflected as being true, right and just in historical documents. This premise is explained in this Wikipedia entry as follows.

For example, if Big Brother makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, the employees of the Ministry of Truth go back and rewrite the prediction so that any prediction Big Brother previously made is accurate. This is the "how" of the Ministry of Truth's existence.

The current US government is not so brazen, but you can still see shadows of it. When Barack Obama came into office, he immediately stated that his administration would neither investigate nor prosecute any criminality of the previous administration. Not only did he handle these crooks with kid gloves, but he has adopted many of their most insidious characteristics. He has turned what was once considered renegade interpretations of law into somewhat legitimized ones. What he once opposed, he now embraces.

Though the mainstream media supposedly is independent and not a branch of government, it often is difficult to discern this fact. More often than not, they serve as a megaphone for government talking points without critically examining the veracity of those very points.

2013/1984, Part 6

Trey Smith

Now we come to the Ministry of Love which dovetails nicely with the current NSA spygate.  In Orwell's Oceania, this ministry is responsible for spying on its own citizens and dispensing torture upon anyone who doesn't show the utmost love and respect for Big Brother.  It reminds one of the Third Reich and how those who didn't show sufficient dedication to the Führer were imprisoned, systematically reprogrammed (tortured) or executed.

For the most part -- though someone like Bradley Manning might argue otherwise -- we aren't that far down this road, but we certainly are laying the bricks today to get there.  

On Wednesday, in the US House of Representatives, a vote was taken to prohibit the NSA from collecting metadata from millions of Americans without probable cause and for specific investigation.  Former constitutional scholar [President] Barack Obama implored representatives to turn a blind eye to the US Bill of Rights and to vote the measure down.  Big Brother should not be constrained!

He got his wish!  Though the vote was very close, he twisted enough arms to insure that the measure was defeated.  Now, with the blessing of the majority in the House of Representatives, his administration can get back to the job of unfettered spying on everyone.

Just like in Oceania, the President has made it crystal clear that he doesn't trust the people he serves.  Utilizing the strategy of fear of nebulous bogeymen, we are being told that our constitutional rights must be thrown to the side of the road in order to protect them!  We must give up our rights of privacy in order to have them!

Talk about doublespeak!!

Here is how Glenn Greenwald -- referring to Orwell -- summarized the Obama administration's vehement opposition to the measure shortly before the vote was taken.

Using Orwellian language so extreme as to be darkly hilarious, this was the first line of the White House's statement opposing the amendment: "In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens" (i.e.: we welcome the debate that has been exclusively enabled by that vile traitor, the same debate we've spent years trying to prevent with rampant abuse of our secrecy powers that has kept even the most basic facts about our spying activities concealed from the American people).

The White House then condemned Amash/Conyers this way: "This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process." What a multi-level masterpiece of Orwellian political deceit that sentence is. The highly surgical Amash/Conyers amendment - which would eliminate a single, specific NSA program of indiscriminate domestic spying - is a "blunt approach", but the Obama NSA's bulk, indiscriminate collection of all Americans' telephone records is not a "blunt approach". Even worse: Amash/Conyers - a House bill debated in public and then voted on in public - is not an "open or deliberative process", as opposed to the Obama administration's secret spying activities and the secret court that blesses its secret interpretations of law, which is "open and deliberative". That anyone can write a statement like the one that came from the Obama White House without dying of shame, or giggles, is impressive.

And so, just like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, almost ALL of our communications are being collected, scrutinized, analyzed and stored in giant databases.  What will be done with all this massive data?  Only Big Brother knows!

2013/1984, Part 5

Trey Smith

Going on the idea that "a poor, weak populace is easier to rule over than a wealthy, powerful" one, the Ministry of Plenty, in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, insures that the only abundance goes to the top one percent! For everyone else, supplies are tight and the quality is puny.

The various agencies of the US federal government that deal with economics -- Department of Commerce, Department of the Treasury, Office of Management and Budget, Council of Economic Advisers and Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the quasi-independent Federal Reserve -- are not that much unlike the Ministry of Plenty. These bodies and many others work to insure that most of the benefits and little of the responsibility flows to the corporate elite.

When the financial elite behave badly, the agencies who supposedly serve as the watchdogs of public monies go out of their way to shield and protect the wrongdoers from harm. When they lose billions of dollars, taxpayer funds are used to bail them out. When they engage in criminal activity, they are not prosecuted and the most they can expect is a bit of bad press and a meager slap on the wrists. When they are caught committing fraud or malfeasance, not only are they not prosecuted, but they get to keep most or all of their ill-gotten gains.

But when it comes to protecting the interests of the unwashed masses, these agencies are out to lunch! Lost your pension because some Wall Street giant gambled away your money? Too bad. Investments are risky, they opine. Lost your home due to illegal robosigning? We feel your pain, they say, but you ain't getting your house back! Losing out on basic services because of decreased federal spending? Everybody needs to sacrifice, they say, while making sure that their corporate benefactors somehow aren't included in the definition of everybody!

And what about jobs? Both corporate parties SAY that getting Americans back to work is a top priority, but neither one of them is working on any type of meaningful legislation to fix the problem. Like the Ministry of Plenty, they are determined to keep the vast majority poor and weak.

2013/1984, Part 4

Trey Smith

In the book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Inner Party ("Big Brother") controls the nation and its people through four ministries which promote the precise opposite of their names. (doublespeak). For this post, I will discuss the Ministry of Peace and the following three posts will deal with the others.

The Ministry of Peace is all about war just like the US Department of Defense over the last generation or two has been all about offense. Neither agency is interested in a state of no war because armed conflict serves the elite so well. It means fabulous riches for the few and is used to justify mass surveillance of the many. If there is any peace involved, it is the peace of mind of the military-intelligence-industrial complex as they rob the public treasury blind and few of their underlings even notice!

If we look at history, imperialistic powers need war in order to grow. Imperialism is built upon the foundation of expropriating the natural resources and people of nation-states who are far weaker than the imperialists. An imperialistic power like the US first will try economically to blackmail the elite of the target country. If this gambit works for a while, then the US is able to gobble up resources without going to war. In time, however, as the US demands a larger stake, even the most compliant nations begin to bristle. Consequently, in the name of protecting our "national interests," we extract what we want by force.

In the old days, the political elite required the acquiescence of the masses. They were able to receive the big thumbs up from the public by demonizing any nation with the temerity to get in the way of the machinations of the US elite. These days, unfortunately, the Executive Branch has grown so powerful that they basically have foregone this charade. Now, they simply announce their decision (Libya) or they don't even bother to inform the public what they are up to (Somalia, Yemen and who knows where else).

In essence, peace is one of the biggest enemies of the US elite. They will do everything possible to keep it from breaking out. Peace would turn off the golden spigot and force corporations to innovate for the public good.

2013/1984, Part 3

Trey Smith

The titular "leader" of the Inner Party and the whole of society, for that matter, is Big Brother (BB). Though presented to the masses as an actual person, BB is nothing more than the supreme power of the elite. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is a visual depiction of BB, but he never speaks to the people "himself." No, his lieutenants handle such responsibilities.

It could be argued that in today's world the US President is one such lieutenant. Though many view him -- whichever bloke happens to occupy the office at any given time -- as THE Commander-in-Chief, he is little more than a frontman for the military-intelligence-industrial complex and Wall Street. Upon winning the office, he (someday maybe she) is informed what he can and cannot do, what he can and cannot say. It doesn't matter what he campaigned on or what pledges he made. The die is already cast.

In my view, BB has much greater chance of being established in the US as opposed to Europe or Asia. While Europe has moved away from the Judeo-Christian belief system and said system never had much of a foothold in the Far East, it remains alive and well to a greater degree here.

If you think about it, the model for BB is not that much unlike the hierarchy in the Christian Church. You have this God who cannot be proven to exist, but millions of people believe he does. He never addresses the people himself; various spokespeople handle such chores (the pope for Catholics, the living prophet for Mormons, and the pastor/minister for fundamentalist Christians). We are told that these speakers have the ear of God and, in many instances, whatever they utter is deemed infallible.

It is not a big jump to utilize this same model for secular government. Big Brother IS God (or Santa Claus), in a manner of speaking. He knows when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sakes!

2013/1984, Part 2

Trey Smith

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four features a caste system that closely resembles the class structure in the US today. At the top of the ladder is the Inner Party, which is by far the smallest sector of the three groups, the 1 percent. Next comes the Outer Party which is akin to our own shrinking middle class and, on the bottom rungs of the ladder, are various divisions of Proles. The only group that enjoys any degree of freedom is the Inner Party and even they are constrained somewhat by the apparatus of the state that they've created.

In America, a tiny fraction of our population holds the fast majority of the wealth. It is because of this concentration of great wealth that the elite hold almost all of the power. They hand select the corrupt candidates we are allowed to vote on. They craft tough laws and regulations that we must follow to a T, but they themselves are exempt from. They lead us into war after war that destroys tens of thousands of lives and wastes billions of dollars...as they laugh themselves silly on their way to the bank. And when someone has the audacity to shine a spotlight on a portion of the shenanigans going on behind the proverbial curtain, they react with fury and promise to hunt that person down to the ends of the earth.

As it stands right now, we already are far down the road in the development of this impenetrable caste system. When individuals try to stand up against it, they are squashed like little bugs. One gnat will not thwart a lion, but a swarm of gnats will cause him to slow down and, maybe, even cause him to stop dead in his tracks.

2013/1984, Part 1

Trey Smith

The other night I was tooling around on YouTube and I came across a 1956 British adaptation of George Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. As I watched it -- like when I read the book two years ago -- it didn't seem like a work of fiction. It seemed more like a modern case of Nostradamus! While our world isn't as antiseptic as the fictional Oceania, it is not difficult at all to find many eerie parallels.

Two years ago -- August 2011 -- I wrote a series of posts about how many of the themes in Orwell's work could be found in today's modern world. With the advent of revelations about the breadth and depth of spying by the US and British governments (along with several allies), it seems fitting to draw your attention to these parallels again. So, over the next several days, this book will provide the fodder for my mid-morning and evening posts.

In my view, we stand at the precipice of heading down the road toward the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. We already see many of the themes of the book evident in the world today. The powers that be are instituting these changes gradually, so that they imperceptibly become new norms and, once they have been accepted as commonplace, they institute the next set of draconian measures. By this method, we are gradually finding ourselves ensnared in a trap that will only be fully understood once it is far too late to escape from.

If we do not want our children and our children's children to live in a world like Oceania, it is incumbent that we wake up to the stones being laid now. If in our apathy we allow the roadbed to be plotted out, it will become the sole highway that they will travel on. They will rue the day when we stood by and allowed our own "Inner Party" to transform this world into the beginnings of the Nineteen Eighty-Four they find themselves forced to live under.

Almost Everything Is Political

Trey Smith

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
~ from the essay, Why I Write, by George Orwell ~

It has been mentioned before by some readers that my Taoism has been unduly impacted by my socialist beliefs. It is because of my penchant for the socialist ideology, they say, that I see a lot of socialist themes running throughout Taoist thought.

My response to that is...well DUH!

We each have perspectives that color the world as we see it. We realistically can't divorce ourselves from them. To be sure, we might be able to escape them briefly in a meditative state, but it's impossible to know what is percolating in our subconscious when we sink into a state of bliss.

Life is small p political. Whether we're discussing which movie we want to watch or what trail to hike, we engage in lobbying others and, sometimes, ourselves. If we think we can get what we want through promised inducements, few of us are above a little bribery to push things our way. When we have power, we utilize it; when we don't, we protest.

The Taoist sages had a political point of view each was advancing. This is not to suggest that it was one singular political perspective; in reading the various ancient tracts, you can find more than one.

What we each get out of these writings will be impacted by our own political beliefs. It's much the same thing with the Christian Bible. That's why a fundamentalist, a mainstream Christian and a universalist can read the same passage and come away from it with completely different understandings.

Write On!

Trey Smith

From a very early age...I knew that I when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
~ from the essay, Why I Write, by George Orwell ~

This opening paragraph from Orwell's essay really resonates with me. From a very early age, I too realized that I had to write, though not necessarily as a profession. Writing has always been one of my great joys and it's hard for me to imagine my life without it.

Further on in the essay, Orwell talks of a lonely childhood and how writing provided an outlet. I was a lonely child too and so writing became a way for me to release my pent up frustrations with a world I couldn't seem to comprehend. Unlike most of my peers, I spent far more time with words than I did with people, so I suppose it's natural that words have become such intimate companions.

To this day, I can explain myself better in writing than I can in speaking. Face-to-face I'm often a jumble of words that frequently don't intersect with each other. Most people -- including members of my family -- have a hard time trying to decipher the point I'm trying to make. But this problem generally disappears when I write.

So, I write because I have to...and because I love to!

From 1984 to We

While performing some research on George Orwell's, 1984, I read that a book that inspired him was Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 novel, We. In Orwell's estimation, "Zamyatin's intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism -- human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself -- makes We superior to [Aldous] Huxley's Brave New World."

I didn't hold out much hope that I would find this old Russian dystopian novel in my local library system, but I looked anyway. To my utter surprise, not only were there several copies available, but one of those copies was housed at the Raymond Public Library. (Since Raymond is but 4 miles from South Bend, I went over there this afternoon and snatched up the book.) I even learned that one of the Assistant Librarians is fascinated by dystopian literature and had just finished reading We. So, you should expect to see several posts from themes in that book.

For now, I am putting 1984 aside. Below I will list all the posts to date that were focused on various aspects of Orwell's classic novel. I am certainly not saying this represents the end of this miniseries. I have no doubt that I will add a few more posts in the future.

• Doublethink
• 1984
• War Is Peace
• Freedom Is Slavery
• Ignorance Is Strength
• Two Minutes' Hate
• It Never Happened
• Newspeak
• Orthodoxy
• Rebellion
• Uncertain Compromises
• Love
• The Military-Industrial Complex
• The Tea Party
• Not So Far Away
• Rats
• Enemies
  

1984 - Enemies

Oceania is in a perpetual state of war. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia...except when its the other way around! Whichever enemy is named is the enemy for all-time...except when it's not. Simple, isn't it?

It's nice always to have an enemy to direct your citizens to hate. If you can keep the people focused on the soup du jour, then they'll stay out of the kitchen! They will never know that you're using roadkill as your base ingredient.

When I was a young lad the "communists" were the sworn enemy of the United States. The commies were the reason we had to stockpile nuclear weapons and all sorts of chemical and biological agents. The reds were the reason we had to have military installations all over the globe and why we had to send the CIA to Central and South America to overthrow democratically-elected governments.

The big Red Menace was so evil and diabolical (their people were ugly too!) that we couldn't let down our guard for even a nanosecond lest they sweep over the world and ultimately defeat us. We had to protect ourselves and the world from them.

But then an odd thing happened. The USSR fell apart. The enemy we had spent the better part of 4 decades hating with a blind passion dematerialized before our eyes. There was still China, but, at that time, their army and military might was no match for ours and we knew it.

The powers that be went into panic mode. They had been able to divert the public's attention away from the shenanigans they had been up to behind the proverbial curtain for so long; with no sworn enemy for the people to focus on -- egads -- the public might begin to figure out that the corporatists were stealing the country blind.

And so, they needed to create a new Public Enemy #1 and they needed to do it damn fast. What they came up with were the Muslims. The Muslims, they told us, are bloodthirsty terrorists. They hate our freedoms so much that they want to destroy the US of A.

To insure that the public would embrace the Muslims as our new sworn enemy, the government set out to provoke as many Arab nations as possible. They employed every trick in the book and, in time, they began to provoke violent responses. A few disaffected Muslims committed some violent acts and so the deal was sealed. Muslim terrorists slid seamlessly into the place that had been occupied by the dirty commie Russians.

Our new sworn enemy has provided our corporatist state with the political cover to attack a wide variety of Muslim nations. If they possess a natural resource we're interested in (oil) or we simply don't like their ruler (Libya), our government can go blow up their country to smithereens and the majority of the public will give them a big thumbs up because they are killing and maiming the people we've been conditioned to hate.

Just like Oceania, our leaders always will have enemies for us proles to despise. Once we've dispatched with the Muslims, a new group of vile miscreants will be ushered in to take their place. Who knows! Maybe the Red Menace will return in the form of China.

This series of posts based on George Orwell's novel, 1984, will be rather avant-garde. My focus will not be to explain Orwell's premises or what HE meant -- it is more about what his prose stirs in me, often in relation to the way I view the world today. Some of my observations may fall in line with Orwell's intent, but others will go off in a wholly different direction. To read my intro to this series, go here.

1984 - Rats

"You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everybody knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world."

"...In your case," said O'Brien, "the worst thing in the world happens to be rats."
~ from 1984 by George Orwell ~

As I was reading this section of the last part of the book, I was thinking about what I was most scared of. As it turns out, Winston and I are morbidly afraid of the same thing -- rats! In fact, it doesn't have to be a rat; I'm deathly afraid of mice too! Little rodents give me the heebie-jeebies.

The torturous method by which Winston would be introduced to the rats would set a person's hair on edge. His head was to be placed inside of a contraption that looked like a fencer's mask and the [sewer] rats were in an attached cage separated only by a door. All O'Brien needed to do was press a switch and the door would open. The hungry rats would then attack (i.e., eat) Winston's defenseless face.

Just the thought of this turns my stomach!

However, once I climbed away from the sheer horror of this form of torture, something struck me. Supposedly, victims meet up with their greatest fear in Room 101 (e.g., drowning, being burned to death, etc.), but who wouldn't be terrified of being eaten alive by rats? I bet that someone who had domestic rats as pets and who loved the general species would be just as terrified of two sewer rats attacking their face as anyone else.

I'm not suggesting that this represents the ONLY dastardly way to kill someone slowly and painfully, but I would think that every single person on the face of the earth would be horrified at this prospect.

Wouldn't you be?

This series of posts based on George Orwell's novel, 1984, will be rather avant-garde. My focus will not be to explain Orwell's premises or what HE meant -- it is more about what his prose stirs in me, often in relation to the way I view the world today. Some of my observations may fall in line with Orwell's intent, but others will go off in a wholly different direction. To read my intro to this series, go here.

1984 - Not So Far Away

As you can see, I'm not leading with a quote from the book this time (there will be more of that in subsequent posts). I went to bed much later that I had planned last night because I couldn't stop reading the last part of 1984 until I had finished it. When I closed the book, it left me with a very disquieted feeling.

As Winston's torture continued, O'Brien made it very clear that Big Brother and the Party could not be defeated or overthrown. With every ploy or strategy that Winston offered, O'Brien showed how it would not and could not work. In the end, no matter how he fought this eventuality, the only avenue left for our protagonist was to succumb.

While many would say that Orwell's book is one of fantasy, we're not so far away from this point today.

Over the last decade or so, the United States has started one imperialistic war after another and, while many oppose these acts of wanton aggression, we are powerless to stop them. No amount of lobbying or protests has even so much as slowed the machine down. Does anyone doubt that Syria, Iran or who knows where else will be next?

The straitjacket of the police state grows tighter around our necks each day. On the one hand, we are losing any semblance of a right to privacy. The state can intercept phone calls, text messages and letters. The state can film us for any reason they see fit. They can infiltrate our groups and associations, even when there is no suspicion of wrongdoing or criminal acts. They can look over every library book we check out and, in this computerized age, they can even get a list of every almost every item we purchase and they can plumb the depths of our medical/mental history.

On the other hand, we can't find out what the state is up to because more and more information is being cloaked in "state secrets." It is becoming harder and harder to turn our cameras on the government -- citizens are being threatened, beaten, arrested and their cameras/cell phones smashed for trying to document abuse at the hands of the state.

Our judicial system has declared over and over again that the corporation is a person -- a precursor to the perpetual Party -- and this "person" is bestowed with far more rights than the rest of us combined. This "person" can injure, maim and kill us, yet not be held personally responsible. If we withhold something that the corporate person declares is rightfully theirs, the full force of the state comes down on our necks!

What is the most alarming to me about the vision of 1984 is that we are on the road toward making Orwell's fantasy a reality. It is a very undramatic process. It happens little by little -- the increments are so small that we aren't even aware of them.

One day -- in the not so distant future -- a generation will awaken to the fact the process is complete. Big Brother and the Party will be in total control. Of course, they will have different designations, but the bloodline will be the same.

This series of posts based on George Orwell's novel, 1984, will be rather avant-garde. My focus will not be to explain Orwell's premises or what HE meant -- it is more about what his prose stirs in me, often in relation to the way I view the world today. Some of my observations may fall in line with Orwell's intent, but others will go off in a wholly different direction. To read my intro to this series, go here.

1984 - The Tea Party

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.
~ from 1984 by George Orwell ~

More than one commentator has noted the irony of the modern day Tea Party in relation to the historical event from which the name was derived. The main issue for those who participated in the Boston Tea Party (circa 1773) was the passage of the Tea Act by the British Parliament. The colonists declared that the tax imposed represented a case of taxation without representation.

The modern day Tea Party has taken this historical event and garbled the underlying message. They have turned no taxation without representation into no new taxation. Period.

Why do these common folks scream, "No new taxes?" Because the well-to-do who provide the funding for the Tea Party have convinced them that taxes -- with representation, by the way -- represent bad policy.

What is lost on many of the average people in today's Tea Party is that some of the colonists who participated in the Boston Tea Party later become leading members of America's new government and that government levied taxes.

Taxes represent part of the lifeblood of any country. This money is used to build and maintain needed infrastructure. Without it, a nation slowly will implode. It will crumble under the people's feet. But this salient fact is lost on most members of this reactionary group. They simply seem incapable of comprehending that many of the services that each of them depends on will be compromised severely if the government doesn't have the requisite revenue to fund them.

This series of posts based on George Orwell's novel, 1984, will be rather avant-garde. My focus will not be to explain Orwell's premises or what HE meant -- it is more about what his prose stirs in me, often in relation to the way I view the world today. Some of my observations may fall in line with Orwell's intent, but others will go off in a wholly different direction. To read my intro to this series, go here.