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The Parallels between 1984 and North Korea

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The Parallels between 1984 and North Korea

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The people living in North Korea has so many similarities with those living in the world of 1984. People living in North Korea aren't able to voice their own thoughts which is similar to 1984's thought crime. North Korea also has a leader and had previous leaders that's similar to Big Brother. Those that are working as a the government officials in North Korea has a high standard of living like those of the inner party in 1984. Most of those living in North Korea are suffering through starvation just likes the proles in 1984.

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This artifact is a article. It was created by Human Right's March. This article was created in 2015. The author of this article is talking to the public to gain attention of the public to help those in North Korea. This artifact showed a society that was the most accurate from Orwell's prediction about the future. This is important to us because this could happen to any society and the people living in North Korea is suffering.

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The people now days seem to be starting to become like the proles in 1984. Most people now days have access to better and accurate information about politics but seem to not have any interest in them. Just like the proles people now days are more focused on making money, earning fame, and enjoying pleasure and excitement. Most people are worried about 1st world problems, such as what's going around celebrity life, what new products are avaliable.If we lose our attention on politics we might get a leader that could change our country into a totalitarian society.

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This artifact is a article. It was created by Keri Blankinger from The New York Daily. This article was published in June 6, 2016. The author of this article is talking to the public how Orwell's prediction is becoming true today. This article shows many different predictions of Orwell such as endless war, surveillance state, newspeak,  doublethink, and how the people are becoming like the proles in the book. This is important because there is a change we might live in that society if we don't pay attention to who were going to have as our leaders and how the government is running we could live in the society Orwell predicted.

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"War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"

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"War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"

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In 1984 everyone was brainwashed to think that War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength. The country that we live in today has some things that are similar. The war on terror is very similar to 1984. War in general creates emotions like hate and patriotism which is happening the same as today. Just like in 1984 where ignorance is strength, the U.S is more concerned protecting those that are ignorant in profiling and unequal opportunity.

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The government has many ways to keep an eye on us 24/7. They are able to track where we are at any time. In 2015, the EFF (Electric Frontier Foundation) warned that the FBI is using a new secretive surveillance tool that being used around the country called the "Stingray". This device is a fake cell phone tower which lets the government search electronically for particular cell phone signal. In Seattle, there's a law where if you leave food in the trash you could get fined. This shows that the government could search through our trash and see what we throw away. Also, the FBI could turn on the mics of our devices and listen to what were hearing even though our phone is turned off.

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This Artifact is a article. It was created by Liberty Upward and was published in December 31, 2015.The author is showing the public how the government today exceeds Orwell's warnings. This artifact exceeds some of Orwell's warnings and for other parts it was similar to 1984's society. These things are happening right now. As time passes the technology gets better. If governments find a better way to keep an eye on us and keep it a secret, whatever we do would be watched. We should be cautious and be aware of what the government could do us.

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In the 21st century the U.S has been in war with different countries at once since 2001. The U.S has been at War in Afghanistan from 2001~2014. The U.S also has been at war with Iraq during (2003~2011). The U.S was also involved during the Libyan Civil War in 2011. There are 3 wars the U.S is still involved in today. Those are The war in North-West Pakistan, The war on ISIL, and The war in Afghanistan.

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This artifact is a article. This article was published by Alasdair Denvil in June 18, 2013. The author is showing the public how Orwell's predictions are becoming true today. This article shows 4 predictions that relate to the things that exist today. This artifact shows how the society we live in today has perpetual war just like 1984. This article is important to us because wars always have losses and people suffer. Living in a world where war is perpetual would cause problems to those involved in the war.

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This artifact is a magazine. It was created by Sean Fitzpatrick from Crisis Magazine. This magazine was published in August 15,2013. The author is talking to the public how close we are living to the world of 1984. It shows the similarities in our world and 1984's. This magazine is trying to tell us if we are living the world of 1984. Brainwashing is similar to 1984. We need to know how were slowly being transitioned to the world of 1984.  It's very important to know information about this world to not be ignorant and become like those living in 1984.

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The second most terrifying thing about George Orwell's 1984 is the supposition that it is possible to destroy humanity without destroying humankind. The first is how many aspects of our democratic nation resemble his dystopian nightmare.

George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 as a political satire of a totalitarian state and a denunciation of Stalinism. Orwell himself was a socialist, who fought for the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded by a sniper bullet to the throat. As the West became aware of the horrors of Stalin, Orwell became disillusioned.

1984 was Orwell's resulting futuristic-cautionary tale of Winston Smith in a world of government domination defined by anxiety, hatred, and cruelty. The Party, whose head is reverently called Big Brother, presides over existence through omnipresent surveillance and mind control. Their subjugated citizens are programmed not only to accept if Big Brother says that 2 + 2 = 5, but also to believe it. Winston's adventures begin as he slowly and fearfully steps out of the established traces, sensing the hypocrisy that surrounds and penetrates him, to search for truth. What he finds is pain.

Commenting on 1984, Orwell wrote, "I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe that something resembling it could arrive."

Has it?

Of course, the United States is not autocratic; but many of the disturbing elements of 1984 actually exist in American society. In some cases, what is happening in the U.S. is more draconian and invasive than anything Orwell conceived.

War is Peace
One of the Party pillars in 1984 is endless war on a global scale. The war, however, is a fabrication accepted and treated as fact. For, unreal as it is, it is not meaningless. World powers become enemies and allies interchangeably simply to keep the masses in perpetual fear, perpetual industry, and perpetual order. War provides outlet for unwanted emotions such as hate, patriotism, and discontent, keeping the structure of society intact and productive without raising the standard of living.

Where is the enemy-or the end-in our "war on terror?" The faceless foe and limitless objectives are productive of a widespread atmosphere of paranoia and restricted civilian liberties. In the wake of the sequestration military-spending cuts, it is also manifest that, to many, war means little more than a job.

Freedom is Slavery
The perpetual warfare in 1984 sacrifices individual freedom for collective freedom. By submitting entirely to the Party, people surrender their identity and the impulses that arise from having one, passively receiving everything. The principles of un freedom and inequality are consciously perpetuated to stifle revolution and uprising, uniting all in a trance under the watchful eye of Big Brother.

True freedom is the unimpeded capacity to realize the human good. Freedom in America is generally defined as mere license, which enslaves when human inclinations stray from the good. This American fallacy defines liberty as getting what is wanted, and moreover, that the government is there to give it. Subservience through mindless entitlement for government handouts and bailouts is not freedom, but slavery.

Ignorance is Strength
Any transgression against the Party is a capital crime. The common habit, therefore, is invincible ignorance: the appearance of orthodoxy without knowing what orthodoxy entails. The Party's world-view is impressed most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.

Has anyone read the Affordable Care Act? The plan appears to be to swallow it in blind lip-service to the ideologies of big government. This mentality is rendered common by a declining-if not fallen-education system. (Who can afford college anyway these days?) Rather than address the plague of ignorance, America seems more concerned with protecting the ignorant from profiling and unequal opportunity.

Telescreens
Practically every public and private place in Orwell's fictional world is under surveillance through "telescreens," that also broadcast announcements, news, and propaganda. They are the sleepless eyes monitoring every move, every word, every facial expression, and every involuntary reaction of every person in the effort to detect thoughtcrime. "Big Brother is watching you."

Social media keeps close record of our "likes" and activities. Our telephone calls and browsing histories are accessible to apparently any NSA analyst, according to Mr. Snowden. Our social security numbers and zip codes are increasingly part of everyday transactions. Private lives are spied upon. Drones fly overhead. Cameras record invisibly. Data is collected. We, too, are being watched.

Doublethink
Party members in 1984 practice a mental contortion that assumes two contradictory premises simultaneously for the sake of exercising control over reality. This practice is called "doublethink," and leaves no impression that reality has been violated. This mind control, or memory control, allows the Party to shape their world: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

Politicians often use forms of doublethink when they carefully and consciously lie. National Intelligence Director James Clapper, for instance, was asked at a Senate hearing last March whether the NSA collected information on millions of Americans. "No," Clapper answered. "Not wittingly." Following the NSA leak, Clapper insisted he did not lie, but responded in the "least untruthful manner." We are too accustomed to mutable "truth"-the gospel according to Wikipedia. From conflicting Benghazi reports to misleading Trayvon photographs, the media regularly and unabashedly fabricates, falsifies, and manipulates according to the agenda du jour.

A prominent feature of progress in 1984 is the language "newspeak," a stripped-down, impotent distortion of English. Orwell draws a connection between the success of the tyrannical government and the deterioration of language, as newspeak renders certain ideas literally unthinkable through reduction of vocabulary and grammar. Language control results in thought control.

We have our own variations of "newspeak" that limits what we think by limiting what we say. "Politically correct" language is speech that hedges thought. Technological autocorrect and autocomplete functions often dictate our phraseology. Emails and tweets promote stilted communication. And let us not forget text talk, which AFAICT, is not helping anything. WYSIWYG. As a language deteriorates, the grand and noble ideas it is capable of expressing are in danger of deteriorating also.

Although we are not citizens of Orwell's world, there is a complacency in our civilization that is akin to Orwellian capitulation. The fears and confusions of a rapidly changing culture and its permeating devices are disorienting and discouraging. Affairs may not be as grisly as they were for Winston Smith, but we may not be far off. After all, can facecrime really be much different than hate-crime? Is it better for sex to be reduced to its practical purpose or its pleasure? Whether memory holes or paper shredders, a society resembling Orwell's description may have arrived.

There is only so much we can do. When all are monitored, all are suspect.

"We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little."

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Orwell's 1984: Are We There Yet? - Crisis Magazine

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The second most terrifying thing about George Orwell's 1984 is the supposition that it is possible to destroy humanity without destroying humankind. The first is how many aspects of our democratic nation resemble his dystopian nightmare. George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 as a political satire of a totalitarian state and a denunciation of Stalinism.

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It would be an exaggeration to say that our world has turned into the totalitarian state outlined by George Orwell in his landmark novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four .

The planet hasn't devolved into an ongoing clash between super-states, and U.S. society is far from a quasi-communist one-party state in which individual rights are routinely ignored.

Still, it might pay to look at some interesting parallels, and to ask ourselves whether we might wind up in an Orwellian world by following a different plot.

We might be slowly, voluntarily embracing some of the same things that 1984 depicts as being forced on a world still reeling after atomic warfare.

1. Big Brother is Watching You

This, of course, is the most obvious parallel. In Orwell's 1984 , Big Brother - the purported leader of the Party that rules the nation of Oceania - keeps constant tabs on the population through "telescreens" (basically two-way televisions). With our National Security Agency (NSA) involved in , maintaining a call database ( warrantless wiretapping ), and engaged in data-mining ( ), we can be forgiven for wondering if Big Brother is no longer a fictional character. The difference, though, is that telescreens weren't owned by most people in Orwell's because they were too expensive. In the real world, however, each of us has a hand-held "telescreen" we carry with us most everywhere we go, which we've willingly paid for ourselves and which we almost never turn off. To be fair, in , our smartphones were used to defeat the Joker. But is the NSA more Batman or Big Brother? 1984, The Dark Knight

2. Perpetual War

In 1984, the Party embraces a policy of continual war so as to eat up any economic surplus and keep people poor and under control. The U.S. government isn't accomplishing anything like that, but we do seem to have a habit of moving seamlessly from one military conflict to another. Despite having left Iraq in just the past year or so and being slated to leave Afghanistan soon, we're getting more deeply involved in places like Libya and Syria. And what's going on in Syria - and spilling into Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq as well - is shaping up to be the latest episode of the Sunni-Shiite schism, a rift that has endured for over a thousand years. Not sure we can settle that one anytime soon. Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea might have atomic weapons. Yay!

3. Bread and Circuses

In 1984, the vast majority of the population - the "Proles" (i.e., proletariat) - were almost not even worthy of surveillance. So long as the Party gave them a regular infusion of food, alcohol, the lottery and pornography, they Proles were considered to be under control. Maybe Orwell was harkening back to another satirist, Juvenal, who complained about the "bread and circuses" that Imperial Rome used to control the plebians and to pry them away from their rights and responsibilities as Roman citizens. (Juvenal also helpfully gave us the phrase, "Who will watch the watchmen?", paving the way for Alan Moore's graphic novel, , which also described an alternate, dystopian 1980s.) Currently Watchmen are Kim Kardashian, trending on Google , Miss USA, and Italy's win over Mexico in the FIFA Confederations Cup. Would you like bread with that? Man of Steel

Every society engages in and linguistic evolution, but is it used for good or ill? Confucius linked the misuse of vocabulary to the warfare and social breakdown of his day, and called for a . In "rectification of names" , Orwell lays out in detail how language can be (mis)used to deceive and control the masses. In the real world today, political correctness and euphemism are both pervasive and pervasively derided. 1984 worked comedic wonders mocking our gutless linguistic evasions. But as funny as they are, they're not fictional: are George Carlin ; when the government takes less money from people it's called a wealthy people (if we don't make people perform community service, is that a work furlough?); and the by Maj. Nidal Hasan (while yelling "Allahu Akbar") is a case of "job-creators" If the fictional "tax expenditure" of makes us wince, how much more should the actual vocabulary of U.S. politics? massacre of 13 Army personnel "workplace violence." Orwellian Newspeak 1984

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4 Predictions From Orwell's '1984' That Are Coming True Today

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It would be an exaggeration to say that our world has turned into the totalitarian state outlined by George Orwell in his landmark novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four . The planet hasn't devolved into an ongoing clash between super-states, and U.S. society is far from a quasi-communist one-party state in which individual rights are routinely ignored.

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North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is an authoritarian state with a dynastic leadership that is among the most repressive in the world. In 2015, his fourth year in power, leader Kim Jong-Un continued to intensify repression, increased control over the North Korean border with China to prevent North Koreans from escaping and seeking refuge overseas, and tightened restrictions on freedom of movement inside the country. The government also punished those found with unauthorized information from outside the country-including news, films, and photos-and used public executions to generate fearful obedience.

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (COI), set up by the Human Rights Council (HRC), issued a report in 2014 documenting extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortion, and other sexual violence in North Korea. It concluded that the "gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world."

On December 10, 2015, the UN Security Council added the human rights situation in North Korea to its formal agenda, marking two years in a row, in line with a COI recommendation. The HRC and the UN General Assembly have both suggested that the Security Council consider referring the situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

On March 27, 2015, the HRC adopted a resolution condemning the government's systematic, widespread, and gross human rights violations. On June 23, UN High Commissioner Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein opened a UN office based in Seoul to help monitor and document rights abuses in North Korea. On November 19, the UN General Assembly 3rd Committee issued a resolution condemning North Korean abuses.

The North Korean government has ratified four key international human rights treaties and signed one other. Most recently, on November 10, 2014, it ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. North Korea's constitution sets forth a number of rights protections, but in reality the government quashes all forms of disfavored expression and opinion and prohibits any organized political opposition, independent media, free trade unions, and civil society organizations. Religious freedom is systematically repressed.

The government also violates economic and social rights by criminalizing and arbitrarily punishing market activities, one of the few means by which North Koreans can obtain income needed for food, medicine, and other necessities the government often fails to adequately provide the population. Government officials often require those pursuing market activities to pay bribes and sentence those unable to pay to perform forced labor in penal institutions or reform-through-labor camps.

North Korea continues to discriminate against individuals and their families on political grounds in key areas such as employment, residence, and schooling through use of the "songbun," the country's socio-political classification system that from its creation grouped people into "loyal," "wavering," or "hostile" classes. This classification has been restructured several times but continues to divide people based largely on their family background and perceived political loyalty, though corrupt practices now also influence the system.

The government also practices collective punishment for alleged anti-state offenses, effectively enslaving hundreds of thousands of citizens, including children, in prison camps and other detention facilities where they face deplorable conditions, abuse by guards, and forced labor.

Freedom of Movement

The government uses threats of detention, forced labor, and public executions to ensure obedience and imposes harsh restrictions on freedom of information and movement. It criminalizes leaving the country without official permission, and in some instances state security services actively pursue North Koreans into China, seeking to detain and forcibly return them.

During Kim Jong-Un's rule, the government has significantly expanded efforts to stop irregular crossings of North Koreans into China. The government has increased rotations of North Korean border guards, cracked down on brokers who assist people trying to leave, and prosecuted use of Chinese cell phones to communicate with the outside world. North Koreans who left the country in 2014 and 2015 told Human Rights Watch that the government was tracking down and publicly executing border guards who allowed people to cross into China in exchange for bribes.

Increased patrols, barbed-wire fences, and security cameras on the Chinese side of the border have also made crossings more difficult. Chinese authorities have also targeted broker networks in China, resulting in fewer North Koreans being able to complete the arduous journey through China to Laos or Thailand, from which most are sent on to South Korea.

China continues to label all North Koreans in China as illegal "economic migrants" and routinely repatriates them, despite its obligation to protect refugees under the Refugee Convention of 1951 and its 1967 protocol, to which China is a state party. Concerned foreign governments argue that all North Koreans fleeing into China should be considered refugees sur place regardless of their reason for flight because of the prospect of punishment on return. Beijing regularly restricts access of staff of the UN Refugee Agency to border areas where North Koreans are present.

Former North Korean security officials who have defected told Human Rights Watch that North Koreans handed back by China face interrogation, torture, and consignment to political prison camps (known as kwanliso, literally management centers) or forced labor camps. The severity of punishments depend on North Korean authorities' assessments of what the returnees did while in China. North Koreans who have fled the country since 2013 or have contacts inside the country allege that the government has started treating all defectors as enemies of the country, sending anyone caught and repatriated from China to political prison camps.

North Korean women fleeing their country are frequently trafficked into forced marriages with Chinese men or the sex trade. Even if they have lived in China for years, these women are not entitled to legal residence there and face possible arrest and repatriation at any time. Many children from these unrecognized marriages lack legal identity or access to elementary education in China.

Freedom of Information

All media and publications are state-controlled, and unauthorized access to non-state radio or TV broadcasts is punished. Internet and phone calls are limited within the country and are heavily censored. North Koreans are punished if found with mobile media such as computer flash drives or USBs containing unauthorized videos of foreign films or TV dramas. As noted above, authorities also actively track, and seek to catch and punish, persons using Chinese mobile phones to make unauthorized calls to people outside North Korea.

Labor Rights

North Korea is one of the few nations in the world that still refuses to join the International Labour Organization. Workers are systematically denied freedom of association and the right to organize and collectively bargain. The only authorized trade union organization, the General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea, is controlled by the government.

In 2003, a special administrative industrial zone at the southern border, the Kaesung Industrial Complex (KIC), was developed in cooperation with South Korea. As of September 2015, the KIC was hosting 124 South Korean companies employing 54,616 North Korean workers, supervised by 809 South Korean managers. A joint North-South Korea committee oversees the KIC, but the law governing working conditions there falls far short of international standards.

Political Prisoner Camps

Persons accused of serious political offenses are usually sent to political prison camps, operated by North Korea's National Security Agency. These camps are characterized by systematic abuses and often deadly conditions, including meager rations that lead to near-starvation, virtually no medical care, lack of proper housing and clothes, regular mistreatment including sexual assault and torture by guards, and executions.

People held in political prisoner camps face backbreaking forced labor at logging, mining, agricultural, and other worksites. These are characterized by exposure to harsh weather, rudimentary tools, and lack of safety equipment, all of which create a significant risk of accident. Death rates in these camps are reportedly extremely high.

United States and South Korean officials estimate that between 80,000 and 120,000 people are imprisoned in the remaining camps: No. 14 and 18 in Kaechun, No. 15 in Yodok, No. 16 in Hwasung, and No. 25 in Chongjin. Pyongyang does not admit the existence of any such camps in the country.

Forced Labor

Forced labor is common even outside political prison camps. People suspected of involvement in unauthorized trading schemes involving non-controversial goods are usually sent to work in forced labor brigades ( rodong danryeondae, literally labor training centers) or jipkyulso (collection centers), which are criminal penitentiaries where forced labor is required and where many women are victims of sexual abuse. Harsh and dangerous working conditions in those facilities purportedly result in significant numbers of injuries.

People whom authorities suspect of smuggling goods from China, trafficking people to China, or committing ordinary crimes or minor political infractions such as watching or selling South Koreans films are often given lengthy terms in detention facilities known as kyohwaso (correctional, reeducation centers) where detainees face forced labor, food and medicine shortages, and regular mistreatment by guards.

Key International Actors

Pyongyang's record of cooperation with UN human rights mechanisms remains among the worst in the world. Since 2013, its human rights record has been the subject of more focused UN attention than ever before, including at the Human Rights Council and Security Council, as detailed above.

Japan continues to demand the return of 12 Japanese citizens whom North Korea abducted in the 1970s and 1980s. Some Japanese civil society groups insist the number of abductees is much higher. South Korea has also stepped up its demands for the return of its citizens, hundreds of whom were reportedly abducted during the decades after the Korean War. The North Korean government has also kidnapped individuals from China, Thailand, Europe, and the Middle East.

On September 21, the HRC held a plenary panel on the situation of human rights in North Korea, addressing international abductions, enforced disappearances, and other alleged crimes.

From October 20 to 26, the two Koreas organized reunions of 186 families separated during the Korean War, the first such reunions since February 2014.

In January 2015, United States President Barack Obama issued an executive order imposing sanctions following the hacking of Sony's computers in late 2014, allegedly by groups connected to North Korea. The US sanctions on North Korea included a human rights clause for the first time.

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World Report 2016: Rights Trends in North Korea

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North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is an authoritarian state with a dynastic leadership that is among the most repressive in the world. In 2015, his fourth year in power, leader Kim Jong-Un continued to intensify repression, increased control over the North Korean border with China to prevent North Koreans from escaping and seeking refuge overseas, and tightened restrictions on freedom of movement inside the country.

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A list of words from the fictional language Newspeak that appears in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four . Note that some of these words may not strictly be Newspeak, as many of the examples come from the internal jargon of the Ministry of Truth (which is said to be "not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words").

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Since last week's revelations of the scope of the United States' domestic surveillance operations, George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," which was published sixty-four years ago this past Saturday, has enjoyed a massive spike in sales. The book has been invoked by voices as disparate as Nicholas Kristof and Glenn Beck. Even Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old former intelligence contractor turned leaker, sounded, in the Guardian interview in which he came forward, like he'd been guided by Orwell's pen. But what will all the new readers and rereaders of Orwell's classic find when their copy arrives? Is Obama Big Brother, at once omnipresent and opaque? And are we doomed to either submit to the safety of unthinking orthodoxy or endure re-education and face what horrors lie within the dreaded Room 101? With Orwell once again joining a culture-wide consideration of communication, privacy, and security, it seemed worthwhile to take another look at his most influential novel.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" begins on a cold April morning in a deteriorated London, the major city of Airstrip One, a province of Oceania, where, despite advances in technology, the weather is still lousy and residents endure a seemingly endless austerity. The narrator introduces Winston, a thirty-nine-year-old man beset by the fatigue of someone older, who lives in an apartment building that smells of "boiled cabbage" and works as a drone in the Ministry of Truth, which spreads public falsehoods. The first few pages contain all the political realities of this future society: the Police Patrol snoops in people's windows, and Thought Police, with more insidious power, linger elsewhere. Big Brother, the totalitarian figurehead, stares out from posters plastered throughout the city, and private telescreens broadcast the Party's platform and its constant stream of infotainment. Everyone simply assumes that they are always being watched, and most no longer know to care. Except for Winston, who is different, compelled as if by muscle memory to court danger by writing longhand in a real paper journal.

Thinking about Edward Snowden on Sunday, it wasn't much of a leap to imagine him and his colleagues working in some version of Oceania's Ministry of Truth, gliding through banal office gigs whose veneer of nine-to-five technocratic normality helped to hide their more sinister reality. Holed up in a hotel room in Hong Kong, Snowden seemed, if you squinted a bit, like Orwell's protagonist-hero Winston, had he been a bit more ambitious, and considerably more lucky, and managed to defect from Oceania to its enemy Eastasia and sneak a message to the telescreens back home. In fact, at one point in his interview with the Guardian, Snowden could be channelling the novel's narrator, or at least delivering a spirited synopsis of the book:

If living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept, and I think many of us are, it's the human nature, you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize that's the world that you helped create, and it's going to get worse with the next generation, and the next generation, who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk, and it doesn't matter what the outcome is, so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.

Are we living in "Nineteen Eighty-Four"? The technological possibilities of surveillance and data collection and storage surely surpass what Orwell imagined. Oceania's surveillance state operates out in the open, since total power has removed any need for subterfuge: "As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit," the narrator explains. This sounds like an analogue version of what Snowden describes: "The N.S.A., specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default." That seems like a safe operating assumption about e-mails, texts, or telephone calls-even if a person is not saying anything interesting or controversial, and even if no one is actually monitoring our communication, the notion that one's personal digital messages would remain inviolably private forever, or that they would not be saved or stored, was probably naïve. Regardless of the actual scope of the government's snooping programs, the notion of digital privacy must now, finally and forever, seem a mostly quaint one.

Meanwhile, words, as Amy Davidson points out, are manipulated by the three branches of government to make what might seem illegal legal-leading to something of a parallel language that rivals Orwell's Newspeak for its soulless, obfuscated meaning. And, indeed, there has been a hint of something vaguely Big Brotherian in Obama's response to the public outcry about domestic surveillance, as though, by his calm manner and clear intelligence, the President is asking the people to merely trust his beneficence-which many of us might be inclined to do. Even Winston, after all, learns to love Big Brother in the end.

Still, all but the most outré of political thinkers would have to grant that we are far from the crushing, violent, single-party totalitarian regime of Orwell's imagination. In one of the more chilling passages in the novel, the evil Party hack O'Brien explains, "We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about." The N.S.A., on the other hand, is primarily interested in overt acts, of terrorism and its threats, and presumably-or at least hopefully-less so in the thoughts themselves. The war on terror has been compared to Orwell's critique of "the special mental atmosphere" created by perpetual war, but recently Obama made gestures toward bringing it to an end. That is not to say, of course, that we should not be troubled by the government's means, nor is it clear that the ends will remain as generally benevolent as they seem today. But Orwell's central image of unrestrained political power, a "boot stamping on a human face-forever," is not the reality of our age.

While it's tempting to hold the present moment up beside Orwell's 1984, the book is more than a political totem, and overlooking its profound expressions of emotion robs it of most of its real power. Some novels have both the good and bad fortune of being given over to wider history, inspiring idiomatic phrases that instantly communicate a commonly understood idea. Through this transformation, books become blunt and unsubtle, losing something of their art. We might call it the Catch-22 of "Catch-22," or, in this case, of "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" is not simply a cold counterfactual. Instead, it is a love story between Winston and Julia, a younger member of the civil service, and, like many great novels, some of its high points can be found in the minor moments shared between these two characters. Their first real meeting, because of its implicit danger, is one of the more breathtakingly romantic scenes in modern literature-a mixture of lust and decorum like something out of Austen. In the office hallway, Julia slips Winston a piece of paper, a dangerous act. Filled with nervous excitement, he returns to his desk and waits a full eight minutes to look at it. When he does, the words appear as a jolt: "I love you." They arrange to meet in a crowd in order to remain anonymous. Among a mass of people, standing close, their hands touch. A love affair follows-they go to the countryside, like Adam and Eve attempting to push their way back into Eden. Later, they keep a small flat. The Party's stamping out of sex is an essential mode of control. But love, it seems, may exist in a place beyond the government's reach:

They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

But, in the end, even that place can be found-love is also a political act, and so it must be destroyed, and Orwell uses its dissolution as final, terrible evidence of the scope of oppression. Winston and Julia are broken by the Party, forced to inform on each other and, later, made to live on with the memory of having done so. The two meet a final time, and share a muted exchange, akin to one of the clipped, inarticulate breakup scenes from Hemingway, in which, bruised by heartache, no one can quite think of the right thing to say. Julia explains that by denouncing Winston, she has somehow obliterated him:

"And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer."
"No," he said, "you don't feel the same."

Were this just a novel, rather than an ideological novel with an aim to warn and instruct, it might have ended here, in ambivalence, leaving out the clever and rather heavy-handed turn of Winston's final conversion. If so, its political utility might be less clear, but we would be left instead with its artistic force and mysterious inner workings.

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Since last week's revelations of the scope of the United States' domestic surveillance operations, George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," which was published sixty-four years ago this past Saturday, has enjoyed a massive spike in sales. The book has been invoked by voices as disparate as Nicholas Kristof and Glenn Beck.

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I have, I'm afraid, a terrible confession to make: I have never been a huge fan of George Orwell's "1984." It always seemed, in its extrapolations from present to future, too pat, a little lacking in the imaginative extrapolations we want from dystopian literature. As the British author Anthony Burgess pointed out a long time ago, Orwell's modern hell was basically a reproduction of British misery in the postwar rationing years, with the malice of Stalin's police-state style added on. That other ninth-grade classic, Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," where a permanent playground of sex and drugs persists in a fiercely inegalitarian society, seemed to me far more prescient, and so did any work of Philip K. Dick's that extrapolated forward our bizarre American entertainment obsessions into an ever more brutal future in which Ken and Barbie might be worshipped as gods. "1984" seemed, in contrast, too brutal, too atavistic, too limited in its imagination of the relation between authoritarian state and helpless citizens.

An unbidden apology rises to the lips, as Orwell's book duly climbs high in the Amazon rankings: it was far better and smarter than good times past allowed us to think. What it took, of course, to change this view was the Presidency of Donald Trump. Because the single most striking thing about his matchlessly strange first week is how primitive, atavistic, and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump's brand of authoritarianism is turning out to be. We have to go back to "1984" because, in effect, we have to go back to 1948 to get the flavor.

There is nothing subtle about Trump's behavior. He lies, he repeats the lie, and his listeners either cower in fear, stammer in disbelief, or try to see how they can turn the lie to their own benefit. Every continental wiseguy, from Žižek to Baudrillard, insisted that when they pulled the full totalitarian wool over our eyes next time, we wouldn't even know it was happening. Not a bit of it. Trump's lies, and his urge to tell them, are pure Big Brother crude, however oafish their articulation. They are not postmodern traps and temptations; they are primitive schoolyard taunts and threats.

The blind, blatant disregard for truth is offered without even the sugar-façade of sweetness of temper or equableness or entertainment-offered not with a sheen of condescending consensus but in an ancient tone of rage, vanity, and vengeance. Trump is pure raging authoritarian id.

And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism-and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.

When Trump repeats the ridiculous story about the three million illegal voters-a story that no one who knows, that not a single White House "staffer," not a single Republican congressman actually believes to be true-he does not really care if anyone believes it, even if, at some crazy level, he does, sort of. People aren't meant to believe it; they're meant to be intimidated by it. The lie is not a claim about specific facts; the lunacy is a deliberate challenge to the whole larger idea of sanity. Once a lie that big is in circulation, trying to reel the conversation back into the territory of rational argument becomes impossible.

And so CNN's Jake Tapper, to his credit, may announce boldly that the story is false from beginning to end-but then he is led by his own caution and sense of professionalism to ask Trump whether, if he sees it as true, there ought to be an investigation into it. Tapper, like everyone else, knows perfectly well that a minimally honest investigation would turn up no proof of this absurdity at all. But that, of course, is the trap, the game. Watch: there will be a "commission" consisting of experts borrowed from Breitbart; it will hold no hearings, or hold absurdly closed ones; or hold ones with testimony from frequent callers to "The Alex Jones Show"-and this clownish commission will then baldly conclude that there is, indeed, widespread evidence of voter fraud. And Trump will reassert the lie and point to his commission's findings as his evidence.

Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress, thoroughly intimidated, fear shining from one eye and cupidity from the other, will exploit the "question" of voter fraud to pursue policies of actually suppressing minority voters. Caligula, the mad Roman emperor, infamously appointed his horse Incitatus to the Roman Senate, and that has been for millennia a byword for cracked authoritarian action. But we now know what would happen if Caligula appointed his horse to the Senate if the modern Republican Party happened to be in the majority there: first the Republicans would say that they didn't want to get into disputes about the Emperor's personnel choices, and then they'd quickly see how the presence of the horse could help justify dismantling regulations in the horse-chariot industry. ("Well, you know, he's an unorthodox kind of Emperor, so I don't want to get into that, Jake-but I will say that, whatever the Emperor's beliefs, we have a very inclusive party, and, if we're slackening regulations on the stables, I want to point out it's with the full and welcome participation of a horse.") The Emperor's lunacy and the senators' larceny match perfectly.

Starting this week, it's vital that everyone who is trying to maintain sanity understand that this is so-that it is a myth that reason, as normally undertaken, is going to affect this process or that "consequences," as they are normally understood, will, either. Whenever there is an authoritarian coup rooted in an irrational ideology, well-meaning people insist that it can't persist because the results are going to be so obviously bad for the people who believe in it, whether it's the theocratic revolution in Iran or the first truly autocratic Administration in America. Tragically, terribly, this is never the way it works. There is no political cost for Trump in being seen to be incompetent, impulsive, shallow, inconsistent, and contemptuous of truth and reason. Those are his politics. This is how he achieved power. His base loves craziness, incompetence, and contempt for reason because sanity, competence, and the patient accumulation of evidence are things that allow educated people to pretend that they are superior. Resentment comes before reason. Conservative intellectuals, as a reading of the Times each day reveals, turn out to share these resentments far more deeply than they value the rational practices. Having experienced this condescension, or so they imagine, on the larger stage of universities and publishing houses, they may mistrust the demagogue, but they actively hate those who demonstrate against him. The demagogue they regard only with disdain; his critics are an ancient object of hatred and contempt. If forced to choose, they will always choose the demagogue before the demonstrators. If there's one thing we really do know from social science, it's that people are far more determined to see their ancient enemies made miserable than themselves made happier.

On the positive side, well, there were the women's marches last weekend, which filled any sane heart with hope. What had seemed doubtful a short week before-that there could be unified, peaceful, indeed joyous mass action against the madness-was fully realized, and for what one hopes will be only the first of many times. It left our minds inspired with simple slogans that did not oversimplify: Community is the only cure for catastrophe. Action is the only antidote to anger. If these sound a bit like Winston's private mutterings in "1984"-when he writes secretly, for instance, that sanity is not statistical-at least they are, for the moment, still fully public truths. Pray that they remain so.

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I have, I'm afraid, a terrible confession to make: I have never been a huge fan of George Orwell's "1984." It always seemed, in its extrapolations from present to future, too pat, a little lacking in the imaginative extrapolations we want from dystopian literature.

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The second most terrifying thing about George Orwell's 1984 is the supposition that it is possible to destroy humanity without destroying humankind. The first is how many aspects of our democratic nation resemble his dystopian nightmare.

George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 as a political satire of a totalitarian state and a denunciation of Stalinism. Orwell himself was a socialist, who fought for the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded by a sniper bullet to the throat. As the West became aware of the horrors of Stalin, Orwell became disillusioned.

1984 was Orwell's resulting futuristic-cautionary tale of Winston Smith in a world of government domination defined by anxiety, hatred, and cruelty. The Party, whose head is reverently called Big Brother, presides over existence through omnipresent surveillance and mind control. Their subjugated citizens are programmed not only to accept if Big Brother says that 2 + 2 = 5, but also to believe it. Winston's adventures begin as he slowly and fearfully steps out of the established traces, sensing the hypocrisy that surrounds and penetrates him, to search for truth. What he finds is pain.

Commenting on 1984, Orwell wrote, "I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe that something resembling it could arrive."

Has it?

Of course, the United States is not autocratic; but many of the disturbing elements of 1984 actually exist in American society. In some cases, what is happening in the U.S. is more draconian and invasive than anything Orwell conceived.

War is Peace
One of the Party pillars in 1984 is endless war on a global scale. The war, however, is a fabrication accepted and treated as fact. For, unreal as it is, it is not meaningless. World powers become enemies and allies interchangeably simply to keep the masses in perpetual fear, perpetual industry, and perpetual order. War provides outlet for unwanted emotions such as hate, patriotism, and discontent, keeping the structure of society intact and productive without raising the standard of living.

Where is the enemy-or the end-in our "war on terror?" The faceless foe and limitless objectives are productive of a widespread atmosphere of paranoia and restricted civilian liberties. In the wake of the sequestration military-spending cuts, it is also manifest that, to many, war means little more than a job.

Freedom is Slavery
The perpetual warfare in 1984 sacrifices individual freedom for collective freedom. By submitting entirely to the Party, people surrender their identity and the impulses that arise from having one, passively receiving everything. The principles of un freedom and inequality are consciously perpetuated to stifle revolution and uprising, uniting all in a trance under the watchful eye of Big Brother.

True freedom is the unimpeded capacity to realize the human good. Freedom in America is generally defined as mere license, which enslaves when human inclinations stray from the good. This American fallacy defines liberty as getting what is wanted, and moreover, that the government is there to give it. Subservience through mindless entitlement for government handouts and bailouts is not freedom, but slavery.

Ignorance is Strength
Any transgression against the Party is a capital crime. The common habit, therefore, is invincible ignorance: the appearance of orthodoxy without knowing what orthodoxy entails. The Party's world-view is impressed most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.

Has anyone read the Affordable Care Act? The plan appears to be to swallow it in blind lip-service to the ideologies of big government. This mentality is rendered common by a declining-if not fallen-education system. (Who can afford college anyway these days?) Rather than address the plague of ignorance, America seems more concerned with protecting the ignorant from profiling and unequal opportunity.

Telescreens
Practically every public and private place in Orwell's fictional world is under surveillance through "telescreens," that also broadcast announcements, news, and propaganda. They are the sleepless eyes monitoring every move, every word, every facial expression, and every involuntary reaction of every person in the effort to detect thoughtcrime. "Big Brother is watching you."

Social media keeps close record of our "likes" and activities. Our telephone calls and browsing histories are accessible to apparently any NSA analyst, according to Mr. Snowden. Our social security numbers and zip codes are increasingly part of everyday transactions. Private lives are spied upon. Drones fly overhead. Cameras record invisibly. Data is collected. We, too, are being watched.

Doublethink
Party members in 1984 practice a mental contortion that assumes two contradictory premises simultaneously for the sake of exercising control over reality. This practice is called "doublethink," and leaves no impression that reality has been violated. This mind control, or memory control, allows the Party to shape their world: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

Politicians often use forms of doublethink when they carefully and consciously lie. National Intelligence Director James Clapper, for instance, was asked at a Senate hearing last March whether the NSA collected information on millions of Americans. "No," Clapper answered. "Not wittingly." Following the NSA leak, Clapper insisted he did not lie, but responded in the "least untruthful manner." We are too accustomed to mutable "truth"-the gospel according to Wikipedia. From conflicting Benghazi reports to misleading Trayvon photographs, the media regularly and unabashedly fabricates, falsifies, and manipulates according to the agenda du jour.

A prominent feature of progress in 1984 is the language "newspeak," a stripped-down, impotent distortion of English. Orwell draws a connection between the success of the tyrannical government and the deterioration of language, as newspeak renders certain ideas literally unthinkable through reduction of vocabulary and grammar. Language control results in thought control.

We have our own variations of "newspeak" that limits what we think by limiting what we say. "Politically correct" language is speech that hedges thought. Technological autocorrect and autocomplete functions often dictate our phraseology. Emails and tweets promote stilted communication. And let us not forget text talk, which AFAICT, is not helping anything. WYSIWYG. As a language deteriorates, the grand and noble ideas it is capable of expressing are in danger of deteriorating also.

Although we are not citizens of Orwell's world, there is a complacency in our civilization that is akin to Orwellian capitulation. The fears and confusions of a rapidly changing culture and its permeating devices are disorienting and discouraging. Affairs may not be as grisly as they were for Winston Smith, but we may not be far off. After all, can facecrime really be much different than hate-crime? Is it better for sex to be reduced to its practical purpose or its pleasure? Whether memory holes or paper shredders, a society resembling Orwell's description may have arrived.

There is only so much we can do. When all are monitored, all are suspect.

"We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little."

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Orwell's 1984: Are We There Yet? - Crisis Magazine

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The second most terrifying thing about George Orwell's 1984 is the supposition that it is possible to destroy humanity without destroying humankind. The first is how many aspects of our democratic nation resemble his dystopian nightmare. George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 as a political satire of a totalitarian state and a denunciation of Stalinism.

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I recently read 1984, and had some thoughts to share. Spoilers.

Mass Surveillance
Because of course. This is what the story is most well known for, although we'll see there's a lot more to it than that. The protagonist, a gov't party man named Winston, lives in a world covered in cameras, and under 24/7 surveillance.
This is eerily similar to the recent leaks by Snowden, PRISM, and everything we're learning about the NSA surveillance in our world. Privacy is a relic.

Endless War on Ever-Changing Enemies
The book takes place in a totalitarian England, under the rule of English Socialism, or INGSOC. This land, now called Oceania, is allied with Eastasia and at constant war with Eurasia. Or was it the other way around? The tides of war constantly shift and once the Government says The Enemy is now renamed, It Must Be So. Everything changes to reflect this fact, and mentioning the shift is a crime. This is similar to the constant New Face of Terror we've seen with Taliban/Al Qaeda/ISIS, or how war changes from Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan/Syria constantly, as if these nations were interchangeable.

Self Inflicted Attacks to Control the Populace
Eventually Winston learns that the war itself may be an elaborate fabrication, and that Oceania may be staging attacks on its own country in order to keep the citizens in line, and control them through fear. This also causes the regular citizenry to support the war effort, unaware of the truth. The other enemies may not even exist! Operation North Woods, anyone? I don't even need to mention that Other Date. You all know what I'm talking about.

Mass Mind Control through Press and Propaganda
I haven't told you about Winston's job yet. He works as a media journalist whose job it is to edit and rewrite historical records to support the INGSOC causes. This means altering facts, fabricating entirely false information and then printing it as war propaganda, and destroying the evidence of his tampering. He's done this for years without question, to him it's just a job.
Again, we are familiar with the way the Press controls and contains the flow of information in our society, and as Winston realizes in the book, If It Isn't Recorded in History It Never Happened. He writes a fact out of existence, and it ceases having ever been true at all.

Subversive Mind Control through Education and Language
Another branch of government is in control of education and begins to rewrite language into Newspeak. Words like "bad" are replaced with the less offensive "ungood". The idea being that by contorting language you can control the direction of peoples' very thoughts, and make certain lines of logic impossible to consider and literally unspeakable.
If this is occurring in our current society, I'm not sure yet, although certain things I've discovered about Common Core are certainly alarming.

The Criminalization of Free Thought
Thought Crime in Winston's world is the act of having any subversive, original, or unsanctioned thought, and results in the individual suspected to be made to Disappear. Literally every trace and record of your existence is wiped from the public memory. Enemies who don't exist are the easiest to control. Of course Big Brother doesn't have to prove you had a criminal thought, just arrest you under the suspicion that you might have.
We haven't seen anything like that on Reddit recently, have we? It's not like shadowbanning people for free thinking speech and erasing their posts... Nah that's too easy.

Psychological Mind Control through Paranoia and Ritual
Every day, the citizenry are forced to partake in The 2 Minute Hate, a brainwashing exercise where citizens spew curses and rage against Goldstein, the leader of an underground resistance party and terrorist cell group.
Again, I find the similarities almost too obvious to mention, but the way we are expected to hate all members of a certain race or country, spewing hateful pap against people we don't even know in order to promote the needs of Uncle Sam... It seems to fit.

Controlled Resistance through Fabricated Shills
In another major plot twist, we eventually discover that the Resistance which Winston runs away to join, does not even exist. In order to trap would-be rebels, INGSOC fabricated their own dummy-resistance army. Anyone who seeks to fight them gets swept into it and eliminated. Even Goldstein, the man everyone is conditioned to hate, is illusory. What matters is they are being conditioned to Obey, and hate the idea of what he represents: Free Thought, and Resistance.
Limited Hangouts, media shills, pinning the blame for shootings and attacks on individuals who could not possibly be responsible for them... It's all there to control us.

The Hope Lies with the People
Winston, a member of government, realizes that the only way change will ever occur is if the regular members of the population, the proletariats, or "Proles" as he calls them, openly choose to revolt. The problem is these people live relatively comfortable lives, are ignorant of the truth, and seem resistant to the idea of the government conspiracies he tries to express to them. He knows that they are so numerous and influential that the course of the future will be determined by their action or failure to act. He also knows that the herd mentality of the masses means that change will probably never happen.
That reminds me of today because...
...

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r/conspiracy - 9 Similarities Between 1984 and Today

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r/conspiracy: **The conspiracy subreddit is a thinking ground. Above all else, we respect everyone's opinions and ALL religious beliefs and creeds. We hope to challenge issues which have captured the public's imagination, from JFK and UFOs to 9/11. This is a forum for free thinking, not hate speech.

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Big Brother Government

George Washington said it best when he described government in this way:

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence - it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."

Today, irresponsible action seems to be the only thing the big brother government is capable of. How far we have come from the constitutional Republic George Washington fought for, and many others died for.

Here is a list of things our government is doing to "we the people|, that violates our rights in the same manner, or worse, than the horrific government of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel. 1984.

1.) The government searches your trash

In Seattle, wasting food will now earn you a scarlet letter - well, a scarlet tag, to be more accurate.

The bright red tag, posted on a garbage bin, tells everyone who sees it that you've violated a new city law that makes it illegal to put food into trash cans.

"I'm sure neighbors are going to see these on their other neighbors' cans," says Rodney Watkins, a lead driver for Recology CleanScapes, a waste contractor for the city. He's on the front lines of enforcing these rules.

2.) The government tracks the location of your cellphone

A few months ago, EFF warned of a secretive new surveillance tool being used by the FBI in cases around the country commonly referred to as a "Stingray." Recently, more information on the device has come to light and it makes us even more concerned than before.

The device, which acts as a fake cell phone tower, essentially allows the government to electronically search large areas for a particular cell phone's signal-sucking down data on potentially thousands of innocent people along the way. At the same time, law enforcement has attempted use them while avoiding many of the traditional limitations set forth in the Constitution, like individualized warrants. This is why we called the tool "an unconstitutional, all-you-can-eat data buffet."

3.) The government can see through the walls of your home

WASHINGTON - At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.

Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the inside of a person's house without first obtaining a search warrant.

The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving.

4.) The government attacks leakers who tell you about the illegal things the government does

The Obama administration has been carrying out an unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers, particularly on those who have divulged information that relates to national security. The Espionage Act, enacted during the first World War to punish Americans who aided the enemy, had only been used three times in its history to try government officials accused of leaking classified information - until the Obama administration. Since 2009, the administration has used the act to prosecute six government officials. Meet the whistleblowers.

5.) The government tortures

Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA's torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee's executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency's secret "black sites."

In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: "We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program." Mitchell and Jessen's qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of "learned helplessness" derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies.

To implement those theories, Mitchell and Jessen oversaw or personally engaged in techniques intended to produce "debility, disorientation and dread." Their "theory" had a particular means-ends relationship that is not well understood, as Mitchell testily explained in an interview on Vice News: "The point of the bad cop is to get the bad guy to talk to the good cop." In other words, "enhanced interrogation techniques" (the Bush administration's euphemism for torture) do not themselves produce useful information; rather, they produce the condition of total submission that will facilitate extraction of actionable intelligence.

6.) The government wants to control what you say

When protesters arrived in Bunkerville last week to join rancher Cliven Bundy's battle against the federal government, they came angry.

They were angry about how the Bureau of Land Management was treating Bundy and his family, whose cattle feeding on public land were being rounded up because of his refusal to pay grazing fees over a 20-year period.

But many of them seemed even more upset about what they saw as the trampling of their First Amendment right to free speech.

They're not alone.

Some First Amendent supporters say the "free speech zones" like the ones the BLM set up - and later dismantled after public outrage - are intended to stifle rather than encourage debate. The federal land agency said that all other areas in the 1,200-square-mile Gold Butte closure area were off-limits to people for stating their opinions.

Regardless of the purpose, advocates say such zones are an inappropriate infringement of free speech.

7.) The government spies on all your internet activity

George Orwell's fictional Big Brother monitoring everyone's lives is "nothing" compared to surveillance today, U.S. secrets leaker Edward Snowden says on TV.

"Great Britain's George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information," Snowden says, referring to Orwell's dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," about a superstate in a world of perpetual war and omnipresent government surveillance that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as "thoughtcrimes."

"The types of collection in the book - microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us - are nothing compared to what we have available today," Snowden says in broadcast excerpts released in advance of a recorded Christmas message to air on Britain's Channel 4 at 4:15 p.m. (11:15 a.m. EDT).

"We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go," he says, apparently referring to cellphones. "Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.

8.) The government is fighting endless wars in your name and handing you and your children the bill

Long before Americans were introduced to the new 9/11 era super-villains called ISIS and Khorasan, senior Obama officials were openly and explicitly stating that America's "war on terror," already 12 years old, would last at least another decade. At first, they injected these decrees only anonymously; in late 2012, The Washington Post - disclosing the administration's secret creation of a "disposition matrix" to decide who should be killed, imprisoned without charges, or otherwise "disposed" of - reported these remarkable facts:

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."

In May, 2013, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether it should revise the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). A committee member asked a senior Pentagon official, Assistant Secretary Michael Sheehan, how long the war on terror would last; his reply: "At least 10 to 20 years." At least. A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed afterward "that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today - atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted." As Spencer Ackerman put it: "Welcome to America's Thirty Years War," one which - by the Obama administration's own reasoning - has "no geographic limit."

9.) The government uses x-rays to search you and if you refuse they touch your private parts

If you want to get on an airplane in America today, you either have to allow TSA security officials to gawk at your exposed body using the new full body scanners that literally show "everything", or you must submit to the new "enhanced pat-downs". These pat-downs are so intrusive that many of those who have experienced them are using the term "sexual assault". The truth is that TSA officials have been instructed to start using the fronts of their hands to feel the outlines of male and female genitalia during these pat-downs. Not only that, but instead of going over the clothing, in many instances it is being reported that TSA officials are actually reaching down the pants and up the skirts of air travelers. Some TSA officials are doing this hundreds of times a day, and they do not put on clean gloves each time they perform an examination.

This is what America has sunk to. Today, in the "land of the free and the home of the brave", Americans are groped like farm animals by tyrannical thugs who get to do pretty much whatever they want with us. Things have gotten so bizarre that now even a columnist for Forbes magazine is calling for the TSA to be abolished.

The following are 7 TSA horror stories that are almost too shocking to believe. But all of them are actually true....

10.) The government is monitoring, encrypting and storing nearly every you make in public

Recent reports published by WikiLeaks have revealed that the US government is using highly advanced spyware to watch its own citizens. The system, called TrapWire, allegedly accesses all surveillance cameras nationwide and sends collected data to a main database, where the images are stored. RT's Marina Portnaya reveals more about the mysterious software.

11.) The government uses unmanned drones to monitor you from above, all the time

A new camera developed by the Pentagon's research arm was highlighted in a recent special on PBS' "Nova" in an episode called "Rise of the Drones." It's a camera system so detailed it can discern specific movements and even what a subject is wearing.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS) has 1.8 billion pixels (1.8 gigapixels), making it the world' highest resolution camera. The sensors on the camera are so precise, PBS stated it is the equivalent to the capabilities of 100 Predator drones in a medium city.
In the clip from PBS, it is said this is the first time the government has allowed information to be shared about these capabilities.
"It is important for the public to know that some of these capabilities exist," Yiannis Antonaides with contractor BAE Systems said in the clip, but noted the sensor itself cannot be revealed. "Because we are not allowed to expose some of the pieces that make up this sensor, so you get to look a pretty plastic curtains."

The technology allows the user to open up a specific windows of interest in the camera's view while still keeping up an image of the larger picture (sort of like split screen). Antonaides explained that the colored boxes in the image show that the sensor recognized moving objects. "You can see individuals crossing the street. You can see individuals walking in parking lots. There's actually enough resolution to see the people waving their arms or walking around or what kind of clothes they wear," he said. PBS noted that ARGUS can actually see much more details than just attire. It can see objects as small as six inches. At 2:23 in the clip, Antonaides points out that from 17,500 feet, a white object in the field of view is a bird flying. PBS pointed out that DARPA put a time crunch on creating the camera, which lead Antonaides to look into technology that you probably have in your purse or pocket at this very moment. Taking similar imaging systems used in smartphones and putting 368 together, is essentially how Antonaides and other engineers at BAE Systems created ARGUS. It is this "mosaic" of cameras that allows the system to zoom in on specific sections in extreme detail. As for data, the system stores up to 1 million terabytes a day. Putting this into perspective, PBS notes this is equal to 5,000 hours of HD footage.

"You can go back and say 'I would like to know what happened at this particular location three days, two hours, four minutes ago' and it would actually show you what happened as if you were watching it live," Antonaides said.

It is still classified information whether ARGUS has been used in the field yet.

12.) The government can turn on your cellphone and and listen to you

The FBI can turn on the mic on your cell phone and eaves drop even with the phone is turned off. Our rights as AMERICANS are being torn away by this corrupt government.

13.) The government wants to control your thoughts

The insidious thing about evolutionary tyranny is that it's gradual progression. It doesn't beat you over the head with the iron fist of a despot or sweep you aside with a wave of revolution, but, rather, is a death by a thousand doses of bad medicine that makes benign neglect seem utopian.

One example of this brand of tyranny is the proliferation of hate-crime laws in the Western World. The very concept of hate-crime law itself is an offense against freedom and, as such, is quintessentially un-American. Yes, I hate hate-crime laws. And so should you.

The main problem with hate-crime law is that it is an effort at thought-control masquerading as legitimate criminal-justice legislation. Let's examine why this is so.

14.) The government has corrupted the media you watch

Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (which is one of Germany's largest newspapers), has decided to go public about the corruption of himself and the rest of the Western 'news' media, because he finds that this corruption is bringing Europe too close to a nuclear war against Russia, which he concludes the U.S. aristocracy that controls the CIA wants to bring about, or else to bring closer to the brink.

15.) The government is massively subsidizing mind altering pharmaceutical medications

Has there ever been a nation more hooked on drugs than the United States? And I am not just talking about illegal drugs - the truth is that the number of Americans addicted to legal drugs is far greater than the number of Americans addicted to illegal drugs. As you will read about below, more than 30 million Americans are currently on antidepressants and doctors in the U.S. wrote more than 250 million prescriptions for painkillers last year. Sadly, most people got hooked on these drugs very innocently. They trusted that their doctors would never prescribe something for them that would be harmful, and they trusted that the federal government would never approve any drugs that were not safe. And once the drug companies get you hooked, they often have you for life. You see, the reality of the matter is that some of these "legal drugs" are actually some of the most addictive substances on the entire planet. And when they start raising the prices on those drugs, there isn't much that the addicts can do about it. It is a brutally efficient business model, and the pharmaceutical industry guards their territory fiercely. Very powerful people will often do some really crazy things when there are hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. The following are 22 facts about America's endless pharmaceutical nightmare that everyone should know...

16.) The government has turned the police into a military force that violates your rights

The intensive militarization of America's police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction. In a 2007 paper on "the blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement," the criminal justice professor Peter Kraska defined "police militarization" as "the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model."

The harrowing events of the last week in Ferguson, Missouri - the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager, Mike Brown, and the blatantly excessive and thuggish response to ensuing community protests from a police force that resembles an occupying army - have shocked the U.S. media class and millions of Americans. But none of this is aberrational.

It is the destructive by-product of several decades of deliberate militarization of American policing, a trend that received a sustained (and ongoing) steroid injection in the form of a still-flowing, post-9/11 federal funding bonanza, all justified in the name of "homeland security." This has resulted in a domestic police force that looks, thinks, and acts more like an invading and occupying military than a community-based force to protect the public.

17.) The government keeps putting more and more Americans in prison

The growth of the private detention industry has long been a subject of scrutiny. A recent eight-part series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune chronicled how more than half of Louisiana's 40,000 inmates are housed in prisons run by sheriffs or private companies as part of a broader financial incentive scheme. The detention business goes beyond just criminal prisoners.

As a Huffington Post investigation pointed out last month, nearly half of all immigrant detainees are now held in privately run detention facilities. Just this week, the New York Times delved into lax oversight at industrial-sized but privately run halfway houses in New Jersey.

We've taken a look at some of the numbers associated with the billion-dollar and wide-ranging for-profit detention industry-and the two companies that dominate the market:
General Statistics:
1.6 million: Total number of state and federal prisoners in the United States as of December 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics

128,195: Number of state and federal prisoners housed in private facilities as of December 2010

37: percent by which number of prisoners in private facilities increased between 2002 and 2009

217,690: Total federal inmate population as of May 2012, according to the Bureau of Prisons

The government has forgotten this...

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17 Ways Today's Big Brother Government Exceeds Orwell's Fears

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George Washington said it best when he described government in this way: "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence - it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."

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President Trump may not be a big reader, but he's been a boon for sales of dystopian literature. Amid our thirst for adult coloring books and stories about missing girls and reincarnated puppies, some grim old classics are speaking to us with new urgency. Ray Bradbury's " Fahrenheit 451 ," Aldous Huxley's " Brave New World " and Margaret Atwood's " The Handmaid's Tale " have all risen up the latest paperback bestseller list.

But by far the greatest beneficiary of our newly piqued national anxiety is George Orwell's "1984."

Soon after senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Sunday that the administration was issuing "alternative facts," Orwell's classic novel spiked to No. 1 on Amazon. Like officials from the Ministry of Truth, Conway and White House press secretary Sean Spicer doubled down on Trump's fanciful contention that his inauguration drew the "largest audience ever," despite a Web-full of photographic evidence to the contrary. The Twittersphere responded with allusions to "1984," and Penguin announced plans for a special 75,000-copy reprint , noting that since the inauguration, sales for the novel have increased by 9,500 percent.

Leaders have always tried to manipulate the truth, of course, and modern politicians of all persuasions want to "control the narrative," but there's something freshly audacious about the president's assault on basic math, his effort to assemble from the substance of his vanity hundreds of thousands of fans on the Mall.

Almost 70 years after "1984" was first published, Orwell suddenly feels doubleplus relevant. Considering the New Trumpmatics, it's impossible not to remember Winston Smith, the hero of "1984," who predicted, "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it."

Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker is not at all surprised by the renewed interest. "The continuing popularity of 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is a reminder," he said via email, "of the threat to democracy posed by those with power who proclaim 'alternative facts' and deny objective truths. Big Brother's pronouncements are treated as absolute truth by his acolytes, even when they defy rational thought - so Black is White, 2+2=5, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength."

['George Orwell Diaries,' edited by Peter Davison]

Born in 1903, Orwell lived through two world wars and saw the rise of totalitarian regimes on an unpresidented scale. In a widely quoted letter written in 1944, he decried "the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth." He went on to explain with rising alarm: "Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered." Now we're being told that millions of illegal immigrants kept Trump from winning the popular vote and that the science behind climate change is a Chinese hoax.

This is ungood.

But Democrats shouldn't feel too smug about Trump's fluency in Newspeak. The Obama administration did its best to conceal that the National Security Agency is listening to our electronic communications, an eerie parallel to the surveillance described in "1984." And it was President Bill Clinton who brought the country to a constitutional climax by claiming that the truth of his testimony regarding "that woman" depended "on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" - an Orwellian clarification if there ever was one.

Besides, Orwell wasn't writing about a particular party. Although he was inspired by full-scale abuses in the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, he was also borrowing from the methods of communication control he had witnessed in Britain. He was describing, in other words, the basic function of power, the tendency of leaders and governments - "from Conservatives to Anarchists" - to cement their authority by controlling our language and by extension our thought and behavior.

Like most people who still pick up a newspaper in their yard every morning, I first read "1984" in school, long before 1984. I can remember worrying about how much of what Orwell described might come true by that year. But as a teenager, what frightened me most was those horrible torture scenes, particularly the unspeakable threat of the rat mask that eventually breaks Winston's will. Only later did I start to appreciate the real profundity of Orwell's insights, laid out so succinctly in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language."

In that brilliant critique, Orwell casts the blame for political corruption widely, and he insists that we all bear a responsibility to resist it by thinking and especially by writing more clearly. "One ought to recognize," he wrote, "that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end." There's a patriotic challenge you won't hear coming from Washington, no matter which party is in power.

Fortunately, we're not living under the dystopian terror that Orwell described in "1984." Our new leader is not the manufactured icon of a supreme state. He's a supernova of insecurities, tweeting out his insults and threats to increasingly perplexed citizens who still - for the moment, at least - enjoy the right to object in whatever language they choose.

Ron Charles is the editor of Book World. You can follow him @RonCharles.

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President Trump may not be a big reader, but he's been a boon for sales of dystopian literature. Amid our thirst for adult coloring books and stories about missing girls and reincarnated puppies, some grim old classics are speaking to us with new urgency.

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List of wars involving the United States - Wikipedia

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This is a list of direct armed conflicts involving the United States of America since its founding during the American Revolution.

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Are Millennials Being Brainwashed by Social Media?

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Twenty years from now, people will have crooked thumbs, arthritis in their hands, and hunched backs from looking down at and typing on their cellphones. Generations have shifted from reading the newspaper to reading off of phone screens and from watching local news to looking at laptop screens.

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A summary of Themes in George Orwell's 1984. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of 1984 and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.

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eorge Orwell and Aldous Huxley, two of England's foremost literary figures of the last century, each wrote a compelling description of a future dystopia, both of them nightmare visions of society totally under the control of a ruling clique whose only purpose is the enjoyment of power. In Orwell's
1984 the ruling tyrant is named Big Brother and is clearly modelled on Stalin, whilst in Huxley's Brave New World the ruler is known as the Director, a character somewhat less sinister and brutal than Orwell's Big Brother. The two books are of course very different. Brave New World is a black comedy, which does actually make us laugh, whereas there is absolutely nothing funny about 1984. Nonetheless, there are similarities between the two, and both men can be said to have accurately predicted certain specific features of the world we now inhabit.

The most striking parallel of course is that both men foresaw the future as totalitarian rather than democratic and free. Neither presumably believed their vision of the future to be inevitable, though it is equally clear that each saw aspects of mid-twentieth century life which clearly pointed in the totalitarian direction. Thus 1984 and Brave New World may be seen as warnings against what might be if the trends identified by the two authors persisted. What these trends were and why the authors saw them leading towards totalitarianism is an important question and one that will be addressed presently.

The totalitarian states described by Orwell and Huxley differed in most details, though there were also many correspondences. Both Big Brother's world and the Brave New World are ruled by authoritarian elites of a basically socialist/communist nature, whose only real purpose is the maintenance of their own power and privileges. Both worlds are materialist to the core and religion has been effectively excised from the consciousness of the populace. Furthermore, in both dystopias the family has virtually ceased to exist. A remnant of it survives in Orwell's world, though even here the true loyalty of children (and spouses) is to the state. In Huxley's Brave New World however the family does not exist at all, and children are conceived in hatcheries and raised in factory-farm conditions. Indeed, in Huxley's dystopia science has been utilized by the elite to facilitate its control, and special types of humans, ranging from intelligent alphas to epsilon "semi-morons" are bred in test-tubes to perform specific functions. Marriage does not exist and promiscuous and even perverted sexual activity is encouraged by the state.

Both the differences and the parallels between the two visions are of great interest. Orwell's nightmare future is based squarely on the reality of Stalin's brutal regime in the Soviet Union, and tends thus to look backward rather than forward. He does not, for example, on the whole, foresee the importance of technology in the repertoire of the future dictatorship, though his "telescreens," by which Big Brother keeps an eye on everyone, is rightly viewed as stunningly prophetic of our age of massive electronic surveillance.

Huxley, by contrast, has science and technology right at the heart of his dystopia. The Directors use technology to control everything - including the genetic makeup of each citizen's body. And for this reason the heroes of technology and industry - such as Henry Ford - are as much honoured in the Brave New World as Marx and Lenin, the heroes of socialism. This is a crucial clue to Huxley's world-view and central to his idea that the future could well be totalitarian. For Huxley, the materialism of the socialists is in essence no different from the materialism of the technocrats and capitalists; they are simply two different sides of the same materialist coin.

Several aspects of modern life seem to have been very accurately predicted by both Orwell and Huxley. Orwell's idea of "New Speak," for example, the deliberate remoulding and distortion of the English language by Big Brother, has been rightly compared to the politically correct manipulation of language that has become all too familiar in western societies over the past twenty to thirty years. The political purpose of "New Speak" is to control the thinking of the populace - not too different in aim from the new terms and words coined by political correctness. Huxley does not go into the language issue in the same way as Orwell, though we note too that in the Brave New World certain "offensive" words - such as "cross" - have been eliminated from public use. Thus for example Charing Cross Station in London has been renamed "Charing T Station" - after Henry Ford's Model T automobile.

Related to the question of language, both writers foresaw the rewriting of history, or rather the complete elimination of history in any meaningful sense of the word, in the totalitarian future. Thus in Big Brother's world there exists a whole government department, the Ministry of Truth, whose purpose is the falsification of history. The Ministry's task is to destroy real historical documents and forge others more pleasing to Big Brother. The destruction of historical consciousness is so complete that even traditional songs and nursery rhymes are all but forgotten by the populace. A similar situation prevails in the Brave New World. Here too there is no historical consciousness amongst the people and in fact all "education" is simply conditioning by the state.

How frighteningly reminiscent of modern norms, where the "history" curricula in western schools is increasingly little more than politically correct conditioning!

Another area of agreement between the two writers centres round the attitude of the elites to what might be termed the "lower classes." In Big Brother's world the lower classes are described as the "proles," a vast section of society deliberately kept in ignorance by the state. In the "prole" areas the state permits a kind of chaos to reign. Drunkenness and crime are tolerated and even encouraged. Similarly, in Huxley's Brave New World the lower classes, from the gammas down to the epsilons, are actually genetically engineered to be stupid, and they are furthermore provided with a mind-altering drug, named "soma," to keep them thoroughly stupefied and malleable.

Again, we note the striking correspondence with the norms in many western societies - especially in the English-speaking world - where a de-educated and essentially feral "underclass" has been permitted to develop over the past thirty to forty years. Not only is this underclass utterly ignorant, it is malnourished on a diet of "pop" culture, drugs and alcohol, and is utterly incapable of breaking free of the welfare addiction which saps the very life out of it.

Who then was most right: Orwell or Huxley, and more importantly, why did these two see the future as totalitarian?

Of the two dystopian visions, it has to be admitted that, so far, Huxley seems more correct. This statement is made on the qualification that we understand his Brave New World to be a comedy and therefore an exaggeration and parody of reality. Taking this into account, we can see that the emerging totalitarianism appears in many areas to be very much in conformity with Huxley's vision. The hedonism and ignorance encouraged by the modern elites is truly mirrored in the Brave New World, and the soma consumed by the brain-dead masses is quite literally paralleled in the mind-altering drugs which plague the working-class areas of the modern cities. And, so far, the "soft power" exercised by the Director is more in conformity with the type of totalitarian control exerted by the western elites than the brutal control exercised by Big Brother. As yet, there are no concentration camps or Room 101s. Having said that, it needs to be emphasized that the situation is fluid, and the possibility of a much more oppressive form of totalitarianism, in the image of Big Brother's 1984, is one that cannot be discounted. Over the past twenty years we have witnessed, in most western societies, a progressive closing down of freedom of speech and disenfranchisement of the populace. It would take very little, I suggest, to transform the "soft power" of Huxley's Director into the "hard power" of Orwell's Big Brother.

How then did these authors, in the 1940s and '50s, realize the totalitarian direction of western societies?

The answer, I think, is fairly straightforward: They saw in their own time the drift to the left of the intellectual elites of the West and they simply imagined the consequences if this drift continued. The deceptive and apparent "humanitarianism" of socialism made the continuation of this trend highly likely, particularly in the aftermath of World War II, when the world woke to the horrors of fascism. (That fascism was itself originally an outgrowth of socialism was of course all too easily forgotten). The very utopianism of socialism, particularly in its Marxist guise, is bound to lead to totalitarianism, as any system which believes itself involved in a project to "perfect" the world will tend to brook no disagreement.

Emmet Scott is the author of Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (New English Review Press, 2012)

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Orwell, Huxley and the Emerging Totalitarianism

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The New English Review - A monthly political/cultural magazine with a literary slant. The Iconoclast is a group blog featuring Hugh Fitzgerald, Rebecca Bynum, Theodore Dalrymple, Conrad Black, Jerry Gordon, Mary Jackson, Norman Berdichevsky, Christina McIntosh, John M. Joyce and Esmerelda Weatherwax.