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George Orwell’s 1984 Has
Become a Blueprint for Our Dystopian Reality
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha
Whitehead
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on
a human face—for ever.”— George
Orwell, 1984
Tread
cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21, 1950) has
become an operation manual for the
omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.
It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody
coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise
of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted
the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.
Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words
to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big
Brother.
984 portrays a global society of total control
in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with
the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has
become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and
cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with
anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big
Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is
watching you.”
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the
dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as
Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell
people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell
Much
like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984,
the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like
Huxley’s A Brave
New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have
their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are]
distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like
Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place
and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be
protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves
that they will accept their assigned
fate and not rebel or run away.”
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian
police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic
thriller Minority
Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the
government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step
out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few
skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the
government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive
databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a
complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting
our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past
writers is fast becoming our reality.
Our world is characterized by widespread
surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers,
driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition
systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at
capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on
our telephone calls and read our emails. Political
correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding
principle of modern society.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because
rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell
The
courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s
protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In
fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents
acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common
occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been
utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over
what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who
are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and
arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to
pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was
which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm
We
are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It
cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex
security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense,
surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector,
which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the
growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.
Orwell understood what many Americans are still struggling to
come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for
the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government
inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry
at all costs.
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate
those who speak it.” ― George Orwell
Even
our ability to speak and think freely is being regulated.
In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance
are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can
and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a
benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor
themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the
mass mind.
Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into
mindless automatons.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451,
reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas,
while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render
them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Huxley’s Brave New World,
serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as
subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of
conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of
individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.
In my debut novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the
dystopian future that George Orwell predicted for 1984 has finally arrived, 100
years late and ten times as brutal. In this post-apocalyptic world where
everyone marches to the beat of the same drummer and words like “freedom” are
taboo, Erik Blair—Orwell’s descendant and unwitting heir to his legacy—isn’t
volunteering to be anyone’s hero. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always go
according to plan. To save all that he loves, Orwell will have to travel
between his future self and the past.
And in Orwell’s 1984,
Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings,
even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”
Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip
such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent,
non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings,
and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and
“accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their
intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts
and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until
after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell
Having
been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who
refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in
the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy
combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance
that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one
where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.
“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell
Wherever
you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave
behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a
record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even
where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of
where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most
locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone
or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such
information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all
of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts
and your activities is now being fed to the government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our
movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics
to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove
yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its
citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or
groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside
your skull.” ― George Orwell
Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand,
however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen
this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that
cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages
self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
Say hello to the
new Thought Police.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate
State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more
importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might
think. For example, the NSA has been working on an artificial intelligence
system designed to anticipate your every move. Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for
INTelligence) has been designed to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to
emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking
sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit
card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents
in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS.
What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of
security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the
watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government
bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an
end.
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position
of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not
to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the
fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily
basis.
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking
back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we
wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words
and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as
Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against
us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have
even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s
roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is
rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw. Just look at
what happened to Julian Assange.
So how do you survive in the American surveillance
state?
We’re running out of options.
Whether you’re dealing with fact or fiction, as I
make clear in Battlefield
America: The War on the American People and in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the
bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports
conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form
of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in
self-governance.
WC: 2316
Source: https://bit.ly/3xWFrsC
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RESOURCES
People sometimes forget that the smallest and most convenient
storage space is in their own heads. If you find yourself in the midst of a
disaster and you need to either build or fix something, having the necessary
knowledge and experience in your mind instead of in a book will hugely benefit
your ability to survive.
And if there's something you need from your neighbors but you're
not willing to trade any of your supplies, you could do some work for them in
exchange.
But what sort of skills will be the most useful after TEOTWAWKI?
Knowing Microsoft Office won't do you much good, but knowing how to make soap
could mean the difference between health and sickness. Or maybe you could trade
your soap for more food. The point is, you need to learn a few skills that will
be useful in a post-disaster world. I suggest you take up one as a hobby while
you still have time...
20 Skills You Can Trade After The End Of The World
You may also like...
22 Basic Skills You Have To Learn After The Collapse
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3 comments:
Amen brother!
Anyone who doesn't see this has their head in the sand.
Too many in our country either embrace this leftist garbage or are among the 3 blind mice.
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