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1984 Was Supposed to be a Warning, Not a How-to Manual.
The following is a quote from 1984 by George Orwell:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’
You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
Published in General
Every one of these is being undertaken today.
Remember all the celebrations last year marking the 70th anniversary of the publishing of Nineteen Eighty-Four? Me, neither. You’d think a book of such staggering power and importance would be lauded and, above all, remembered. Why was the landmark publishing of Nineteen Eighty-Four pushed “down the memory hole?” Because Big Brother IS watching!
I’ve never been more worried.
One of my concerns is that there are more insane voters than sane voters. And that even if there are fewer insane voters, that they’ll stuff the ballot boxes in communist/ insurgent-controlled states.
I’m fairly confident that if the federal government has the will, it has the wherewithal to root out insurgent corruption. But whose side is the boots-on-the-ground government law enforcement on?
1984 highlighted the tropes of Stalinism and Great Power statism for an audience that was protected from much of it by a corrupt media, immersing the reader in a conceptual world they might not perceive accurately or contemplate deeply otherwise. Of course, if it were published today he would be cancelled instantly. Along with Malcolm Muggeridge and Whitaker Chambers and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Then such people would only be mentioned at places like Ricochet.
(sigh)
I’m reading volume 1 of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin and found some eerily similar warning signs:
Caricatures of the Provisional Government were accompanied by popular pamphlets, songs, and gestures that discredited all things bourgeois, attacking the educated, the decently dressed, the literate, as fat cats, swindlers – even Russia’s Stock Market Gazette poked fun at the bourgeoisie. At the same time, in 1917, far more than even in 1905-6. Russia’s constitutional revolution was deluged by a multifaceted leftist revolutionary culture enacted in evocative gestures and imagery: the “Internationale,” red flags and red slogans, and a vague yet compelling program of people’s power: “All Power to the Soviets.”
And this one. This one in particular:
In addition, the Provisional Government deliberately abetted the Russian state’s disintegration. On March 4, 1917, rather than try to salvage a police force out of the dissolving tsarist police, whose offices in the capital had been ransacked, the Provisional Government formally abolished the Department of Police and okhranka, while reassigning Special-Corps-of-Gendarmes officers to the army. But the newly formed “citizen militias” that were supposed to replace the police failed miserably: looting and social breakdown spread, thereby hurting the poor as much as the rich, and staining the cause of democracy. (Some militias, predictably, were headed by former convicts who escaped or were released from prison in the chaos.)
You would think the FBI might have infiltrated Antifa and BLM and subverted their operations before they burned down Minneapolis. You would be wrong. The FBI had bigger fish to subvert — like the peaceful transition of power.
Comey and company should be in jail.