IS BUSH MAKING MONKEYS OR LIZARDS OUT OF US?
ARE THEY (repubs) MAKING MONKEYS OR LIZARDS OUT OF US?
I must admit, I am not much of a book reader... mainly I retrieve information from magazines, newspapers and TV (in the past that is) but today I use the INTERNET to gather facts and truths about what the hell is going on in this world of ours. Why, because life is short and I desire and need to use my time left productively and without waste, I believe the Internet does that for me. Anyway, I have never read the British author George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair's book "1984"... Yet, I feel I have because so many of the highlights from this novel have circulated around the www since Bush's mob took over our Nation.
What a correlation between the bullies in the Whitehouse and the bullies in Orwell's imagination. The very first paragraph gives you the same sense of eeriness we feel today when Bush pulls out his FEAR CARD:
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Chapter 1 Part One
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. (click the below picture to learn about HOW BIG BROTHER IS IN OUR LIVES TODAY)
The NSA spying on citizens, revealed is one such GRANDMA and they are scared to death they may lose this "spying on, we the citizens of the USA" tool or worse be prosecuted and punished for using it in the first place. And woe are we, if they get away with this by using their "HITTING US OVER THE PROVERBIAL HEAD WITH FEAR TACTICS AND NEWSPEAK, AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN!" The same tactics used in the Nineteen Eighty-Four's country of OCEANIA'S Big Brother, Newspeak and Fear. Also read: NSA Spying Evolved Pre-9/11
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With these slogans, George Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR burst upon the literary world as the definitive anti-utopian novel for the second half of the 20th Century.
Published in 1949, this darkly cautionary and prescient vision of the near future was a warning against the dangers of a totalitarian government fueled by high technology. Orwell envisions a world devastated by nuclear war and poverty, where the West has fallen under the spell of a totalitarian socialist dictator, Big Brother. A political demagogue and religious cult leader all rolled into one, Big Brother's power and mystery are so immense that one may wonder if he even exists at all.
Big Brother's Ingsoc Party (English Socialism) has perfected the uses of high technology to monitor the lives of its populace, and to insure unswerving loyalty through surveillance, propaganda and brainwashing. The government's most brilliant and most appalling project is the actual deconstruction of the English language into Newspeak, the language of the Party. Each successive edition of the Newspeak Dictionary has fewer words than its predecessor. By removing meaning and nuance from the vocabulary, the government hopes to eradicate seditious and anti-social thinking before it even has the chance to enter a person's mind. Without the vocabulary for revolution, there can be no revolution. For those who persist in thinking for themselves, so-called Thought Criminals, Ingsoc's stormtroopers, the Thought Police, are there to intervene, incarcerating the free-thinkers in the Ministry of Love, where they will be re-educated, or worse.
The most intrusive daily aspect of life in Oceania (as Orwell calls the European/American mega-State) are the omnipresent telescreens, two-way interactive televisions that cannot be turned off, and which give the government a faceless surveillance window into everyone's life. Who is on the other side of the telescreens? Are people watching? Is all the monitoring done by machine? All we learn is that members of the Inner Party, the elite, are allowed to turn off their telescreens, if only for a brief period.
Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell's novel, becomes a Thought Criminal. A minor bureaucrat (an "Outer Party" member) his job is to actually rewrite the archives of the London Times so that they are consistent with current Ingsoc policy. When Ingsoc changes its political alliance with another superpower and begins waging war on a former ally, Winston's job is to rewrite all the prior information to show that the old alliance never existed. So addled are the minds of the people he meets that they don't even realize that these changes have been made. A sad, lonely man, Winston is also smart enough to understand the insidious manipulation being perpetrated on the society.
And so he becomes a willing victim of the government's most ingenious ruse: Winston obtains a copy of a banned revolutionary tract by the famous enemy of the State, Goldstein. Galvanized and inspired by what he reads, he pursues an illicit love affair with a co-worker,Julia, and seems to find an ally in the person of Inner Party official O'Brien. Longing for an escape from this terrible world to a better life, he does not realize that everything has been a set-up. Kindly O'Brien is actually the head of the Thought Police, and it is he who has actually written Goldstein's book for the very purpose of luring potential revolutionaries out of the closet and into the dreaded Room 101 - a torture chamber where one's worst fears are made real. Totally broken, brainwashed and reprogrammed (so suggestible that he is even made to agree that 2+2=5), Winston is returned to society as another harmless devoté of Big Brother. In the chilling final pages of the book, Winston, tears of fear and joy streaming down his face, proclaims his love of Big Brother, all thoughts, hopes or dreams of escape and freedom permanently eradicated from his consciousness. 
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"Politics and the English Language" (1950), which links authoritarianism with linguistic decay, has been widely influential. The four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell was published in 1968.
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Please read Arianna's column on this subject, she puts to words precisely what we are feeling but may not be actually thinking logically enough about, and that is...
How the Bushies use spying and fear to make monkeys (or lizards) out of us all... thinkingblue
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On Fear, Lizard Brains, and 1984
I spent much of yesterday having people try to scare the hell out of me. In the morning it was President Bush. At night it was Big Brother. At times, it wasn't easy telling them apart. Let me explain:
My very scary day was jump-started by the president's chilling tale of how my hometown had narrowly escaped a 9/11-like attack, with hijacked planes being flown into a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper. I know, I know: the story is old news, a four year-old plot that we were already told about years ago, which, in fact, some experts believe never got off the al-Qaeda drawing board -- and which Holden picks apart. But the president sure made it sound really, really frightening.
Then, at night, I saw a preview performance of a brilliant new production of George Orwell's 1984 -- adapted by Michael Gene Sullivan and directed by Tim Robbins -- and was struck by the ways that Big Brother uses fear and perpetual war to keep the citizens of Oceania under control. And, especially, how that fear effectively blots out memory.
"His memory," writes Orwell of his rebellious hero, "was not satisfactorily under control." Memory "satisfactorily under control" is a perfect description of the mindset that allows Bush and Cheney to repeatedly lie to the American people and get away with it. Thanks to the constant fear-mongering. Again and again. ('Last throes'? who remembers anything about 'last throes'?)
Orwell also shows how a frightened people will look to the strongest and most confident to save and protect them. As Goldstein says in the play: "Even the humblest, most industrious citizen is expected to be an ignorant fanatic, whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and triumph, regardless of his own suffering. In other words, the mentality appropriate to a state of war. And being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival."
I knew Karl Rove was a student of history, but apparently he's a student of literature, too.
The Big Brothers in the Bush White House bang the fear-gong like clockwork. Early in the week, the administration took some hits on its NSA warrantless wiretapping program, with even Republicans like Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Heather Wilson raising doubts. And before the week was out, there was the president, offering up details of shoe bombs and "young men from Southeast Asia" meeting with Osama bin Laden and preparing to attack L.A. (In 1984, the unseen enemy keeps shifting from "Eurasia" to "Eastasia" and back again).
The president didn't directly link the disruption of the attack with the NSA wiretapping but, as
noted by the New York Times, Frances Townsend, his counterterrorism adviser, "did not rule out the program as a factor in discovering the plan." How very vague of her.
Listening to Bush's speech, I kept flashing on comedian Kevin Nealon's classic Subliminal Message Guy character: "Since [9/11] we've taken decisive action (no time for FISA) to protect our citizens against new dangers (old ones too). We're hunting down terrorists (Osama who?)using every element of our national power (even illegal elements) -- military (mission accomplished), intelligence (warrantless wiretapping), law enforcement (more wiretapping)... When an American president says something, he better mean what he said (except for all the times he doesn't)."
Scaring the bejeezus out of us any time the going gets tough is simple, crude -- and has worked like a charm for the Bushies. I'm guessing that they're saving a fresh elevation of the terror alert status until closer to November.
Watching my personal "Fear Factor" double feature -- Bush and Big Brother -- reminded me of a conversation I had during the 2004 campaign with Dr. Daniel Siegel, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist whose book Mindsight explores the physiological workings of the brain. He explained that the Bush campaign's unrelenting fear-mongering had left voters "shrouded in a 'fog of fear,'" reacting not with their linear, logical left brain but with their lizard, more emotional right brain.
Deep in the brain lies the amygdala, an almond-sized region that generates fear. When this fear state is activated, the amygdala springs into action. Before you are even consciously aware that you are afraid, your lizard brain responds by clicking into survival mode. No time to assess the situation, no time to look at the facts, just fight, flight or freeze. Fear paralyzes our reasoning and literally makes it impossible to think straight. Instead, we search for emotional, nonverbal cues from others that will make us feel safe and secure.
This is precisely why Rove wants to paint Democrats as having "a pre-9/11 worldview" which, by implication, makes them unwilling to go the extra -- even illegal -- mile to keep America safe.
The only way to break through this "fog of fear" is to keep shining a light on this cynical strategy, like Hillary Clinton did the other day at the UAW convention: "If you're paying attention, you saw two weeks ago, Karl Rove, in a room like this, telling the Republican National Committee, 'Here's your game plan, folks. Here's how we're going to win. We're going to win by getting everybody scared again.... We're going to keep playing the fear card.'"
Some in the mainstream media are doing the same. The headline on the jump page of the Los Angeles Times story on Bush's speech reads, "Critics Question Timing of Disclosures About Plot." And the New York Times' story on it offered a similarly dubious tone: "Mr. Bush's speech came at a time when Republicans are intent on establishing their record on national security as the pre-eminent issue in the 2006 midterm elections, and when the president is facing questions from members of both parties about a secret eavesdropping program that he describes as pivotal to the war on terrorism."
Maybe even the MSM's lizard brains are getting wise to the White House's scare tactics. And, just maybe, we're about to enter a new era where our collective memory is no longer "satisfactorily under control."
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NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President.
http://thinkingblue.blogspot.com
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QUOTES:
"The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed—would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you." —pg 19
"People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed
from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped
out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were
abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word." —pg 20
"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death." —pg 27
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that
even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere
torture and death." —pg 32
"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.'" —pg 32
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at
the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could
understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of
thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we
understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." —Syme, pg 46-47
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in
any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could
GIVE you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of
muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of
abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper
expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a
word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…" pg 54
"Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment
the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible
symptom." —pg 56
"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they
have rebelled they cannot become conscious." —pg 61, referring the proles
or proletarian - A member of the proletariat; a worker belonging to the
lowest class of Roman citizens (viewed as contributing to the state only
through having children)
"to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk
by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in
Newspeak: ownlife" pg 70
"In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost
ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science.' The empirical
method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past
were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc." pg
159
(Ingsoc - English Socialism)
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/
"Sanity is not statistical." (or fact) pg 179
"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in
Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were
also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or
thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one
another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet
almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but were
storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would
one day overturn the world." pg 181
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Oingo Boingo - Wake Up (It's 1984) Lyrics
Wake up! won't you listen to me
Wake up! won't you listen to me
won't you listen to me
Wake up! won't you listen to me
Wake up! won't you listen to me
won't you listen to me
Big brother's watching, we watch him back
We see right through his disguise
He tries to scare us, with angry words
But we all know that they're lies
Whole world is waiting
Just see the fear in their eyes
Whole world is watching, observing every move
Is it beginning or the end?
Just like a chess game, but so intense
That I just don't understand
Anticipation
It's much to big to pretend
CHORUS
(Wake up), it's 1984
(Wake up), but we've been here before
(Wake up), it's 1984
(Wake up), but we've been here before, (here before)
Big brother's screaming but we don't care
Cause he's got nothing to say
Think of the future, think of the prophecy
Think of the children of today
Big brother's marching
So we all stand in his way
Open your eyes, sisters and brothers
Neatly disguised, so far away
Open your heart, try to remember
Two worlds apart, but so close
(Wake up), it's 1984
But we've been here before
(Wake up), it's 1984
But we've been here before
All our lives leading up to this day, watching and waiting
Wake up! Wake up!
Wake up! Wake up!
Open your eyes, sisters and brothers
Neatly disguised, so far away
Open your heart, try to remember
Two worlds apart, but so close
CHORUS
Whole world is watching
Anticipating
Big brother's marching
Is it beginning or the end?
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QUOTATION OF THE DAY "The
very word 'WAR', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be
accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. ...
WAR IS PEACE." - George Orwell - 1984__________________________________________
ALL THINKINGBLUE LINKS
CAROLYNCONNECTION.COM
Warning very Graphic REAL PICTURES OF WAR
CAROLYNCONNETION - I've got a mind and I'm going to use it!
posted by thinkingblue at 11:59 AM
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