9.18.2011

Attack Watch Obama thought police, Nazi Germany and 1984 revisited, Too scary to be funny

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the people, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandyhaired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long agohow longago, nobody quite remembered had been one of the leading figures of the party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counterrevolutionary activities , had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters; perhaps even–so it was occasionally rumored–in some hiding place in Oceania itself.”Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party–an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assemblyfreedom of thought”Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the roomthe sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically.”
“He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia.”
“There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies”
“In it’s second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices”Winston dialed “back numbers” on the telescreen and called
for the appropriate issues of the Times, which slid out of
the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay.  The
messages he had received referred to articles or news items
which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to
alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.  For
example, it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of
March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day,
had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet
but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in
North Africa.  As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command
had launched its offensive in South India and left NorthAfrica alone.  It was therefore necessary to rewrite a
paragraph of Big Brother’s speech in such a way as to make
him predict the thing that had actually happened.”
“the Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones.”As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any partiucular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in it’s stead. This process of continuation alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs–to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to be correct; nor was any item of news, or expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to be on recordWith those children [Winston] thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the PartyYou’re a traitorYou’re a thought crimina

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