“Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell.
I have a confession to make: until today, I have not been able to force myself to watch or read 1984. I know the basics, have read the plot, get the ideas. But I have not seen it.
It is stunning, watching it now, how close we are. The Party can put Goldstein on a screen everyone is made to watch, and he can tell something close to the truth, and yet people are conditioned to reject it, to revile, to be triggered and enraged by it.
Is this not more or less what we are seeing in the managed hate directed at Donald Trump? In the ridiculous lies that people embrace not just willingly, but enthusiastically and violently?
And it has to be said that among all the possible ways of reading the situation, one remains that Trump himself is part of a managed “resistance” and that the war is already lost. I can’t know. Few would know. But I retain hope.
But just now–and I am writing a few notes as I watch it–it was pointed out that the continual war is necessary to keep people hungry, ignorant and angry, and that the real war is that of the State against its own people, to support a hierarchy they would never otherwise accept and support.
Is this not in a nutshell what these quarantines and lockdowns amount to? Is this not a war by other means, directed by an elite against the rank and file Americans, the “proletarians” who, in our case, would be the small business owners and working poor? Will it not have the effect of impoverishing us–while Joe Biden, if he gets in office–swears daily that he is doing his best to help us and fix everything, and God forbid the Republicans ever get back in power to make things even worse?
This whole mask thing is managed hatred. If I am not sick, I can’t infect anyone, and the bulk of evidence and common sense is that people without symptoms are not contagious. This leaves mask wearing as protection, as PPE. But that doesn’t work either.
And as I have said, when I see the fear in people’s eyes, it is obvious to me that most of them really view the masks as shields against the disease.
And in recent days I have been pointing out that if Fauci and everyone else were REALLY trying to fight this pandemic, would they not be recommending Vitamin D supplementation to everyone, and doing so at the same rate they are insisting on mask wearing?
I am obviously no expert, but it seems obvious to me that if 20% of Americans are Vitamin D deficient, and if 60 million people get the flu each year, there may well be a lot of overlap between the two. It seems obvious to me that if 60 million come down with SYMPTOMS, that 200-300 million of us must be exposed to it, and simply fight it off effectively.
And it has been known for some years that zinc supplementation shortens the duration of the symptoms which the coronaviruses that cause the common cold induce. There are a number of supplements you can buy in any grocery store which exist for that reason. And Vitamin C, likewise, seems to shorten the duration, and presumably decrease the amplitude of the illness.
Why are these FACTS not being promulgated by our “experts”? I have been asking people who became seriously ill if their doctors told them these things, and most of them say no. Why? How?
This is a 1984 grade “war”, that is how.
Another quote: “there is truth and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn’t make you mad.”
Same scene: “I understand how. I don’t understand why.”
Interrogation scene:
“How does one man assert power over another?”
“By making him suffer”
“Exactly. Obedience is not enough. Power is inflicting pain and humiliation. Otherwise you cannot be sure. Power is tearing human minds apart, and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Power is not a means: it is an end. In our world there will only be triumph and self abasement. Everything else we shall destroy.
The past is forbidden. Why? Because when we can cut man from his own past, then we can cut him from his family, his children, other men, there is no loyalty, except loyalty to the Party. There is no love, except love of Big Brother. All competing pleasures we will destroy. If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
These are all themes I have explored in my own work. Communism is vastly worse that Fascism. Fascism, at root, is atavistic. It is a return to tribal violence. Communism is a new evil, which purifies and routinizes sadism in the pursuit of absolutely nothing.
In the end, Orwell described the how well, but never got at the why. No one seems to know. I will continue to try and get there.
This is a large universe, much larger than any Party can possibly fathom. But this planet, they can control that. That much is true.