Category Archives: George Orwell

No one cares if the boots exist…

1984 is MUCH more relevant than the more simplified versions we see in movies.

Article by Catte Black

What struck me last time I read 1984 was how much I had missed in it. It’s much much more than the images of brutal repression we tend to remember.

I was struck by how familiar the Party’s mind control methodology now seems – with the emphasis on invented, irrational narrative and willing suspension of critical faculties.

[Quote from the novel:]

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.“

The Ruling Elites Create an Orwellian Reinterpretation of Human Rights

Article by Wanjiru Njoya:

Ludwig von Mises depicts the aim of revolutionary socialism as: “to clear the ground for building up a new civilization by liquidating the old one.” One of the main strategies in liquidating a civilization involves dismantling its legal and philosophical foundations. This role is fulfilled by activists who embark upon “sabotage and revolution” by subverting the meaning of words: “The socialists have engineered a semantic revolution in converting the meaning of terms into their opposite.”

George Orwell famously called this subversive language “Newspeak.” Peter Foster describes Newspeak as “a sort of totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting, and manufacturing words.”

Mises explains that dictators express their ideas in Newspeak precisely because, if they did not, nobody would support their schemes:1984 (Signet Classics)George OrwellBest Price: $1.49Buy New $3.58(as of 10:53 UTC – Details)

This reversal of the traditional connotation of all words of the political terminology is not merely a peculiarity of the language of the Russian Communists and their Fascist and Nazi disciples. The social order that in abolishing private property deprives the consumers of their autonomy and independence, and thereby subjects every man to the arbitrary discretion of the central planning board, could not win the support of the masses if they were not to camouflage its main character. The socialists would have never duped the voters if they had openly told them that their ultimate end is to cast them into bondage. (emphasis added)

In the proliferation of Newspeak, the reinterpretation of “human rights” has proved to be one of the most powerful weapons of sabotage and revolution. Activists have seized control of a vast empire of international law, NGOs, and human rights charities with a global network of staff who monitor respect for “human rights.” They wield their significant influence in the human rights industry to undermine human liberty by redefining the meaning of “human rights” to denote the antidiscrimination principle. Under the banner of equality and nondiscrimination, they restrict free speech and other human liberties. In other words, the doctrine of “human rights” now denotes the precise opposite: the destruction of human liberty.

The “human right” to non-discrimination

Human rights no longer mean what many might suppose: the right to life, liberty, and property. The vast corpus of human rights in international law has been categorized by Karel Vašák into three: civil-political, socio-economic, and collective-developmental. These categories are said to encompass negative rights (things the state must not do, such interfering with life, liberty, or property), positive rights (things the state must do, for example, provide citizens with food, shelter, education, healthcare, etc.), and rights of solidarity between citizens such as wealth redistribution through social welfare schemes and equal participation in economic progress through measures such as the minimum wage or equal pay.

Human rights organizations monitor progress against these categories and ensure that the legal system works in favor of socialist goals and against liberty. For example, the United Nations human rights program educates the public on the need to eradicate “hate speech” and interprets “equal protection” of the law, as a fundamental human right, to mean protection from hate speech. The UN says:

Addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of speech. It means keeping hate speech from escalating into more something more dangerous, particularly incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which is prohibited under international law.

From that description, it can be seen that the UN takes a concept which is well-established in the criminal law, namely, prohibiting incitement to violence, and links it to notions of incitement to discrimination and incitement to hostility, which have never before been recognized as crimes. They annex discrimination and hostility to the charge of inciting violence because, if they did not, it would be immediately clear to everyone that criminalizing “discrimination” or “hostility” amounts to nothing less than Newspeakian crimethink.

The meaning of human rights

In his article, “There’s no such thing as Human Rights,” the British journalist Peter Hitchens argues that,

Human rights do not exist. They are an invention, made out of pure wind. If you are seriously interested in staying free, you should not rely on these flatulent, vague phrases to help you.

They are in fact a weapon in the hands of those who wish to remove your liberty and transform society, though this is probably an accident. It is only in the past 50 years or so that radical judges have realised these baseless declarations can be used (for example) to abolish national frontiers or give criminals the right to vote.

In that context, Hitchens is referring not to the ancient liberties protected by Magna Carta, but to the Newspeakian rights now enshrined in human rights instruments, such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Human rights have been transformed into wooly concepts which merely reflect political and partisan demands.

Murray Rothbard avoids the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of human rights by defining them as property rights. In the Ethics of Liberty, he explains:

…the concept of “rights” only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.

In the first place, there are two senses in which property rights are identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans, so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings; and two, that the person’s right to his own body, his personal liberty, is a property right in his own person as well as a “human right.” But more importantly for our discussion, human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory, causing liberals to weaken those rights on behalf of “public policy” or the “public good.”

Thus, the Rothbardian interpretation of human rights denotes the universal right to self-ownership and private property that vests in all human beings.

Bureaucratic reinterpretation

In practice, the meaning of human rights is subject to interpretation by courts or other law enforcement officials. Therefore, human rights ultimately mean only what they are interpreted to mean by law enforcement, not what they may theoretically, politically, or philosophically. Lowell B. Mason, an attorney and former chair of the Federal Trade Commission explains the significance of bureaucratic interpretation by observing wryly that:

When in private practice I never told clients what the law was; I always told them what the bureaucrats thought the law was… The legality or illegality of what you do often depends not on the words of a statute enacted by your elected representatives, but on the state of the collective liver of a dozen anonymous bureaucrats.

Being well aware of this, the goal of activists is to ensure that “human rights” are interpreted so as to advance their goals. This explains the concerted efforts to depict “hate speech” as a human rights violation. In this way the commitment of states to protecting “human rights” is transformed, through the prism of the antidiscrimination principle, into an edict to prohibit hate speech. The word “hate” is interpreted to mean having the temerity to disagree with socialists, and similarly, the word “equality” is interpreted to mean wealth redistribution to achieve equality of material conditions.

Mason explains how it is possible for bureaucrats, charged with law enforcement, to reinterpret the Constitution to suit whatever they think the law ought to achieve. No matter how carefully a law is drafted, it will always require interpretation, and this is where the bureaucrats strike as they purport to be applying the “evolving” meaning of the Constitution. Mason explains:

“Of course,” he will reassure you, “the Constitution still stands as a bulwark to liberty but it is a growing instrument that adapts itself to the times, and while it has not been repealed or amended, it has necessarily been reinterpreted so that due process (as it was known in the past) no longer unduly encumbers the administration of the law.”

Through Newspeak, the Constitution itself has been reinterpreted, enabling socialists to claim that they support free speech and also support the prohibition of “hate speech.” Mises explains that this subverts the concept of freedom into its very opposite: “Freedom implies the right to choose between assent and dissent. But in Newspeak it means the duty to assent unconditionally and strict interdiction of dissent.” In that sense, the concept of “hate speech” is not compatible with free speech. In denoting any dissent as “hate,” it is the very negation of free speech and freedom of thought. Through Orwellian Newspeak, ordinary words like “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality”—values that most people would support—have been subverted and harnessed to promote socialism.

The Globalist Vision: “15 Minute” Prison Cities and the End of Private Property

Article by Brandon Smith.

Excerpts:

The 15 Minute City is more like a recipe, containing every single ingredient of the climate change and covid lockdown agendas in a single comprehensive Orwellian vision. It includes removing motor vehicles, removing private transportation and roads, smart city and AI monitoring of each person’s electricity usage, monitoring of product consumption and “carbon footprint”, biometric surveillance within a compact and stacked urban landscape, the cashless society concept, equity and inclusion cultism, population control, etc.

It is the culmination, the end game; a massive prison with no bars. A place where you are conditioned to grow accustomed to artificial limitations on privacy, no civil liberties, no private property, and no work options or mobility. You are tied to the land and the land is owned by the state (or corporation). If you want a historic comparison, the closest I can find is the feudal system of Medieval Europe.

Within these cities you are a labor mechanism, nothing more. You will never be allowed to own your own property and thus own your own labor. Everything you have is given to you by the state and can be taken away by the state if you defy them. You might be able to leave the village or community you are tied to for a time, but this will change with increasing restrictions on the public’s movement according to the dictates of climate ideology.

As long as you are productive and submissive you will be give the things you need to survive, but never to thrive. In the case of a technocratic feudal system you would not have any guarantees that the state would need your services. At least in feudal Europe a peasant was seen as valuable resource because of limited population.  In a world where many people are considered “population excess”, you could easily be replaced and booted out of the city to starve and die.

We Are Trapped in a Truman Show Directed by Psychopaths

The danger we are currently in, and how to avoid it

Article by Jim Quinn.

Excerpts:

“Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” – Aldous Huxley – Letter to George Orwell about 1984 in 1949

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” ― Aldous Huxley

[…]

The first task was to instill fear into the masses through fake videos, fake medical experts spewing fake “facts”, denying the reality masks, social distancing, and locking down the world did not stop a microscopic virus, while suppressing treatments which were clearly safe and effective (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) and forcing Fauci’s remdesivir and ventilators on patients – insuring their deaths. Truman’s life was built upon lies, deception, and fake narratives, controlled by a tyrannical director putting on a show to please his bosses and maximize profits. We are experiencing the same reality today.

[…]

“Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

The State is run by an eager group of psychopaths who are hell bent on destroying our civil society and common culture on behalf of globalists attempting to implement their Great Reset agenda, and enforcing it through technological surveillance, mind control through propaganda messaging, and strict management of the daily plot via mainstream media and social media censorship of the truth. As Plato contemplated fifteen centuries ago, most men will remain in their cave, believing shadows presented by their overlords is reality, never questioning their servitude or seeking the truth.

Never has this fact been truer than during this covid pandemic reality show directed by our Christof – mass murderer Anthony Fauci. The willful ignorance of the masses was assumed by the covid controllers who cast shadows of fear and death on the cave walls of the locked down extras in this well-orchestrated reality show. Using a purposefully misleading PCR test to vastly overestimate “cases”, paying hospitals to classify all deaths as covid, and having the propaganda professionals at CNN, MSNBC and Fox showing Covid Death Counters on their screens 24/7 to terrify the masses into compliance was the Covid Show.

Once the fear level was ramped to eleven on the control dial, the producers of this show introduced the miraculous Big Pharma vaccine antidote to save the day. Their script was so believable they were able to convince over 5 billion members of their captive audience to inject themselves with an untested, unproven genetic therapy, that didn’t prevent you from catching, transmitting, getting sick, being hospitalized, or dying from the Fauci funded Wuhan lab produced virus. But, as a dramatic twist to the tale, it seems the “vaccine” causes myocarditis, blood clots, infertility, miscarriages, heart attacks, cancer, and sudden death.

Despite the obvious dangers and failures of these “vaccines”, those bullied into getting jabbed became so comfortable in their ignorance, they were easily persuaded to hate the unjabbed and wish for their deaths. Orwell’s “Two Minutes of Hate” was extended for over a year and continues to this day. Rather than think critically and question why annual flu cases averaged 35 million per year prior to 2020 but dropped to near ZERO during the covid “emergency”, the cave dwellers lashed out in anger at anyone questioning the plot, because to admit they were duped would destroy their self-esteem and decrease their virtue signal credits.

The annual flu didn’t disappear. Covid was the annual flu, with a multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign. This wasn’t a pandemic, but an IQ test, and most people failed miserably. But the critical thinking unvaxxed are still considered the enemy of the state, especially since they have been proven right.

[…]

Christof discovers Truman sailing away from Seahaven in a small boat, as he has overcome the fake conditioning of fear instilled in him by the man who supposedly loves him but traumatized him about the sea by faking his father’s death while at sea. Christof chooses to almost drown Truman by creating a violent storm to deter him from discovering the truth. Ultimately the storm ceases and his boat strikes the wall of the dome.

This is exactly how our controllers treat the ignorant masses. They feed us stories designed to make us fearful and compliant to the exhortations of their paid experts. Paid to lie. Paid to misinform. Paid to persuade people a dangerous concoction is “safe and effective”. The evilness of using Sesame Street characters to convince four-year-old children they need this Big Pharma gene altering toxic brew, even though essentially ZERO children on earth died from covid, is a testament to the greed and malevolent impulses of those in power. Vast amounts of ever-increasing advertising revenue are what kept The Truman Show on the air for thirty years.

[…]

Smart phones, smart cities, and smart streets are nothing more than code for spying on you and controlling you. Truman finally understood his liberty was his to choose and not Christof’s to give. There is a small minority of Americans who are realizing the same thing after two years of totalitarian measures designed to take away our freedoms and liberty. The question is whether enough will exit this tyrannical government produced show to make a difference. The future of mankind literally depends on the answer to this question.

[…]

As Huxley noted decades ago, technology has just provided our civilization with a more efficient means of going backwards. Technology is being used by our controllers to monitor our movements, communications, and to surveil, distract, and amuse us to death. It is no longer a force for good, but a means to control us. They plan to use technology to disarm their citizens through increasingly authoritarian regulations, sold as keeping us safe from mass shooters.

Their climate agenda isn’t about the climate, but about complete control of the masses. When government and their social media attack dogs monitor the citizens for “hate speech and misinformation”, and dole out retribution at their whim, our system is profoundly broken and extremely warped. They are supposed to answer to us. But these megalomaniacs have much bigger agenda.

[…]

Armed revolution is a non-starter, as the oligarchs have far more firepower, and the dissenters are unorganized and scattered. A form of ‘Irish Democracy’ where a silent dogged resistance, marked by the withdrawal from society, belligerence to authority and non-compliance with government dictates by millions of ordinary people would accomplish far more than rioting and armed revolution. Millions have already practiced a form of Irish Democracy by not masking, not social distancing, not getting jabbed, and taking control of their own health decisions.

[…]

The more people who disassociate from their fake world, the weaker they get. As their hold on our lives weakens, they will lash out.

[…]

The beast isn’t as strong as it portrays. It’s broke and its empire of debt is crumbling.

Why Orwell matters

His defence of freedom flies in the face of all that is woke and regressive today.

Article by Bruno Waterfield.

Excerpts:

Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’

He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.

Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.

Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.

Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. . . . [T]hink of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview.

This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.

But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.

Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.

Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:

‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’

Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.

The Science of Evil

Michael Rectenwald's Review of "Political Ponerology"

“Political Ponerology” is the title of a book on the science of evil, written by Polish author Andrew M. Łobaczewski and first published in 1984 (!). US academic Michael Rectenwald has read it and written a review on mises.org. He starts by saying:

This strange and provocative book argues that totalitarianism is the result of the extension of psychopathology from a group of psychopaths to the entire body politic, including its political and economic systems. 

He goes on to say:

Łobaczewski made the bold claim that he’d uncovered “the general laws of the origin of evil.” If true, the book was on par with Newton’s Principia in the physical sciences, while being of greater practical importance. And he approached this domain from the disciplinary perspective of psychology. Such an “individualist” methodology had been dismissed as mere “psychologism” in my own and many other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Łobaczewski’s insistence to focus on individual psychological disorders to understand the unfolding of “macrosocial evil” seemed mistaken to me initially, but this approach accords well with Joseph Schumpeter’s methodological individualism, which became a hallmark of the Austrian school. My assumption had always been that one needed to study political ideology and economics and that political ideology and economic theory explained nearly everything one needed to know about how and why totalitarian evil comes about.

Continue reading →

Lovely People

A short graphic novel about bunnies living in a social credit system

~Note from the artist/author: In 2020 I gave my life into the hands of Jesus and it pressed my [sic!] to stop being a coward and create this comic. The comic is meant to illustrate, in an easy to comprehend way, how social credit systems function so that more people can be mentally prepared. It’s written from a Christian worldview (as a fresh convert at the time) but is made for both Christians and non-Christians. Hopefully it gives you something. ~

It basically is a lighter version of George Orwell’s “1984”. It took me about 30 minutes to read.

Here it is.

Orwell foresaw our cultural chaos

Due to "the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture"

Long before he wrote his famous dystopian and prophetic novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, George Orwell knew exactly which way the wind was blowing. In his essay “Inside the Whale” (published 11th March 1940), which is mainly a review of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer”, he writes, among many other clever observations:

“What is quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture.”

Interestingly, in the same year, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, one of the most clear-sighted thinkers of the 20th century, and one of the most staunch defenders of laissez-faire capitalism, wrote in his autobiography (quote found here):

“Occasionally I entertained the hope that my writings would bear practical fruit and show the way for policy. Constantly I have been looking for evidence of a change in ideology. But…I have come to realize that my theories explain the degeneration of a great civilization; they do not prevent it. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.”

Both, of course, were right. It remains to us, the people living through the horrors they saw coming, to change course.

Von Mises’ writings didn’t bear fruit politically in his lifetime. And, although his ideas now have a strong and dedicated following, still don’t bear any fruit. Despite the fact that his followers predicted the financial crisis of 2008/9, while other economists laughed at them.

Maybe the reason for this fruitlessness can be found in Orwell’s above quote. Maybe laissez-faire capitalism and the “liberal-Christian” culture stand and fall together. Maybe they are two sides of the same coin. Maybe the one cannot be revived without the other. Maybe, as long as they don’t realise that they need each other, they are both doomed to live in the shadows. And, until a sufficient amount of people realise this connection, and act upon it, the whole world is destined to live through a new dark age.