Focused Read in 3-4 minutes
( 📎 Note, the key points made in this article are as of Wednesday, January 25, 2017...)
"Welcome to dystopia – George Orwell experts on Donald Trump
Since Kellyanne Conway spoke of ‘alternative facts’, Nineteen Eighty-Four has hit the No 1 spot in Amazon’s book sales chart. So, is the age of Newspeak here?
Jean Seaton: The seeds were sown during the George W Bush era
Reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four again, now, hurts.
And I’m not the only one to be revisiting it: sales of the book have soared in the past week. What you had previously thought you read at a cool, intellectual distance (a great book about “over there”, somewhere in the past or future) now feels intimate, bitter and shocking.
Orwell is writing of now when he writes, “Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”
Of course, we all have to keep our heads (especially we have to keep our heads).
The lies about the crowd size at Donald Trump’s inauguration by the hapless White House spokesman Sean Spicer at his first briefing were not earth-shattering.
But any lie from this podium is deeply unsettling.
Any hopes that Trump or his team were, underneath it all, “normal” rightwingers, have dissipated.
The lies about the crowd size at Donald Trump’s inauguration by the hapless White House spokesman Sean Spicer at his first briefing were not earth-shattering.
But any lie from this podium is deeply unsettling.
Any hopes that Trump or his team were, underneath it all, “normal” rightwingers, have dissipated.
The post-truth era certainly shares aspects of the dystopian world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Michael Gove’s infamous comment that Britain has had enough of experts is just one step away from 2+2 = 5.
In the interrogation scene in 1984 this is the most appalling moment: before now we read it as a ludicrous indictment of the rejection of reality (surely, we conclude, the party itself must know that 2+2 = 4; science, machines all depend on it).
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the elite, personified by O’Brien, foster and control this willingness to believe one thing one day, and one thing another. Now, it seems, the party itself may believe the lie.
As Orwell writes: “Science, in the old sense, had almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for science.”
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the elite, personified by O’Brien, foster and control this willingness to believe one thing one day, and one thing another. Now, it seems, the party itself may believe the lie.
... Orwell knew that authoritarian regimes want the heart and soul of people.
His two-way telescreens predict social media.
His two-way telescreens predict social media.
And we have, perhaps unwittingly, wandered into a world where feelings have never been more easily swayed: Trump summons them up personally and directly.
... But this new world has been a while coming. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” were foreshadowed by the George W Bush adviser who said in 2002 that the new American empire was “creating [its] own reality”.
As in the 1930s, war has been at the heart of the corrosion of trust in politicians. The lies over Iraq and the quagmire of Afghanistan were followed by the financial crash of 2008, and bankers’ bonuses –
making people far more willing to disbelieve the remote metropolitan media and be drawn to the false dawn promised by Trump.
making people far more willing to disbelieve the remote metropolitan media and be drawn to the false dawn promised by Trump.
Yet these are the obvious big lies. There has been a long drift away from rational beliefs that we have watched too passively. Mistrust in facts was sown by the insistence on creationism and climate change denial by politicians and in many US churches.
But it’s not just America – in India, government officials say that cows don’t contribute to global warming because they breathe out oxygen. ...
Trump is not O’Brien.
He is more like a cut-price version of Big Brother himself...fully on show.
And as Orwell foresaw, his slogan could be “Ignorance is strength”.
Tim Crook: Trump takes doublethink to a new extreme
Trump’s first few days of office have been such an explosion of propagandist grapeshot, it’s little wonder many people have been reaching for copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
His seminal essay Politics and the English Language should also go on the emergency reading list.
Orwell said political language can be “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.
... After his death, his crystal-pane deconstruction of the corruption of revolution and the totalitarian game were adopted as propagandist weapons by the CIA against the Soviet Union.
The early transfer of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four to film was even financed by the CIA with the endings changed.
But Trump takes doublethink to a new extreme, and if Orwell were alive today, I imagine Trump would amuse and horrify him at the same time.
The key message in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that
the purpose of propaganda is to narrow and limit human consciousness, confuse human conscience, and control and narrow the range of thinking.
As all students of Orwellian literature will recall, Squealer, the propagandist porker in Animal Farm, can “turn black into white” and is expert in “new belief”. ...
the purpose of propaganda is to narrow and limit human consciousness, confuse human conscience, and control and narrow the range of thinking.
DJ Taylor: The parallels are impossible to deny
... It’s useless to pretend that this isn’t all sharply reminiscent of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four...Winston Smith, sitting in his cubby-hole at the Ministry of Truth
... Inevitably, much of this manipulation can be traced back to Orwell’s monitoring of the concealments and evasions of the second world war – the Katyn massacre, for example, when thousands of Poles were murdered by Soviet secret police and which some Russian history books omit altogether –
but its roots lie in his experience of fighting against Franco in the Spanish civil war. It was here, he later wrote, that he first read newspaper accounts of battles that had not taken place and heard reports of soldiers charged with cowardice whom he knew had fought bravely.
but its roots lie in his experience of fighting against Franco in the Spanish civil war. It was here, he later wrote, that he first read newspaper accounts of battles that had not taken place and heard reports of soldiers charged with cowardice whom he knew had fought bravely.
... At the same time, he was confident that there were lines which neither right nor left in western democracies would cross. ...
As for what Orwell might have thought of President Trump and his entourage, he would probably have drawn attention to the steady war of attrition fought by various political and corporate oligarchies over the past 50 years against the idea that it can be said that a particular event definitely happened ...
He might have pointed out, too, that these obfuscations are not merely a byproduct of total war – who could really complain about the RAF rigging the numbers of Nazi planes brought down in the Battle of Britain? – but part and parcel of the way in which a certain kind of contemporary autocrat and reality-twister faces up to the world.
Meanwhile, it is worth asking what the average person is supposed to do in a landscape where the leader of what used to be called the free world has such a wanton disregard for one of the principal tools of freedom.
Even Big Brother, after all, brought a certain amount of guile to pretending what he said was true."
Even Big Brother, after all, brought a certain amount of guile to pretending what he said was true."
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The Democratic Party Website
Also, NOT exactly a Democratic Party specific source but a good place for to hear and to watch speeches & hearings directly C-SPAN
→ Fact checking organizations courtesy of the Society of Professional Journalists
in alphabetical order...
follows on Twitter include:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ US Intelligence | Author | Navy Senior Chief | NBC/MSNBC
⭐⭐⭐ Federal Government Operations | Vanity Fair | Newsweek | MSNBC Contributor | Author
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Voting Rights/Voter Suppression | Author | Mother Jones
→ Some of my favorite, highly credible media -- at the moment:
📰📰📰 Mother Jones
📰📰📰📰 The Washington Post
→ Some of my favorite Talking Heads -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
→ Some of my favorite media/panelists -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
✅✅✅✅ Joan Walsh national affairs correspondent for The Nation; CNN political contributor
✅✅✅ Heidi Przybyla USA TODAY Senior Political Reporter
✅✅✅ Jennifer Rubin Conservative blogger at @WashingtonPost's Right Turn, MSNBC contributor
✅✅✅ Natasha Bertrand Staff writer @TheAtlantic covering national security & the intel community. @NBCNews/@MSNBC contributor
✅✅✅ Heidi Przybyla USA TODAY Senior Political Reporter
✅✅✅ Jennifer Rubin Conservative blogger at @WashingtonPost's Right Turn, MSNBC contributor
✅✅✅ Natasha Bertrand Staff writer @TheAtlantic covering national security & the intel community. @NBCNews/@MSNBC contributor
✅✅✅ Betsy Woodruff Daily Beast Reporter
( 📎 Interesting to note: Wallace, a former Republican (or an inactive Republican I believe she calls herself) is new to the job but for right now she has clearly put country over party and her work on Trump GOP has been credible, IMO... )
...for Networking for Democrats today!
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
📎 Note: I rarely get involved in primary races -- outside of those in my own area. And, unless there is a glaring reason that can not be ignored, I support Democratic Party nominees winning in general elections.
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(Linked) "...is our 2016 platform...a declaration of how we plan to move America forward. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
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( #its2018now )
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Curated by Gail Mountain, this blog is often gently edited and/or excerpted for quick reading, with occasional personal commentary in the form of the written word and/or in the form of emphasis noted. Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf as it is provided!
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