George Orwell – praag.org

Ilana Mercer: ‘Gun Violence’? No! Goon Violence

For a short while, the thing called “gun violence” was uppermost in the minds of the blabbering class. Two lovely young people, Alison Parker (news reporter) and Adam Ward (photojournalist), of Roanoke, Virginia, were gunned-down on live TV, is a scene reminiscent of the film “15 Minutes,” in which an anchor’s drive for ratings and a murderer’s quest for his 15 Minutes of Fame result in … gun, fist, and other gratuitous, on-air violence.

A week on, CNN’s Poppy Harlow was using the language of George Orwell’s Oceania to describe the entity, “gun violence,” that “took” the life of poor Deputy Darren Goforth, of Harris County, TX. Shortly thereafter, the same inchoate culprit claimed Lt. Joe Gliniewicz of Fox Lake, Illinois.

Ambush assaults on police are, indubitably, up. And so is Orwellian newsspeak.

In Roanoke and Harris County, black men were implicated in directing the guns at Parker, Ward and Goforth. The killers acted on a tip from their mentors in media. That’s right: Do not be so hard on the “Black Lives Matter” movement. The movement is in its infancy. Most people are unfamiliar with it. “Black Lives Matter,” moreover, is not nearly as innervating and enervating as the meme disseminated, year-in and year-out, by media, academia, by the pedagogy and the politicians; over the airwaves, on the teli, in classrooms, in the halls of power; in textbooks, film, music and in every other cultural outlet and product.

For decades has this “Racial-Industrial Complex” been schooling Americans in the fiction of systemic black oppression by white America. The threshold for oppression is remarkably low. To be white is to oppress The Other; to be black is to be oppressed.

Concomitantly, there has been an epidemic of citizen fatalities at the hands of police officers. Combine the latter with the ritualistic, imbecilic, systemic and baseless drumbeat about oppression of blacks by whites—and you have your catalysts (not causes) for why so many blacks imagine they’ve been wronged, and how some individuals are encouraged, inadvertently, to act on their anger.

As to the former catalyst: In 2014 alone, attests activist William B. Scott, police “gun-violence” dispatched 1,100 people, an average of three every day of the year. Scott’s son, Erik, a decorated ex-Army officer, West-Point graduate, and Duke Univ. MBA, was shot to death by a slob of a cop in Las Vegas. Erik’s BlackBerry was mistaken for a firearm. (Excellence runs in this family. Senior is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School.)

One can’t help but wonder at the incongruous specter of black leaders and advocates (media, pols, pedagogues) complaining when those they consider incorrigibly racist—cops—make themselves scarce in black neighborhoods. The “Racial Industrial Complex” conflates higher arrest and incarceration rates among blacks (rather than lawbreaking and too many laws), with “scientific” proof of systemic racism. Surely, then, police presence in black communities will only increase arrests and bolster these “racist” statistics. Surely a lack of police presence in black communities is to be celebrated.

Go figure!

As kids, we knew our local policeman by name. He patrolled our neighborhoods regularly and joshed around with us. He lived among us. Community policing, however, is a thing of the past. Former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson—notorious for shooting Michael Brown—gave a clue as to why. Wilson told The New Yorker that while he didn’t want to work in a white area, liked the black community and had fun there—he had experienced “culture shock.” Wilson described venturing into a “different culture”: a “pre-gang culture where you’re just running in the streets, not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.” For his candor about an alien culture, Wilson was called racist by CNN’s Boris Sanchez and Kate Bolduan.

“To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” said Edmund Burke, in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” Darren Wilson’s words suggest a variation on Burke’s theme: To make cops love the communities they police, the communities they police ought to be lovely.

Burke further reminded us in 1790 that, “To love the little platoon we belong to is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” But what happens when those little platoons are not so little and not so lovely?

A country that is without a modicum of cultural cohesion and is, by D.C. design, comprised of ever-accreting, competing factions—this kind of country cannot be lovely in the Burkean sense. In fairness to law-enforcement, communities in America must be damn difficult to police.

Ultimately, thinking logically about crime and the criminals who commit it is likelier to lead to solutions than irrational thinking.

Repeat after me: It was not an inanimate object or an abstraction—“gun violence”—that murdered innocent cops and cub reporters, but malevolent men with murder on their minds and weapons in their hands.

Columnist Jack Kerwick’s reductio ad absurdum illustrates the absurdity of “gun violence” speak:

Imagine if, while discussing the Holocaust, we spoke about ‘gas chamber violence,’ or while discussing Islamic State mass beheadings, we talked instead of ‘machete violence.’ Or suppose that discussions of the lynching of blacks were peppered with references to ‘rope violence.’ None of this would sit well with decent human beings, for it is clear, or at least it is thought that it should be clear, that such descriptions miss entirely that which is fundamental to the phenomena being described—the perpetrators responsible for these wicked deeds.

Let us speak, then, of “goon violence.” For to grasp the distinction between goons with moral agency, on the one hand, and inanimate guns with no such thing, on the other, is to come to grips with reality. (Of course, it would help a lot if stupid liberals quit their litany of lies about eternal, never-ending black oppression.)

We’ve covered the catalysts. Let us address the causes:

Guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories of the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. Evil is here to stay.

Bad people do bad things. Deal, as they say in the hood.

**
Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. Follow her on Twitter. “Friend” her on Facebook.

Obama lapses into Orwellian speech

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the US president’s speech at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday lapsed into an Orwellian fiction.

Lavrov reminded the US that terrorists can hardly be good and bad at the same time. America has insisted that Isil terrorists in Libya and Syria are “moderates” while arming them.

The foreign minister said president Barack Obama failed to deliver a peacemaking speech at the current session of the UN General Assembly.

Lavrov said he found Obama’s statements “bizarre”. Obama insisted several times the the world had become freer and safer despite the fact that the US has now bombed 7 countries in 6 years, thus advancing the scourge of terrorism.

“I didn’t understand whether he was serious or not and whether there was an Orwellian element in it. Because George Orwell invented the Ministry of Truth and it looks like this philosophy is still present.

“The U.S. President presented a US worldview as he stressed many a time the exceptionality of himself and of his country,” Lavrov said.

“That’s the worldview of a country that has spelt out its right to use force arbitrarily regardless of the UN Security Council’s resolutions or other international legal acts in its national defence doctrine.”

“As for the US President’s speech, we earned the second place among the threats to international peace and stability,” Lavrov said. “Number one is the Ebola virus, number two is the so-called Russian aggression in Europe and Isil and other terrorists who are now taking hold of the Middle East and primarily of the countries, which have evidenced US interventions, are ranked as number three.

“That’s why the speech of a peacemaker – the way it was conceived – failed to deliver if one compares it to real facts,” he said.

The events in Iraq are a result of the actions carried out by the US and the UK, and the situation has spiraled out of control.

“We’ve known that our English colleagues have a unique ability to twist everything. But I didn’t expect such cynicism, because the events that are taking place in Iraq are an illustration of a complete failure of the venture started by the US and the UK that allowed it to spiral out of control completely,” Lavrov said.

“We’re interested in settling conflicts in the world not by making unilateral accusations or shifting the blame, but through a fair, equal and respectful dialogue,” Lavrov said.

Regarding the sanctions, Lavrov lashed out that it was only the problem of the US which imposed them. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian conflict is a domestic problem that should be solved without US interference, he added.

“Ukrainians met in Minsk several times and signed two documents there. OSCE and Russian officials helped to foster this dialogue. It’s all written in the protocol and the memorandum and they must be implemented,” he said. “This is what the Ukrainians themselves have agreed to, and it would be incorrect to dictate any of the implementation parameters to them.”

He said he would meet with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry today to tell him that.

From the pages of Orwell and 1984

By Wayne Madsen.

«Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible». These are the words from «1984», George Orwell’s fictional novel and eerily correct prognostication of future events from geopolitics to the loss of privacy and the rise of the surveillance state. Oceania fictionally represented the British Isles, North and South America, southern Africa, and Australasia. In Orwell’s world, Eurasia was comprised of Russia and Europe while another power, Eastasia, included China, Korea, and Japan.

Today, a modified form of the dystopian future world map of Orwell is becoming reality as Russia and China increasingly cooperate economically, politically, and militarily to ensure that the forces of Oceania – centered in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris – do not overrun Eurasia.

At last month’s third annual International Security Conference in Moscow, a conclave sponsored by the Russian Defense Ministry, Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces, General Valery Gerasimov stated that Western-financed and organized «color revolutions», such as those employed twice in Ukraine and once in Georgia, represent a form of irregular warfare against Eurasia. Gerasimov’s statement about North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries, which resemble Orwell’s Oceania, launching irregular warfare against Eurasia could have been torn from the pages of «1984». Gerasimov cited information warfare, economic sanctions, and support for «proxy criminal organizations» and extremist groups as part of the West’s irregular warfare construct directed against Eurasia.

Gerasimov also said that color revolutions were part and parcel of Western military strategy against Eurasia since the non-military tactics employed were often followed by military force to bring about regime change. This is now the case with the Ukrainian government’s NATO-supported military offensive against federalists in eastern Ukraine, as well as in NATO support for Islamist rebels battling against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Military intervention, including air attacks, was also employed by NATO after the Islamist uprising in eastern Libya that eventually forced Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi from power.

Gerasimov’s comments about color revolutions was supported by none other than Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a non-profit think tank that often reflects the views of the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department. Cordesman said color revolutions sponsored by the West were a new form of warfare against Russia and China.

Belarusian Defense Minister Yury Zhadobin cited the «godfather» of George Soros- and CIA-financed themed uprisings and revolutions, Gene Sharp, the director of the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston as the prime motivator of the uprisings witnessed in Europe and the Middle East. The armed forces of Russia, China, and Belarus now consider the West’s support for regime change through color revolutions as being part of the military doctrines of the United States and NATO. The military planners in Moscow, Beijing, and Minsk also view Western private military contractors – mercenaries — such as the former Blackwater, now Academi, as being part of the West’s regime change scenario after the outbreak of color revolutions.

The reasons for the West’s color revolution and regime change project for Eurasia are clear. With Russia and China at the forefront of developing new Eurasian energy schemes involving natural gas and new transportation routes evoking memories of the old Silk Road, the West feels threatened by the emergence in Eurasia of a dynamic new market that could not only rival but eclipse the European Union and Washington’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The emergence of a new Eurasian identity has alarmed the political leaders of de facto Oceania. Eurasia places economic development and respect for traditions over what many in Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and other countries of the region see as a Western «culture» that emphasizes pop culture, homosexuality, destruction of social safety nets, disrespect for religion, destruction of the traditional family unit, and unbridled vulture capitalism that promotes draconian austerity.

The Moscow security conference met at about the same time that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping met at the fourth Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) held in Shanghai. There, Xi emphasized that Asia has entered the 21st century at that the Cold War mentality should be abandoned. Observers from Japan and the United States looked on as Asian delegates roundly rejected President Barack Obama’s Cold War military «pivot to Asia» and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s revanchist imperial military buildup in east Asia. In many respects, the United States Pacific forces and Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea represent the militaristic «Eastasia» of «1984», an entity that was allied for a period of time with Oceania.

Not only was the «Power of Siberia» natural gas pipeline, which will begin pumping natural gas from Siberia to China in 2018, agreed upon in Shanghai but there are plans to restore the old Silk Road as a major trans-Eurasian highway that will link China to Europe via the trans-Siberian highway and Europe’s E-30 highway. Eventually, an A-class motor highway will link Amsterdam with Beijing via the Asian Highway Network. This network of modern highways will restore the ancient Silk Road of Asia and move goods and passengers throughout Eurasia and, in the process, build new infrastructures in the remotest parts of the Eurasian heartland. This prospect has the banking houses of Europe and America concerned since they will be locked out of the financial sweepstakes.

Eurasia’s leaders, from Putin and Xi, to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Afghan President Hamid Karzai are well aware that the color revolutions that have wracked Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan have been financed by George Soros’s Open Society Institute and Foundation and that Soros’s hedge fund empire is nothing more than a front for the international House of Rothschild banking cartel. NATO and the Obama administration, which represent the interests of Soros and the Rothschilds, will stop at nothing to destroy the Eurasian initiative. The «Euromaidan» overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who rejected a union with the European Union and appeared ready to forge ties with Eurasia, was part of the West’s (or «Oceania’s) first indirect military aggression against Eurasia.

Some Eurasian leaders are aware that the West is trying to derail the developing Eurasian Union. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed transforming CICA into a new Organization for Security and Development in Asia (OSDA), which would be the closest thing to a Eurasian counterpart to NATO. Stressing Eurasia’s rejection of Western «values», Nazarbayev stressed that OSDA would be built upon Asian «tradition and values». Nazarbayev appeared to be speaking for a number of Eurasian leaders in rejecting the lewd permissiveness of Western culture as witnessed by «Pussy Riot’s» and FEMEN’s displays of vulgarity and gratuitous nudity in places of religious worship in Russia, Ukraine, and other countries.

There is a new competitor to America’s version of Oceania now emerging in Orwell’s Eurasia. Halford John Mackinder’s «Heartland Theory», which was espoused in his book «The Geographical Pivot of History», postulated that the power that controlled Eurasia’s heartland between the Volga and Yangtze and the Arctic Sea and Himalayas would control the destiny of the world. If the Eurasian Union becomes a successful political and economic union, the United States, Britain, Western Europe, and Japan will be confined to a economically anemic and socially decadent coastal «Rimland» where the few remaining assets will be fought over by the hungry jackals of the banking houses of Wall Street, City of London, and Frankfurt. The outbreak of wars in Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq are but the first shots of the impending war between «Oceania» and «Eurasia».

The war on language

By Alex van den Berg.

The war behind all wars is a war on words; a war on language. For instance, in today’s world independence is overshadowed by “inter-dependence”, incessant talk of “democracy” overlooks our constitutional republic, “pooling” is now a substitute for sovereignty, “globalization” takes precedence over nation-states, economic growth has morphed into “sustainable development”, “liberty is co-mingled with “freedom”, and constitutional declarations of war have been replaced with the “approval” or “authorization” for war. The reason for the turnaround is that a modification of vernacular is necessary to bring about a global transformation of society. And that is exactly what the lovely parasitic forces that run our world intend to do.

George Orwell, being thoroughly versed in the nefarious techniques of statists, knew of the need for a new grammar system for the “proles” and spoke of it in his work 1984. He wrote,

“By 2050- earlier, probably- all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron- they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? 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.”

Ray Bradbury vexed in the same vein when he quipped the following in Fahrenheit 451:

“More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less.”

Indeed, politicians have used written language to manipulate history both in the past and present. This is no different today than it was during the time of Stalin. As George Woodcock states in his book Orwell’s Message: 1984 and the Present,

“Such standard works of misinformation as the Soviet Encyclopaedia changed constantly with the party line, so that in successive editions Trotsky was first the hero of the Civil War, then an agent of the Mensheviks, and the western powers.”

Lastly, we can see from Laurence Kotlikoff, Professor of Economics at Boston University, that the subterfuge has even infected the field of economics:

“There is nothing in the math of economic theory that pins down the government’s word choice and each labeling convention will produce a different reported time path of debt, deficits, taxes, and spending. At their heart, these measures are linguistic and convey nothing about a country’s underlying fiscal policy – only about what the government decides to put on and keep off the books.”

Given all the sinister signposts along the way, we should have foreseen this pathetic ploy and its resultant ramifications coming. For the intention to reconfigure the entire political and economic landscape of the world was openly announced as far back as 1614. In that year a lodge of German Rosicrucians initiated a program of outward expansion with the publication of a leaflet announcing the presence of the Order in Hesse’s largest principality, Hesse-Kassel. The shortened name of the pamphlet was Fama Fraternitatis. Its full title, translated into English, is as follows: Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World, together with the Noted Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, inscribed to all the Learned and Rulers of Europe.

Despite the lofty and high sounding rhetoric, the title of the leaflet revealed a poisonous plot with an equally deadly intent: to topple all the crowned heads in Europe in preparation for a political renaissance that would soon sweep the continent and eventually the world. Many revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements were sparked because of this pernicious proclamation. The world we live in today is a testimony to the success of these movements.

While it may have appeared to the untrained eye that the Brotherhood Network had changed its ways and was on a more altruistic path, nothing could be further from the truth. The monarchies of old were simply replaced by a more sophisticated form of control- that of fractional reserve central banking. As William Bramley notes in his Magnum Opus The Gods of Eden,

“The new monetary system was a major element of the revolutions of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, yet this fact is only minimally discussed in the majority of history books. Those who ran, and still run, the new monetary system have been aptly labeled by one author, Howard Katz, the paper aristocracy.”

In addition to the new inflatable paper money system, there was another driving force behind these ostensibly magnanimous reformation efforts: that of parliamentary democracy. Many will cringe at the notion that democracy has inherent flaws. But if this political, social, and intellectual system is benevolent than why did our Founders, like Plato before them, rail against the dangers of democracy? Why was our nation established as a constitutional republic if democracy is so ideal? And lastly, why would we want to follow in the footsteps of the Communist Manifesto which states “We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.”

Many of course will counter that the Communists of old, just like the prevaricating politicians of today, use the word “democracy” to cloak their malevolent agenda. They have no belief in or support for real democracy. Essentially, when our guy wins- we’re for democracy; when our guy loses- we’re against it. While this is of course true, it misses the mark. The point here is that whether a democracy is real or not is superfluous. The goal is to use it to gain control of the majority. In doing so, the globalists seek to turn worldwide democracy into a global dictatorship. It’s all part and parcel of the ongoing attempts to “harmonize” and “integrate” the world. For if the world can be convinced that everyone shares the same universal value system, then why not all come together under the rubric of world government? Why not establish a New World Order that oversees the end of all war?

Ultimately, when we see the spin, puns, double entendres, use, misuse, omissions, and distortions of lexicon at play in our world today, what we are really witnessing is a war on human consciousness. For language has become a modern mind control tool seeking to obliterate the will, creativity, and imagination of the individual. Couple this with the rampant repetition of propaganda, de-sensitization efforts, subliminal projection, amplification of modern media, and all the programming insights that have come from research in cognitive sciences, psychology, sociology, semiotics, and linguistics and it shouldn’t be a stretch to understand why the masses have become something more akin to ghoulish goblins from the underworld as opposed to a rational, civil, human beings.

In his work Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Michael A. Hoffman gives us some illuminating insight on the occult, as opposed to the political motivations, behind such dastardly deeds:

“The French adept Antonin Artaud, architect of the theory of the “Theater of Cruelty” with its transformative power, and the inspiration for the extreme sex-and-death media of our time, had this to say about the processing of the Group Mind: ‘Aside from trifling witchcraft of country sorcerers, there are tricks of global hoodoo in which all alerted consciousnesses participate periodically… That is how strange forces are aroused and transported to the astral vault, to that dark dome which is composed above all of… the poisonous aggressiveness of the evil minds of most people… the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon appear undisguised.”

Reading the above quote one can’t help being reminded of the Goddess Circe from ancient Greek mythology. Her name, which comes from the Celtic Kirk or Kerk, is the exegesis of the word “church”. According to mythological lore, Circe was a priestess who lured innocents into her lair using magical spells. Once inside Circe would take away their minds transforming the young ones into pigs and other animals which she would then use to feed on.

Since the church is now essentially gone with Nietzsche declaring “God is Dead”, we now have “entertainers” taking its place. Through MTV performances, American Idol, and other hideous abortive abominations of our nihilistic, morally bankrupt cannibalistic pop culture we are having our minds taken away. We are being paganized, brutalized, perverted, sexualized, and debased in what is this Nigredo phase of the alchemical Great Work. We are being fed on by a Force.

Carlos Castaneda, in his stupendous work The Active Side of Infinity, elucidated on this Force and its modus operandi when he wrote,

“He said that this narrow fringe of awareness was the epicenter of self-reflection, where man was irremediably caught. By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns.”

Real alchemy was about turning lead into gold. However, the Elite are clearly attempting to do the exact opposite to us. We are low-level initiates in their sick, twisted, demented game of magickal manipulation. And what is the ultimate goal of this ghastly game? I wish I could say that world government is the end, but the reality if far more horrifying. In the end, the birth of a programmed mind controlled human race is also necessary for the birth of something infinitely more terrifying: the birth of EVIL. For as HP Lovecraft wrote in The Call of Cthulhu,

“The cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild, and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”

While this may seem like a recent phenomena to some, the truth is that killing or the offering of sacrifices to Kali, has been going on since time immemorial. And it is this that has ultimately been the driving Force behind all human conflict. Is it any wonder that our war memorials oftentimes depict fallen soldiers beneath a statue of the goddess? “By one human sacrifice with proper rites, the goddess remains gratified for a thousand years” we read in the Kalika Purana, a Hindu scripture of about the tenth century A.D.; “and by the sacrifice of three men, one hundred thousand. Shiva, in his terrific aspect, a the consort of the goddess, is appeased for three thousand years by an offering of human flesh. For blood, if immediately consecrated, becomes ambrosia, and since the head and body are extremely gratifying, these should be presented in the worship of the goddess.”

The question now arises as to whether this is the way the future has to be. Do we need to be sacrificed on the altar of predatory globalism? Fortunately, it need not be. To shape the future in a more positive manner we have to realize that everything we see around us- the fall of the Republic, Trixieland, intellectual amnesia, atheistic materialism, the iron cage, excessive rationalism, the rape of the Earth, grim and grit, the Wasteland- are all symptoms of an internal state of psychic decay. In addition, we must understand that we, like a spider weaving a web, are the builders of our own destiny. We weave possibilities into the mix through our thoughts; thought is the architect. And so let us remember and keep in mind what Doc said to Marty at the end of the third and final Back To The Future. “Your future is whatever you make it. So make it a good one!” – Vigilant Citizen

Sales of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ soar on Amazon as America becomes surveillance society

George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” is enjoying a spike in sales in the wake of revelations on surveillance in the United States.

Amazon.com says the book, published in 1945, has gone from No. 13,074 to No. 193 on its selling list, and it is moving higher, The Guardian reported. To put it another way, sales are up 7,000 percent.

In the novel, Orwell imagines a world divided into three large states, all of them exercising near-constant surveillance on their subjects. The government manipulates the news, history and the language.

The novel is set in London, the city where Orwell spent much of his adult life. But his primary target appears to be the Soviet Union, although he was also concerned about trends he saw in the United States and Britain.

It was “1984” that made “Orwellian” a common adjective in English. It is one that has been used a lot since news broke of National Security Agency monitoring of Internet and telephone traffic.

“What does our Constitution mean? What kind of country do we want to be? Kids will grow up knowing that every damn thing that they do is going to be recorded somewhere in a file, and I think that will have a very Orwellian and inhibiting impact on our lives,” U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., said in a recent interview.

Orwell died in 1950 at the age of 46. But the book remains under copyright in Britain and the United States, so his estate benefits from its new popularity. – UPI