To some readers it may seem like a rhetorical question to ask whether the narrative of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (or 1984), first published in Britain in 1949, has somehow left its pages and settled, like an ominous miasma, over the contours of social reality. Yet, closer inspection – which means avoiding compromised mainstream news outlets – discloses a disquieting state of affairs.
Everywhere we look in Western countries, from the United Kingdom, through Europe to America (and even India, whose ‘Orwellian digital ID system’ was lavishly praised by British prime minister Keir Starmer recently), what meets the eye is a set of social conditions exhibiting varying stages of precisely the no-longer-fictional totalitarian state depicted by Orwell in 1984. Needless to stress, this constitutes a warning against totalitarianism with its unapologetic manipulation of information and mass surveillance.
I am by no means the first person to perceive the ominous contours of Orwell’s nightmarish vision taking shape before our very eyes. Back in 2023 Jack Watson did, too, when he wrote (among other things):
Thoughtcrime is another of Orwell’s conjectures that has come true. When I first read 1984, I would never have thought that this made up word would be taken seriously; nobody should have the right to ask what you are thinking. Obviously, nobody can read your mind and surely you could not be arrested simply for thinking? However, I was dead wrong. A woman was arrested recently for silently praying in her head and, extraordinarily, prosecutors were asked to provide evidence of her ‘thoughtcrime.’ Needless to say, they did not have any. But knowing that we can now be accused of, essentially, thinking the wrong thoughts is a worrying development. Freedom of speech is already under threat, but this goes beyond free speech. This is about free thought. Everybody should have a right to think what they want, and they should not feel obliged or forced to express certain beliefs or only think certain thoughts.
Most people would know that totalitarianism is not a desirable social or political set of circumstances. Even the word sounds ominous, but that is probably only to those who already know what it denotes. I have written on it before, in different contexts, but it is now more relevant than ever. We should remind ourselves what Orwell wrote in that uncannily premonitory novel.
Considering the rapidly expanding and intensifying, electronically mediated strategies of surveillance being implemented globally – no doubt aimed at inculcating in citizens a subliminal awareness that privacy is fast becoming but a distant memory – the following excerpt from Orwell’s text strikes one as disturbingly prophetic, considering the time it was written (1984, Free Planet e-book, p.5):
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Before adducing compelling instances of the contemporary, real-world surveillance equivalents of 1984’s ‘telescreen,’ which have become sufficiently ‘normal’ to be accepted without much in the form of protest, and to refresh your memory further, here’s Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New edition, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich 1979, p. 438):
Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other. The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only ‘freedom’ would consist in ‘preserving the species.’
As Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben would say: totalitarianism reduces every singular human being to ‘bare life;’ nothing more, and after having been subjected to its mind-numbing techniques for a certain time, people start acting accordingly, as if they lack the capacity to manifest their natality (unique, singular birth) and plurality (the fact that all people are singular and irreplaceable). The final blow to our humanity comes when totalitarian rule’s coup de grȃce is delivered (Arendt 1979, quoting David Rousseton conditions in Nazi concentration camps,m p. 451):
The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man. This is done in the main by making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible: ‘How many people here still believe that a protest has even historic importance? This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no longer be postponed is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond one’s own death. In order to be successful, a gesture must have social meaning…’
Surveying the present social scene globally against this backdrop yields interesting, albeit disturbing results. For example, Niamh Harris reports that German MEP Christine Anderson and British politician Nigel Farage have both warned that globalists are frantically trying to establish a fully fledged surveillance state ‘before too many people wake up’ to this state of affairs. Anderson – whose caution is echoed by Farage – points to the irony that people are waking up precisely because globalist efforts to hasten the installation of a totalitarian surveillance state are accelerating and becoming conspicuous. Hence, the more the process is ramped up, the louder critical voices become (and protests are likely to occur), and correlatively, the more anxious the neo-fascists become, to close the net around citizens of the world. She warns that:
‘Digital identity [is] not so your life is easier. It’s so government has total control over you.’
‘Digital currency [is] the crème de la crème of all control mechanisms…What do you think is going to happen the next time you refuse to take an mRNA shot? With the flip of a switch, they just cancel your account. You cannot buy food anymore. You cannot do anything anymore.’
Given these warnings, a case in point concerns well-known globalist Tony Blair’s recent attempt to assuage people’s fears about digital ID-systems. Needless to point out, his commendation of the system (because of its ‘amazing benefits’), in conjunction with AI and facial recognition capacity, is disingenuous in the extreme, as is palpably evident from his words (quoted from Wide Awake Media on X):
‘Facial recognition can now spot suspects in real time from live video…[It] helps identify suspects quickly in busy places like train stations and events.’ ‘AI will go even further—spotting crime patterns, guiding patrols and streamlining decisions…This is where technology, like digital ID, becomes critical.’
Wide Awake Media’s laconic comment on Blair’s words (alluding to the already dystopian surveillance practices in the United Kingdom) says it all: ‘Imagine this kind of system in the hands of a government that imprisons people for memes and jokes.’
It requires no genius to grasp that these examples of attempts at furthering the totalitarian agenda of complete surveillance, coupled with inescapable control mechanisms such as CBDCs, are rooted in the structural dynamics of the (no-longer-fictional) society of Big Brother, as evocatively depicted by Orwell more than 75 years ago. Except that – given the advent of the network society of electronically mediated actions and behaviour – such surveillance and control are at a level of efficiency and pervasiveness that Big Brother could only dream of. This is unmistakable when one peruses reports such as this one, which alerts one to the fact that, in Britain today, surveillance technology enables the neo-fascist authorities to identify, arrest, and imprison individuals for so-called ‘crimes’ which echo the thoughtcrimes of Orwell’s 1984, except that, by comparison, they seem trivial to the nth degree. As the article in question states,
Following a number of high-profile arrests for speech-related crimes, Britain is seen as far as the White House as a realm of tinpot, two-tier woke tyranny, where authors of errant tweets can expect to spend more time in prison than sex pests and paedophiles and which commentators and comedians should avoid — lest they be whisked straight from arrivals to a holding cell having offended Left-wing orthodoxies.
Lucy Connolly, a mother and childminder who received a 31-month prison sentence for ‘inciting racial hatred’ over a single (quickly deleted) tweet posted in the wake of the Southport Murders, is just one of many Brits that the state has pursued for such crimes in recent years. British police presently make 30 arrests per day for online speech offences, with many of these treated far more seriously than violent, sexual, or acquisitive crimes. Connolly’s was one of 44 convictions for ‘stirring up racial hatred’ last year…
Those, like Tony Blair, who are trying their best to justify surveillance as being ‘beneficial,’ even go as far as employing Orwell’s terminology to assuage the fears of the public who would be at the receiving end of such vaunted ‘protection.’ In this vein, in 2022 outgoing mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, was reported as claiming that:
Americans will learn to love the Chinese-style surveillance state, according to New York City Democrat Mayor Eric Adams who responded to criticism over increasing the use of facial recognition technology by declaring, ‘Big Brother is protecting you!’
Adams made the disturbing comments in response to elected officials who expressed concerns that using such technology is turning society into an authoritarian surveillance state.
Not everyone was enamoured of the mayor’s reassurance, however:
Albert Fox Cahn, the head of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, responded by warning that facial recognition technology would be weaponized to crack down on ‘every aspect of dissent’ in the city.
‘These are technologies that would be chilling in anyone’s hands. But to give an agency with such a horrifying record of surveillance abuse even more power, at a time when they face dwindling oversight, is a recipe for disaster,’ he said.
Part of the problem faced by freedom-loving citizens everywhere is the uncritical acceptance by many – although by no means all – people, that constantly changing technology is somehow self-justifying. It is not, as a simple thought-experiment confirms. If someone tells you that, compared to its 18th-century French Revolution precursor, today there is a much more efficient, ‘electronic guillotine’ available, which terminates a person’s life quickly, humanely, and painlessly, and could solve the overpopulation problem by euthanising people over 60 years of age, should you agree?
Of course not. For one thing, older people have the same right to life as anyone else, and many of one’s most productive, and enjoyable years come after 60. Hence, there is absolutely no ground for accepting or justifying new technology as ‘beneficial,’ simply because it is supposedly ‘more efficient.’
Yet, everyone of globalist persuasion seems to believe that, to persuade the ‘sheeple’ to enter the corral of digital imprisonment, all they need to do is to glorify the technology involved – lying through their teeth, of course. But lest I forget, according to the 1984 playbook, which all and sundry among the globalist neo-fascists seem to have adopted (stupidly believing that no one would notice), everything we have been taught in the world that preceded the attempt to establish their vaunted New World Order, has been turned on its head, so that ‘falsehood’ (lying) has now become ‘truth.’ If this sounds far-fetched, take a look at the globalists’ disingenuous pronouncements through the lens of 1984 (p. 6):
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The ‘Newspeak’ of today does exactly the same thing, as anyone who frequents the alternative media easily discovers. Hence, if those among us who cherish our freedoms wish to preserve them, we had better be wide awake to any and all the continuing attempts to impose terminal limitations, or should I say, permanent termination, on them, all in the name of putative ‘benefits, safety, and convenience.’ If we don’t, we shall have only ourselves to blame if legislators of various stripes succeed in imposing them on us by stealth.
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