Last night, my wife and I attended a showing of the Edmund O’Brien/Jan Sterling version of Orwell’s “1984.” Orwell was quite prescient, and certainly saw the seeds of modern statism in the 1940s. I commented afterwards on the technology now being put together by the statists – as reported in last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” program – to allow for the reading of the specific content of people’s minds. (I have long maintained that, when the statists declare people are free to think what they choose, they are making no concessions to liberty, but only expressing regret that they, as yet, don’t have the machinery to identify and forcibly change people’s thinking!)
The “1984″ celebration of “hate week” provides an interesting twist on the modern version, with the statists – having armed the “thought police” with the tools to do so – now ferret out those who “hate” the politically-incorrect objects of animosity. (One is still free, as in “1984″, to hate enemies of the state. In fact, it has now become fashionable among some statist sociopaths to identify opposition to government, or defense of the Second Amendment, as “hate crimes.” Nor can we forget the Nobel Prize winner who would have the state prosecute, for the crime of “treason,” those who oppose the state’s anti-global warming programs!)
I once had a reader ask: “why do so many of you keep citing George Orwell?” Because he was one of the few who understood that tyranny has its foundations deep within the minds of its victims, who equate “patriotism” with the shouted love for “Big Brother.”
