1984: The book. C/D? (Or just discussion about it.)

*gulp*

"He had won the victory over himself.
He loved Ned Raggett."
-- pete s (petesesnai...), March 12th, 2004.

:8O = my Oh, noes! face

Are you all aware that:

For the first time in our history, American citizens have been seized by the executive branch of government and put in prison without being charged with a crime, without having the right to a trial, without being able to see a lawyer, and without even being able to contact their families.

President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American citizen he believes is an "enemy combatant." Those are the magic words. If the President alone decides that those two words accurately describe someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the President wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment.

Now if the President makes a mistake, or is given faulty information by somebody working for him, and locks up the wrong person, then it's almost impossible for that person to prove his innocence – because he can't talk to a lawyer or his family or anyone else and he doesn't even have the right to know what specific crime he is accused of committing. So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as "inalienable" can now be instantly stripped from any American by the President with no meaningful review by any other branch of government.

How do we feel about that? Is that OK?

Here's another recent change in our civil liberties: Now, if it wants to, the federal government has the right to monitor every website you go to on the internet, keep a list of everyone you send email to or receive email from and everyone who you call on the telephone or who calls you – and they don't even have to show probable cause that you've done anything wrong. Nor do they ever have to report to any court on what they're doing with the information. Moreover, there are precious few safeguards to keep them from reading the content of all your email.

Everybody fine with that?

If so, what about this next change?

For America's first 212 years, it used to be that if the police wanted to search your house, they had to be able to convince an independent judge to give them a search warrant and then (with rare exceptions) they had to go bang on your door and yell, "Open up!" Then, if you didn't quickly open up, they could knock the door down. Also, if they seized anything, they had to leave a list explaining what they had taken. That way, if it was all a terrible mistake (as it sometimes is) you could go and get your stuff back.

But that's all changed now. Starting two years ago, federal agents were given broad new statutory authority by the Patriot Act to "sneak and peak" in non-terrorism cases. They can secretly enter your home with no warning – whether you are there or not – and they can wait for months before telling you they were there. And it doesn't have to have any relationship to terrorism whatsoever. It applies to any garden-variety crime. And the new law makes it very easy to get around the need for a traditional warrant -- simply by saying that searching your house might have some connection (even a remote one) to the investigation of some agent of a foreign power. Then they can go to another court, a secret court, that more or less has to give them a warrant whenever they ask.

Three weeks ago, in a speech at FBI Headquarters, President Bush went even further and formally proposed that the Attorney General be allowed to authorize subpoenas by administrative order, without the need for a warrant from any court.

What about the right to consult a lawyer if you're arrested? Is that important?

Attorney General Ashcroft has issued regulations authorizing the secret monitoring of attorney-client conversations on his say-so alone; bypassing procedures for obtaining prior judicial review for such monitoring in the rare instances when it was permitted in the past. Now, whoever is in custody has to assume that the government is always listening to consultations between them and their lawyers.

Does it matter if the government listens in on everything you say to your lawyer? Is that Ok?

Or, to take another change -- and thanks to the librarians, more people know about this one -- the FBI now has the right to go into any library and ask for the records of everybody who has used the library and get a list of who is reading what. Similarly, the FBI can demand all the records of banks, colleges, hotels, hospitals, credit-card companies, and many more kinds of companies. And these changes are only the beginning. Just last week, Attorney General Ashcroft issued brand new guidelines permitting FBI agents to run credit checks and background checks and gather other information about anyone who is "of investigatory interest," - meaning anyone the agent thinks is suspicious - without any evidence of criminal behavior.

So, is that fine with everyone?

Listen to the way Israel's highest court dealt with a similar question when, in 1999, it was asked to balance due process rights against dire threats to the security of its people:

"This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individual's liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day they (add to) its strength."

I want to challenge the Bush Administration's implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists.

Because it is simply not true.

(all of the examples above are from a speech given by Al Gore on November 9, 2003 to the American Constitution Society)

It certainly seems like Big Brother is alive and well to me.

This is no recommendation and is also entirely untrue - the Right persist in misrepresenting '1984' and 'Animal Farm' but reading the rest of Orwell's oeuvre proves he was a Socialist to his bootlaces.

'His last novel, the disturbing dystopian vision of the future, Nineteen Eighty Four, written in 1948, was influenced by the Trotskyist critique of the Soviet Union. Originally written to attack both Fascist and Communist tyranny, the defeat of Nazism allowed Orwell to focus on the totalitarianism of the Russian state and the slavishness of the left intelligentsia that allowed the myth of Soviet 'socialism' to take hold. For Orwell it was the managerial class, of which the intelligentsia was one section, who would make the revolution alongside the working class, but who would also be repelled by the Soviet myth. He was appealing to them, warning what it would be like to be 'rigidly policed and controlled by an omnipotent terroristic apparatus that aspires to thought-control'.39 He dissects the mentality of this 'middling' group and recounts Winston Smith's failed rebellion against Big Brother.'

'Nineteen Eighty Four was immediately seized upon by the right to attack socialism which was equated with Stalinist Russia. In refusing to recognise that the Soviet Union was not socialist, the left found themselves wide open to these attacks. The most schizoid reaction must be Raymond Williams's dismissal of Orwell as an 'ex-socialist' in the same breath as he was apologising for Mao's Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge campaign: 'The revolutionary movement has to impose the harshest discipline on itself and over relatively innocent people in order not to be broken down and defeated'.44 Orwell was never able to complete his defence of the book--that it was never intended as an attack on socialism or the British Labour Party--due to his illness from TB and his early death in 1950.'

But he wasn't overly fond of the British radicals of the era - there are some hilarious lines in Wigan Pier (that are all too applicable today)
"We have reached a stage when the very word 'Socialism' calls up, on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors, and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics, and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers. Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship, and the stupid cult of
Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may
win."

Ingsoc

that didn't take long

http://www.unitedstateofcinema.com/

If you've never read George Orwell's "1984," here's your chance to catch up. The classic dystopian novel seems to be everywhere these days, including on the air: On Tuesday, KPFT (90.1 FM) will air a 15-hour dramatic reading of the entire story.

The recording was made in 1975 at KPFK in Los Angeles. It was read by Charles Morgan, a longtime KPFK morning host (and a blacklisted writer). He got some help from June Foray, the voiceover artist best known for playing Rocky in "Rocky and Bullwinkle."

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/books/article/An-all-day-reading-of-1984-11243383.php

June Foray!! reading 1984!

You've sold me, Tracer.

tiny trains

Fainting, vomiting, fisticuffs:

http://jezebel.com/broadway-production-of-1984-is-causing-audience-members-1796405665

Pynchon's essay on the book.

the Pynchon essay arguing it's as much a critique of British Labour as Stalin was revelatory for me (and relates to this point) https://t.co/5Z70ZT1Nrl

— dylan matthews (@dylanmatt) November 29, 2022

Now here's something we hope you'll really like.

I'm surprised that hasn't been an Oceana TV series.. not necessarily just the Winston/Julia story, but just using that world to tell a bunch of stories.. there's the whole part where Winston rents his secret room, and the Proles drinking gin and playing lotto in the pub would make an interesting side setting. Also, the machinations of the Party hierarchy, etc.