On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 03:52:51PM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” - George Orwell
The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell's 1984 Is No Longer Fiction https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-11/omnipresent-surveillance-state-orw...
It’s been 70 years since Orwell - dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm - depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.
Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.
“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone - to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink - greetings!”—George Orwell
The right to tell people what they don't want to hear is fundamental to any concept or community in which freedom of communication lives. Similarly the right to publish any crime, statutory or otherwise, is similarly fundamental to any community, group or nation in which freedom lives. Without the right to publish information about any and every crime, then public discussion of the crimes by the state, and true debate about censorship and the right of the public to know the crimes of the powerful courtesy whistleblowers and much more, is denied to us all and the criminals continue to perpetuate their crimes and "criminals" shall continue to be created and punished essentially arbitrarily. Some "crimes" are no crimes at all, and the will of the community eventually swings around after sometimes decades of prohibition, misery, despair, broken lives, broken families and the general criminalisation of normal human behaviour - the works of "evil" if ever there were a suitable definition; thus the war on drugs, the war on whistleblowers including Manning and Assange, and the war on truth and facts themselves - "since we've never had a TRUE Marxist utopia, we must continue to race towards a Marxist utopia until we experience a REAL Marxist utopia, OR ELSE!!" We are collectively in a war against humans ourselves - we are declared oxygen thieves and carbon polluters, and trees are carbon thieves and oxygen polluters - the beauty of the symbiosis of nature and life itself is decried as somehow evil - we must be destroyed, so to destroy us means to destroy our will, our "Spirit" if you like - by making most humans "criminals" of one artificial statutory sort or another, in our own minds. THAT is another evil by any reasonable definition of the term. Stay strong brothers and sisters - evil is let loose for a few thousand years and there are certain powerful ones we may not criticize without statutory and corporate consequences. The above means every small gain shall continue, at least for a time to be hard won - by learning how to work cooperatively with others of like spirit (which means figuring out who actually shares our spirit/ principles), and by being staunch for sometimes years or decades at a time - thank you Assange and Manning, Bono and Galloway, Johnstone, Anglin, Duke, and every single one of us who takes some step in conscience, for righteousness, truth and sanity. Peace, and may you find that which your Soul seeks for you.