“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” - George Orwell - [PEACE]

[Zenaan Harkness]

  “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-orwells-1984-no-longer-fiction

  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

  1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are
  not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the
  corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced
  technology has become the driving force behind a
  surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere.
  People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone
  guilty of thought crimes. The government, or "Party," is headed by
  Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: "Big
  Brother is watching you."

  We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future
  dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as
  Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

    “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell
    people what they do not want to hear.” - George Orwell

… What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science
fiction.

… “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough
men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” - George Orwell

… We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the
police state.

… In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother,
and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have
spread worldwide.

… Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the
convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying
the price? The American people, of course.
[and fellow Souls all over this ole world...]

  Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan
  flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there
  is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the
  people. Even the best intentions among those in government
  inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control
  over the citizenry at all costs. As Orwell explains:

  The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not
  interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in
  power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand
  presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in
  that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who
  resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis
  and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods,
  but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They
  pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power
  unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner
  there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We
  are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the
  intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.
  One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a
  revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the
  dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object
  of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin
  to understand me.

    “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate
    those who speak it.” ― George Orwell

  How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the
  words they use.

  In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and
  compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government
  dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the
  police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as
  tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and
  thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

  Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is
  transformed into mindless automatons.

...

  We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being
  monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers
  not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the
  fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us
  on a daily basis.

  It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past
  with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we
  wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those
  thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored
  by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies
  such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police
  with their army of futuristic technologies.

  To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of
  privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming
  eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but
  rebel.

  Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy
  ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.

  So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

  We’re running out of options.

  As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the
  American People, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence
  (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media,
  politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.)
  and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about
  threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

  Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited:

    “Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those
    who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to
    govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A
    society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time,
    not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future,
    but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and
    soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it
    hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and
    control it.”