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Fundamental Transformation Defined: “1984” As An Owner’s Manual

by Flyovercountry ( 51 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Fascism, Hipsters, Liberal Fascism, Progressives at August 1st, 2013 - 11:30 am

Political Cartoons by Lisa Benson

Hat tip Huckfunn: This one will take a while, so bear with me please.

I was twelve years old when I read, “1984.” Since that time, I have heard the author’s name used as an adjective repeatedly. So often in fact, its punch has been cheapened by the sheer frequency. Concepts from the book have become ubiquitous in our society as well, “big brother is watching you,” “double speak,” thought crimes,” have all been permanently ingrained within our lexicon, and all thanks to George Orwell’s depressing description of what he believed Socialistic societies would inevitably become. I want everyone to think about the previous sentence for just one moment, because half of the people who bandy Orwell’s name about as an adjective with very little thought as to its actual meaning or his actual intent, are those very same Socialists whom we were being warned about 59 years ago. I can not even begin to contemplate an actual number of times I’ve listened to the likes of Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olberman, Wolf Blitzer, George Stephanopolis, Matt Lauer, Charlie Gibson, describe some free market approach to a problem caused by a slickly sold government intervention as, “Orwellian.”

The concept of, “big brother,” easily the most oft referred to concept from the Dystopian vision laid out by Orwell, is also the most misunderstood. Those who refer to it most are more likely to cling to the paranoid vision of a government always watching and recording every move made. While that concept is terrifying enough, at least until earlier this week when Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, (and yes kiddies, he’s a Republican,) defended this very activity that our government has seen fit to undertake, the true message behind, “big brother is always watching you,” was even more insidious. That message was in the description of big brother’s likeness as being a benevolent, smiling, comforting, caretaker of society’s down trodden little folk. The message was that big brother would undertake to provide for all of the needs of the populace, and gave a face to where true love was supposed to flow, which was the central government. Big brother did his share of spying on the populace, that was certain, but the true menace of big brother was in how he got there in the first place. He was created as the sole provider for the people, and his watching out for them began as a means to protect his children.

Now, it may be at this point in my essay that some of you will tell me that I should be wearing a tin foil hat, and until eight weeks ago, I would have joined you. Then the whole Snowden thing happened, and in fact, our government has taken up the now possible task of watching our every move, including tracking where you drive, who you talk to, what you say, what you purchase in the store, where you eat, what you read, etc. While I do not believe Mr. Snowden to be a hero, in fact quite the opposite, we can still not discount what he told us all, which is that the application of the Patriot act has become so criminal and corrupt in nature that Orwell’s vision has become reality. It happened rather quickly, via the most reliable measure ever devised to inflict evil upon a formerly free society, the crisis. In our panic over what was admittedly a more powerful recession than most, we gave our Executive Branch carte blanche to consolidate power in a way never before thought possible, and as we have seen repeatedly over the previous 229 years, or throughout all of history for that matter, no one in the future will willingly decentralize that power.

This is what I read yesterday that is representative of that more insidious part of big brother. Here is where the benevolent all caring provider of our every need is born, and he is no where near as charming as one might expect him to be.

The federal government is hiring what it calls a “Behavioral Insights Team” that will look for ways to subtly influence people’s behavior, according to a document describing the program obtained by FoxNews.com. Critics warn there could be unintended consequences to such policies, while supporters say the team could make government and society more efficient.
While the program is still in its early stages, the document shows the White House is already working on such projects with almost a dozen federal departments and agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.
“Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals,” reads the government document describing the program, which goes on to call for applicants to apply for positions on the team.

For those of you who will undoubtedly scream that Fox News should not be considered a reliable source, read the second link instead. It is a recruiting letter sent by Obama Administration Official, Maya Shankar to Harvard University’s Behavioral Economics Professor. What it states, in a nut shell is that the Obama Administration is going to undertake the task of mass manipulation of the behavior of American Citizens. Here is where the line between a free society and one that is willingly allowing itself to become enslaved has been drawn.

Overview:
A growing body of evidence suggests that insights from the social and behavioral sciences can be
used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals. The
practice of using behavioral insights to inform policy has seen success overseas. In 2010, UK Prime
Minister David Cameron commissioned the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), which through a process of
rapid, iterative experimentation (“Test, Learn, Adapt”), has successfully identified and tested
interventions that will further advance priorities of the British government, while saving the government
at least £1 billion within the next five years (see previous Annual Reports 2010-11 and 2011-12).
The federal government is currently creating a new team that will help build federal capacity to
experiment with these approaches, and to scale behavioral interventions that have been rigorously
evaluated, using, where possible, randomized controlled trials. The team will be staffed by 4-5 experts in
behavioral science and experimental design and evaluation. It is likely that selected individuals will serve
on a temporary detail under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act before returning to their home
organization, which can be a university, non-profit, or state and local government. Our preference is for
individuals who are willing to serve full time but we will also consider people who are only in a position
to serve part-time. Moreover, several agencies are looking to recruit expert academics to sit directly
within their agencies and to help inspire, design, and execute on specific policy projects, and so it is
possible to serve in this capacity as well.
If you are aware of individuals with strong analytic skills, experience designing, testing, and
evaluating rigorous randomized control trials, and a strong research background in fields such as social
psychology, cognitive psychology, or behavioral economics, please encourage them send a CV and
contact information to mshankar2@ostp.eop.gov, which will be sent to the relevant parties for
consideration.

I have no doubt that there will be many who will poo poo this as being, “nothing to see here.” They may even believe that the government is well advised to, “nudge,” human behavior, most especially in those areas where our decision making may not measure up the the wiser and certainly more beneficial decisions that big brother wishes to, “nudge,” us into making for ourselves. In fact, you already have examples of such incentives currently happening without your explicit realization. When you are asked whether you wish to be an organ donor while procuring your driver’s license, this is an example of the government attempting to, “nudge,” more citizens into becoming benevolent organ donors. Many of you have doubtless been automatically enrolled in 401k programs at work, and been told that should you not wish to save for your own retirement, a foolish decision by the way, you must take the step of opting out in order to receive your full pay. This is the government teaming up with your employer to, “nudge,” your behavior in the direction of making you a better saver for your future.

My objection here, and I suspect the objection of others is that this is not the business of our government, and this is certainly beyond the scope of decentralized government involvement under which our nation was founded. To call this a slippery slope is an understatement of dangerous proportion. The problem with cute baby gorillas, is that they very quickly grow into the 800 pound variety that will beat you to death should you cross them in any way. How many small seemingly inconsequential benign government programs or agencies have we seen grow into such menacing monstrous gorillas, that have subsequently taken to the business of beating our economy as close to death as whim dictated? The EPA for example has begun to use the Clean Air Act as a means to declare your very act of breathing to be a menace to society. The scope of Obamacare went from a cost of $1 Trillion per year to the astronomical $2.5 Trillion per year, and it hasn’t even been fully implemented yet. What do we do when a, “nudge,” becomes the more menacing version called a shove?

The government has the power of the state behind it, and ultimately, everything our government undertakes is backed up by force. They have the power to arrest, to deny permits, to deny licenses, to revoke the same, to administer financial penalties, to levy taxes, to declare eminent domain, and many other menacing methods to shove us into making the choices that they deem superior to our own. What happens to us when our government, “nudges,” us into buying inferior and less efficient cars, such as the Chevy Volt, complete with two drive trains, extra weight, and batteries that have been known to spontaneously combust, thus rendering the car to be an actual danger to life and limb when driven. For those of you who will claim that such arguments are foolish, that our government would never dare to embark on a path towards vigorous enforcement of these simple, “nudges,” I say take a look at the multiple occurrences of our government engaging in behavior that others told us we were silly to believe that they ever would. The IRS scandal and the NSA domestic spying scandal are this month’s examples.

The other side of the coin of course is this, I don’t want my behavior modified. I like eating hamburgers, pasta, drinking beer, and probably a whole host of other things that the behavior pixies have deemed not good for me. That’s my business, and I consider any who have never met me, that wish to change me, to be the most vile and evil humans on the planet. I like to be left alone, and really do not like the noses of others in my business. That is basically the only behavior that will end a friendship from my end. I like my privacy, and like to respect the privacy of others. Resentment for those attempting to mold my behavior does not even begin to cover the contempt that I have for these people. There is something else, representative of an even greater evil at work here.

I’d like to introduce you to Kurt Lewin. He is the author of the field of psychology known as group dynamics. His work is responsible for those diversity training seminars that many of you were forced to suffer through. He was also a member of the Frankfort School, that group of Communist thugs that set up shop as a part of Columbia University for a while and then moved back to Frankfort after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Lewin’s work, his motivation, were based upon the success of Adolf Hitler. That by the way is something that Lewin himself not only admitted to, but actually bragged about. He was not a fan of Hitler, but felt that Adolf was on to something and clearly had success in molding a uniform public opinion and behavior. He felt that such forces could also be used to create a public benefit, as well as self destructive behavior. So yes, that diversity training was not so much about helping you to become more tolerant of others as it was about molding your opinions and behaviors to match those wanted by the program’s directors. In short, it was about the very definition of intolerance for anything not approved by the human resources people who felt it to be such a grand idea.

The grand nightmare for all of this is, who ever we deem fit to give these powers to now, will not be in charge for ever. Even if you view Barack Obama to be the cat’s pajamas, or if you viewed George Bush as such, the next election cycle bestows the same power upon either Barack Obama or George Bush. Who will be President 20 years from now? A whole country whipped up in uniform thought and behavior is capable of terrible things, all of which can be seen on the nightly news in places like Benghazi or Cairo. Please don’t forget to take a peek into history at the very first example of government, “nudging,” behavior. The consequences of following this path have always been disastrous. Before any of you label me as paranoid for worrying about this, bear in mind that history is already replete with many, all too real examples of how good intentions can go awry, most especially these good intentions.

Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.

Tags: 1984, George Orwell, Nanny State
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Fascism, Hipsters, Liberal Fascism, Progressives | 51 Comments »

What George Orwell would think about the liberal appeasement of Islam

by Mojambo ( 71 Comments › )
Filed under Cold War, Free Speech, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Marxism, Political Correctness, Progressives, Russia at October 2nd, 2012 - 8:00 am

Appeasement of a murderous totalitarian ideology did not begin with Islam. As the Knish points out, the roots go back to the early 1920’s and 30’s and America’s relations with Stalin’s U.S.S.R.

by Daniel Greenfield

Suppose there were a worldwide movement which openly proclaimed its goal of taking over in your country and every country with the purpose of imposing its system on every human being on earth. Also suppose that this movement had carried out murders and terrorist attacks in your own country, that members of this group promoted violence while gaining political influence. Suppose also that is was highly unfashionable and politically incorrect to speak out against them.

I am not speaking of Islam here, but of Communism. The current wave of censorship and denial toward Islam is not a new development. It is rather a very old one. Islamophobia, like Red-Baiting, is a political term that serves the function of cutting off any discussion of the subject. It precludes any listing of the facts or debates on the issue, by declaring it to be off-limits. To raise the issue is to expose yourself as a bad person whose ideas are unacceptable for public distribution.

When George Orwell was struggling to find a publisher for Animal Farm, he was repeatedly turned down on the grounds that the book would offend the Soviet Union. One publisher wrote to Orwell that he had been dissuaded from publishing the book by an important official in the Ministry of Information (an agency that would become the Ministry of Truth in his novel, 1984) who had told him that publishing such a book would be ill-advised at this time. That official was, incidentally, a Soviet spy.

The publisher went on to say that the book might be acceptable if it applied generally to dictators, but not specifically to the USSR. [……….]

Change around a few names and this is exactly the rejection letters that courageous books critical of Islam have received. It’s fine to make general criticisms of religious fanaticism, so long as those criticisms are universally applied, and do not offend those touchy people who religious fanaticism occasionally expresses itself in dangerous ways.

In a generally deleted preface to Animal Farm, Orwell wrote, “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.”

[………]

“At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable,” Orwell wrote in his Animal Farm preface titled, Freedom of the Press.

“Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill… throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference… So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld.”

[……..]

It was always safe to attack Bush, but an attack, even on Bin Laden, was considered tacky at best. And an attack on more “moderate” figures, like Tariq Ramadan, was borderline unprintable. While it was ridiculously easy to publish an essay depicting Bush as a war-crazed chimp invading Iraq for oil, Haliburton and Christian fundamentalism, the cultural elites insisted that doing so was an act of great political courage. Meanwhile publishing an essay critical of Islamic figures was next to impossible and dangerously perilous. And those same elites treated it as a despicable abuse of freedom of speech.

The poisonous vein here goes deeper. With the rise of the Bolsheviks there was a vigorous debate over whether or not to recognize the Soviet Union. Two administrations, Wilson and Hoover, chose not to do so. Their reasoning was fairly straightforward and is best expressed in the words of Bainbridge Colby, the Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson.

Colby was a liberal who had co-founded Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and befriended Mark Twain, nevertheless he laid out a clear rationale for extending no diplomatic recognition to the Bolshevik terrorists. “We cannot recognize, hold official relations with or give friendly reception to the agents of a government which is determined and bound to conspire against our institutions, whose diplomats will be agitators of dangerous revolt, whose spokesmen say they sign agreements with no intention of keeping them.”

That policy persisted under two administrations, including that of President Hoover, who had personal experience with the Soviet Union during the Russian relief effort which bailed out the Communists at a crucial time. It was the FDR Administration which was stuffed full of Communists that abrogated it. FDR became the first American president to directly communicate with a Soviet leader and in his first year of office he invited the Soviet Foreign Minister to Washington D.C. and recognized the Soviet Union.

To achieve that recognition, the Soviet Union pledged not to promote or harbor any groups with the aim of “the overthrow or the preparation for the overthrow of, or bringing about by force of, a change in the political or social order of the whole or any part of the United States, its territories or possessions.” This agreement was never honored in any way, shape or form.

Colby went on defending his policy until his death in 1950 as the right thing to do. And the pace of events only proved him right. The USSR used diplomatic recognition to extract aid, plant saboteurs and conduct espionage. It kept agreements only for so long as they suited it.

The pro-recognition lobby backed of diplomats, businessmen and politicians exploiting argued that only engagement would reform the Soviet Union. That same argument was still being made during the Reagan Administration which was berated for its warmongering obstructionism every time it refused to give in to Soviet demands.

We are back to that same debate today between engaging our enemies or accepting their hostility as a fact. The modern diplomatic corps is full of advocates of engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood, with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. There isn’t anyone they won’t engage with so long as they hate the United States and seek to destroy it.

Four years of Obama has shown once again that engagement does not work. Not only doesn’t it work, it actually emboldens the enemy and allows the enemy to infiltrate deep within our societies and to corrupt our institutions. That very engagement leads to censorship in the name of friendship. It leads to news articles and books that cannot be printed because they might sabotage the chances for peace.

The hope for peace is the greatest force of censorship there is. Once engagement is passed off as a fairy that you must believe in lest she will die, then censorship becomes absolutely mandatory to keep peace alive. If a book critical of Communism might offend the USSR then it is best not to print it or to water it down. If Muslims riot over cartoons of Mohammed, then it is a civic duty not to print them in the name of peace and understanding.

When we marvel at the Dhimmism in modern cultural life, at the extent to which Islamic viewpoints are presented unchallenged as the establishment devotes its fullest efforts to inveighing against any opposing views, this too has its red precedents.

“The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding,” Orwell wrote. “On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency.”

Modern day examples of this surround us on all sides and as a doctor of totalitarianism, Orwell aptly diagnosed the corruption of the elites and their descent into totalitarian expediency.

“If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth… It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.

“The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals arc visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency.”

That principle is now the primary one on the left. This totalitarian cowardice that Orwell inveighed against has been elevated to an unchallenged moral standard. Animal Farm is widely reprinted, but without Orwell’s preface. Like 1984, a book whose composition effectively killed him, it has been treated according to the original plan of that publisher, stripping away most acknowledgements that it is a vicious satire of Soviet Communism, rather than a generic commentary on tyranny.

Orwell’s preface, so rarely published, concludes with his motivation for writing it, “It is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect.”