Thoughts on the Future – From the Past

Opinion

Opinion by George McClellan:

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

– George Orwell

The ideas of British author George Orwell, (1903 – 1950), warning on the political issues of socialism and the totalitarian police state, using the Soviet Union as he did in his books 1984 and Animal Farm, among others, continues to influence our political culture today because most of us who read his stuff, can see the rise of the odious authoritarian society he described actually unfolding before our very eyes, right now. We are long past Orwell’s fictional 1984 but what is happening to our country today, politically and economically, is as frightening and apparently inevitable, as the soul deadening endings of George Orwell’s tales.

We still use terms that Orwell introduced into common usage like the “cold war”, “newspeak” (political correctness), “thoughtcrime” (hate crimes), “Big Brother” (Obama), “doublethink” (Hillary Clinton interviews) and “Room 101” (White House briefing room), which was the torture chamber of the Ministry of Love in Orwell’s 1984. Is the reality of our status actually to be found in the pages of sixty year old novella’s? I’ve read them, my son’s have read them and they scared the bejesus out of us. Basically however, we knew that that was fiction except, was it? America was the shining land of freedom and plenty, “waving fields of grain” and all that. It couldn’t happen here. But, nevertheless we really saw it happening in Russia and China. And, while the old Soviet Union has collapsed and China opened Pandora’s box to Capitalism, 1984 is alive and well in today’s Cuba and now in Venezuela too.

The Progressives are moving our America in the direction so suitably revealed to us by Orwell. And we have, by our inattention or inaction, permitted them to do so. We are being subjected to a slow motion hijacking of America. Wendell Phillips said it best when he told us that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Apparently we weren’t listening because even after his disastrous first term, Obama was re-elected by the numbers by a sub-culture of self-righteous moochers and leeches, indignant people with whom no argument, reasoned or otherwise, can make a dent. To these free loaders, tax payer supplied government largess, in the form of food stamps, welfare, free cell phones, free health care, etc. is now their conventional truth. Woe be unto the politician who attacks those beliefs frontally. That’s the new third rail of politics.

In Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs stage a revolution over the humans, call it Animalism, (progressivism), win, then declare “all animals are equal”, a metaphor for our moochers and takers who vote for their ‘pigs’ to tax our earnings to give to them. Orwell’s story progresses from all animal meetings to a committee of Pigs who have become the elites and run things. All this is accompanied by lies, deceit and treachery. Of course a motto change was required: “All animals are equal but some animals (pigs, i.e.:career politicians) are more equal than others”. Orwell was describing the rise of the Soviet Union not forecasting the collapse of America or Britain and his animal characters were allegories to real Soviet people and events.

The arguments for equality are seductive and alluring and Orwell’s depiction of equality ends up just like we see coming to us now. Fairness is to become common misery for all, except the head pigs (the elites). Obama, is pushing inequality of wages as sinful hence his demands for higher minimum wages. Obama wants affordable housing for all and is trying to do what Dodd-Frank did just a few short years ago, require banks to make home loans to folks without proof of equity. This again will create a housing bubble sure to further cripple our economy. Orwell warned us about these events and we can see them coming. It’s not too late. Remember freedom is the goal, the Constitution is the way. Now, go get ‘em! (9 June 2014)

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