Stealing Freedom

[bogeyman]

I thought it was an ok doco BUT only once mentioned that the ban around parliament only applies to an area of 1100m (or something like that) from parliament grounds (which also includes Downing Street).

Funny thing was...the point they tried to make by reading the names could also have been made if they were standing a couple hundred yards further down the road!

Mailman

The point is, Mailman, that there was never any 'exclusion zone' around parliament before this government came to power.

Also, when Thatcher was PM (who everyone said was an authoritarian) I could still casually walk into Downing Street and take pictures without being molested by our brave Boys in Blue.

[Central-Scrutiniser]

'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's back.

He turned round.

It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right word.

You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak.

Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.


He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.

'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,' he said.

'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've tried all over the place. They don't exist any longer.'

Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones which he was hoarding up.

There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply.

Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the 'free' market.

'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added untruthfully.

The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.

'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?' said Syme.

'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.'

'A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.

His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know you,' the eyes seemed to say, 'I see through you. I know very well why you didn't go to see those prisoners hanged.'


In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love.

Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.

'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently. 'I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue a quite bright blue. That's the detail that appeals to me.'

'Nex', please!' yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.

Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch -- a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.

'There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on the way.'

From the table at Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the room.

'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.'

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word?

A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.

Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still.


Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of Big Brother.

Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

[bogeyman]

'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's back. [snip]

Good as the prose is, do you intent to clog up this thread with lengthy quotes from the book at every opportunity?

[expat]

The point is, Mailman, that there was never any 'exclusion zone' around parliament before this government came to power.

Also, when Thatcher was PM (who everyone said was an authoritarian) I could still casually walk into Downing Street and take pictures without being molested by our brave Boys in Blue.

When she came in, yes. No longer, by the time she went out.

[bogeyman]

When she came in, yes. No longer, by the time she went out.

Well perhaps not. She was utterly barking by the time she left office, but...

She didn't feel the need to erect a set of big gates blocking off a public thoroughfair just to guard herself and her privillegd minions against the enraged plebiscite.

[Denny]

Excellent 'Dispatches' documentary on C4 last night by Peter Hitchens.

A timely expose of how the government are intent on destroying our ancient freedoms and how the police are now enforcers of state politics, rather than the law.

http://www.channel4.com/news/microsi...dom/index.html

Anyone see it?

The strong arm of the state was written about by Andrew Gamble back in the 80s under Thatcher who was supposed to uphold the principle of 'individual freedom.' However, she was really only referring to economic freedom not freedom from state controls which increased immeasurably under her premiership. Since then we've all seen the strengthening of the nanny state the government health campaigns, earlier social interventions, the 'widening of the net' that draws the young into the criminal justice sytem prematurely.

Anyone who associated with unorthodox political affiliations, even back then and before, whether they were activist or dissidents, were likely to be browbeaten by state officialdom long before Blair came to power. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall MI5 agents have largely been laid off with the rest turning more of their attention to all kinds of organisations such as animal rights activists, eco-warrior groups, CND campaigners as well as the usual terrorist groups and soccer hooligan elements such as Combat 18. Leading activists of all of these groups are likely to be on 'file' somewhere whether they've committed an offence or not. The debate about whether the jury system is viable has been ongoing for some time too.

The strong arm of the state is undoubtedly becoming heightened for all of us because of the terrorist threat posed by Islamic extremists, particularly since 9/11, but I also think that the current trend toward state control by stealth is a progression from these earlier controls directed at specific groups, so it's not a Blairite project as such and has little to do with right wing reactionary explanations of 'socialism under Blair' and so on - which shouldn't come as a surprise since he's not even close to being a socialist. Much of these controls has to do with the advent of new surveillance enabling technologies too, such as CCTV.

It just seems that we're living in police state now that Habeus Corpus is under threat, the imminence of ID cards and because the police are more active in clamping down on those publicly expressing politically unorthodox views against the interests of certain other minority groups in addition to the usual law enforcement duties they're meant to carry out.

Scary.

[bogeyman]

because the police are more active in clamping down on those publicly expressing politically unorthodox views against the interests of certain other minority groups in addition to the usual law enforcement duties they're meant to carry out.

Regarding police priorities, I would say 'instead of' rather than 'in addition to'.

[white-anglo-reactionary]

Yet another quote from "1984"

"The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city.. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival."

"It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist."

These were the thoughts of Emmanuel Goldstein, the arch-enemy of the party in 1984. For the Bushes and Blairs of this world, this nebulous "War on Terror" is the perfect excuse for controlling the media and limiting rights of free speech, habeas corpus, and freedom of assembly and demonstration. All this because these imbeciles don't want their stupidity to be held up to proper scrutiny.

[DodgyAgent]

The strong arm of the state was written about by Andrew Gamble back in the 80s under Thatcher who was supposed to uphold the principle of 'individual freedom.' However, she was really only referring to economic freedom not freedom from state controls which increased immeasurably under her premiership.

Scary.

You might like to explain what policies Thatcher implemented to support your insinuation that this all began under her. Socialism is about collective sharing and responsibility and because people are different there needs to be control to make such a system work. Socialists are control freaks (Blair may not be a dyed in the wool csocialist but he is certainly a control freak) by nature, conservatives are not (by nature- though a bit of power soon changes things) our society is being moulded as such because whether it is big business or big government, these are the people who control our lives.

[Central-Scrutiniser]

How could you tell how much of it was lies?

It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution.

The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.

It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve.

Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end.

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering -- a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons -- a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting -- three hundred million people all with the same face.

The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.


He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.

He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations -- that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago.

Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.

The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent.

The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300 -- and so it went on.

It was like a single equation with two unknowns.

It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.