Yes?
This post has been edited for your protection. Nothing to see here, folks.
Carry on.
Nice OP: short, sweet, and to the point.
Let’s take a case in history: Germany. Pre-WWI, Germany was a thriving industrial nation. After all the devastation of World War I and the stripping of Germany’s resources by France and England, Germany fell very deeply into an economic depressio. In part, it was the desperation that came with the times that drove the Nazis into power. The German citizens were very desperate to regain the glory of the pre-WWI era, no matter the cost. All you really need is emotional need of the people to bring anything about, good or bad.
nahtanoj
It already did. 18 years ago. Check your calendar.
I think it could happen anywhere, that’s the beauty of it.
Heh and one kick ass Van Halen album it was, too, baby. Believe it.
But seriously, I think that not only could it happen, it’s already happening. The spread of surveillance - including invasive searches - into every facet of our lives, the treatment of dissenters as traitors, the defining what is or is not a good American, the policing of public speech … we rapidly approach the “game over” stage.
Which part – the unending state of war, the confiscation of citizen’s rights in the name of patriotism, or government snooping in on bedrooms and chatrooms?
Better question would be: How much do we owe Orwell for his prescient warnings?
Big Brother would not issue bulletins through the screaming of some organization man. Catie Couric or Al Roker would cheerfully inform us “We are at war with Oceania. We’ve always been at war with Oceania. Now, here’s some tips for you summer vacation.”
Secondly, Big Brother would do its best to provide citizens with creature comforts. Rationing and living in barracks make people unhdiscontent. It’s not far from being unhappy with how things are, to wanting to change how things are.
Big Brother would try to give every citizen pleasant living space, cheerfuk decorations, and plenty of food. If people are happy living under Big Brother, why revolt?
I agree that some of 1984 has happened. Entertainment Tonight, and similiar shows tell people what to like. Studios play it safe by releasing the same films instead of taking chances with something new.
Things got a lot worse on 9/11. Huge amounts of people were willing to cheerfully relinquish their freedoms in return for safety. McCarthy would be proud.
Congress and the Supreme Court support a pledge that endorses belief in a single divine being. Atheists and polytheists hold ideas which are contrary to those of the government. Brave New World had a state religion. Look at Napoleon from Orwell's Animal Farm. He doesn't hold power by force alone. He is the successor to Old Major. He venerates OM's skull in a public shrine. He claims to communicate with OM in dreams. Napoleon makes himself shaman of a new state religion.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If Orwell were alive today he'd regret writing 1984 as no one seems to have read it.We aren’t heading for 1984. If anything we are looking more and more like Brave New World. People are being kept in line through media circuses, frivolity and overconsumption, not by starvation and torture.
BTW…all of you all who think “1984 is coming true!” have no clue about what living in a dictatorship is really all about. Yes, there are parts of the world that resemble 1984, the country that most closely approaches it is North Korea.
I suppose that 1000s of people screaming how any minor government interference with their rights is fascism is a small price to pay for not living under fascism. The thing that always amuses me is that all you prophets of doom are perfectly capable of seeing that we live under a fascist dictatorship, yet the rest of us are too stupid and brainwashed to see it. And then you get on a public message board and state that we live in a fascist dictatorship with absolutely zero fear of being disappeared.
Doc
Two things were at work against this in Oceania, however. The first was the daunting task of organization: very effectively quelled by the Thought Police, and later in the workings of Newspeak. The second was the amount of effort required to achieve even the smallest increase in happiness. Julia and Winston went to great lengths just to have sex, and it was their undoing. The minimal comfort Big Brother gave them was far and above what they’d have to give up to get the slightest bit more.
The flaw of wealthy nations: people are never content. Taken axiomatically in economics (and always introduced in 101 classes) is this notion: humans have unlimited wants and needs. There is no final sense of satisfaction. Also, it is noteworthy that Goldstein’s book layed out the reasoning behind induced poverty in the treatment of the proles, those who constituted the largest portion of Oceania’s society. It had to be set up so that in struggling to gain more one had to give up more than one would gain. Simple pleasures ruled the day: gambling, drinking, prositution, petty relationships and bickering. No education, and so no sense of teleology (and so no drive to change things).
The poor are not politically affluent; Orwell was not prophetic in this, but observational.
I don’t think we’re going to have *1984-*style “mass amnesia” any time soon; if someone were to announce tomorrow that we are allies with the Taliban, and we’ve always been allies with the Taliban, there’d be a lot of head-scratching on that one.
On the other hand, we definitely are moving towards implementing more and more aspects of 1984. Besides the other indications mentioned by other posters, I’d add the fact that we’re moving closer to a uniform control over the media (there is no such thing as a truly liberal major media outlet, despite when the conservatives say).
The United States is not a fascist nation. Yet. I’d definitely start to worry if and when the Bush Administration outlaws the ACLU, however.
1984 was just a slight exageration of normal behavior in european culture. the united states is an economic slave state based on television brainwashed neurotic consumerism. how many people are locked into their jobs because they are in debt up to their eyebrows?
DRIVE = LOVE, do women actually buy that?
why isn’t accounting mandatory in highschool since it is just 5th grade arithmatic? banking was going on 400 years before the invention of the steam engine. shouldn’t almost everyone in this hi-tech society be able to understand accounting?
ASSETS - LIABILITIES = NET WORTH
maximize assets, minimize liabilities. even an economist should be able to understand.
Dal Timgar
I love this sort of rhetoric. “No one is dragging you away, so you must be a foil-hat wearing paranoid!” Of course the reality is much more complex.
Not that there aren’t foil-hatters out there, but such generalization doesn’t seem to apply well here.
The fear of impending or realized fascism is realized as a loss of personal power. No one has to disappear you (or send you to room 101) when your aspirations cannot be realized anyway. This point is simply not trivial.
The dictionary definition of fascism serves well for short discussion, but a more detailed analysis of social structure is always necessary at this level of discussion. The parallels to the anti-utopia presented in 1984 are stunning if metaphoric. Of course, the differences are also significant. I’m sure most of us on the board realize that; our fears (expressed and, as you aptly demonstrate, disdained) focus on losing those differences: we don’t want to! Slippery slope arguments are never popular; is this because they fail, or because they are true? Neither question is fair, but this is the bifurcation we are offered.
The majority of the population of America seems to be marginalized either politically or economically. Following the standard conservative approach will lead us to de facto fascism of a form more like a plutocracy: one dollar, one vote, one million dollars, one million votes; affluency and wealth are synonamous, and no mechanism exists to create mobility except poor planning, but learning to plan effectively requires money in the first place. This was the flaw of raw capitalism and why labor laws and such were introduced, yet you’ll note (I hope!) that it is a metaphoric form of fascism, and no one had to be disappeared.
One needn’t be Stalin to oppress.
In fact, the notion of disappearing is probably incorrect even from the view of 1984. Winston should have been disappeared just like Stymes was (I think that was his name?-- the guy who was working on the final version of Newspeak), but he wasn’t. I somehow think that neither was anyone else. Though I suppose the case could be made either way. That’s CS grounds, not GD at any rate.
I guess that depends on who you are, doesn’t it? My mother and I had a few starvation incidents here and there while I was growing up. Too wealthy for welfare, too poor for anything else.
The opposite swing is over-regulation and Big [Brother] Government: everything not forbidden is compulsory. In the middle lies our existence, and there are elements that try to get the government to swing one way or the other in different regards. Point is, it really wouldn’t take much to push us one way or the other.
Big Brother Companies or Big Brother Government? In neither scenario does anyone have to be killed, they only need to be kept so busy surviving that there is no means for dissent except for those in power, but what incentive do they have to dissent, then? None, of course.
Which, incidentally, is what your quote is trying to do to me: discourage dissent. “Hey, no one is dragging you off to room 101; you must be a paranoid slippery-slope arguing looney” (note: I know you didn’t say this, and I highly doubt you even wanted to imply it, so please let’s not bicker over this). Other arguments are, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”. That one pops up a lot here on the SDMB, though my objections have never really been addressed in those threads. “Democracy is the worst, except for all the others”. This one cracks me up; it at once acknowledges that political machinations suck and proceeds to elevate our form of it high anyway. How is this not doublethink? Try and explain it, if you can.
“Army of one”; “Watch ‘Me’ become ‘We’” :rolleyes:
No, they aren’t dragging me away. You are right about that. Am I to be thankful for this? I don’t know. But what other response can there be to such an assertion? the guy on the streetcorner shouting that the end of the world is coming is easy to dismiss: here is the world, and so he must be wrong. The guy yelling that we are approaching (or are already in) a state of fascism… if no one acts on his claims of oppression, is it because he is crazy?
Rosa parks sat in an improper place on the bus. We lock up millions of drug users. One is considered civil disobediance and the other? I don’t know. Are there any parallels?
If I say to you, Lemur, that I wish to vote on issues, not politicians, and since I cannot I do not vote, what is your response? Am I stupid for doing so? How does my no-vote differ from the no-vote out of apathy? Am I marginalized legitimately or not? And who decides the legitmacy without begging the question?
Fascism only needs to destroy opportunity for meaningful dissent. there are a million ways to accomplish this; the quickest way is to slander those who would choose to express dissent.
Yes, there are foil-hats out there. But just because I am allowed to post dissent on an internet message board doesn’t mean I am not oppressed in many regards. If 1984 said anything, it was that you didn’t have to kill people to oppress them. Everyone worked, everyone was fed, everyone had access to things like prostitutes, bars, gambling. creature comforts were sometimes scarce, but not to the point of death or starvation. The torture routine was only employed when all else failed.
When all else fails now you go to jail. You must request a forum for public dissent; should that request be denied and you go ahead anyway then what?
I’m not really worried about a 1984 Oceana type government. I would imagine that in a relatively short period of time, such a government would destabilize from all the O’Brians in INSOC jockying for the Big Brother spot. Most revolutions aren’t started by the poor anyhow. They are started by middleclass and wealthy individuals who feel dssatisfied with the system. Jefferson and Washington weren’t exactly angry peasents. INSOC was pretty good at keeping the poor down, but what happens if one of the high level beurocrats woth plenty of support decides he wants to be Big Brother?
I’m more worried about a Terry Gilliams Brazil type scenario. A big mindless beurocracy weighed down by an overabundance of information. “I’m sorry Mr Buttle, we can’t renew your drivers license because you died last week. But my names Tuttle, I just want the typo fixed.” and so on…
Personally, I don’t think it is possible to live absolutely free. In order to live with other people, it is necessary to create rules. The more people we have living together, the more rules we need. The more rules we impose on ourselves, the less freedom we have. The best we can hope to expect is a society where the same rules apply to everyone and the people have some input into what laws are written.
How come no one ever worries about barnyard animals taking over the world like in Animal Farm?
1984 was NOT intended to be a Prediction.
It is a Satire, amplifying the worst excesses of his fellow Leftwingers.
Also, its not Orwells last will and testament , its just the last book he wrote before he died.