This weekend I re-read 1984, a book I tend to reach for when I get Defcon-1 depressed about the state of the world. Deep in the novel, Winston ponders the intricacies of doublethink:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… that was the ultimate subtlety.
In the last weeks, Russia took an already exacting speech environment to new extremes. A law was passed that would impose 15-year prison sentences for anyone spreading “fake news” about the Ukraine invasion; access was cut to Facebook and Twitter; stations like Echo Moskvi and TV Rain as well as BBC Russia, Radio Liberty, the New Times, Deutsche Welle, Doxa, and Latvia-based Meduza were effectively shut down; Wikipedia was threatened with a block over its invasion page; and national authorities have appeared to step in to prevent coverage of soldiers killed in the war, requiring local outlets to use terms like “special operation” instead. The latter development is connected to the state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, issuing a remarkably desperate dictum requiring news outlets to “use information and data received by them only from official Russian sources.”
Russia also appears in the middle of a general crackdown on local media, not so much because those outlets are dissenting, but because they’re more likely to provide indirect evidence of war failures or the effect of sanctions. The desperation to control news has grown to the point where Russian diplomats in foreign countries are pressuring state outlets in countries like Iran to stop using the term “war” to describe what’s going on in Ukraine.
On the flip side, a slew of actions have been taken to crack down on “fake news” and “misinformation” in the West. The big one was the European Union banning RT and Sputnik:
1 comment:
Great Article, because the using Orwell's 1984 book as an analogy in alignment with the goings on now, endless war mongering, rings so true, in my opinion! Bingo! Yet, it's so pathetically inexcusably sad we are watching numskulls actually playing the scenario's out as if it's 1984 Orwell come to life!
Upon reading this book in HS, my English Teacher stated then, this will come in the next 30 to 40 years and we thought, start preparing our minds for dealing with really evil stupidity in the future. It helped, we are wiser and cynical about how great mankind has had it, and now regression will set in, proving why Christ died for our sins, God knew we all are sinner's but some folks will just screw up big time, and tis so! Next, what to believe from all the newspeak pumping up the volume for not missing a beat for another crisis as Covid-19 waned, or hear it's making a come back on stage?
Where are the mother's of those clowns promoting their play for "New World Order", even USA head-figures are in the play. USA has the biggest clown ever, right? Time for USA to promote a new act, new play, and some great actor's that are the part they portray, a play that puts the NWO play out of business, right? No clowns in our new play!
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