Monday, December 27, 2010

2011 - A Brave New Dystopia (Chris Hedges)







 

















Posted on Dec 27, 2010














By Chris Hedges

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.



We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.”  “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.
 


The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.
Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.

Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.

“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”





He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.

The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.

The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”

20 comments:

  1. Chris has managed to put into words my exact thoughts about the state of the disunion. I've always compared what we're experiencing with both 1984 and Brave New World and see them manifested in the same way as Hedges.

    The media circus is the soma which got the sheeple hooked in order to distract them from the ptb's hostile takeover. Mission accomplished. Enter 1984's police state on steroids.

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  2. Chris Hedges is definitly COTO.

    Spot on and horrific. A brilliant picture of what we all can see here as well.

    “Hell is empty and the devils are all here.”~Shakespeare

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  3. Of the handful of journalists who can see through the US's political hologram, Hedges has the clearest view into the matrix than anyone I've read so far. Too bad he doesn't command a larger audience. But alas, maybe we can help give him more exposure by posting links to his essays whenever we have the chance.

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  4. One think to be noticed is that the template for all of this is available in a third text proceeding both Orewll and Huxley that lays out the same paradigm and the steps to that end.

    It is remarkable to read the Protocols now having the history from the early 1900s to now as an obvious manifestation of the Zionist agenda. It is simply undeniable at this point that these documents reflect a plan that has come to fruition.

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  5. I heartily agree with that Will. It's all layed out in the protocols for all with eyes that see. We all knew what was coming but did any of us expect it to happen this quickly? I didn't.

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  6. He's the diamond in a sea of glass journalists. 'I Don't Believe in Atheists' and 'American Fascists' should be required reading for COTO students as it confirms the two winged collusion to destroy what freedom we have left.

    He most certainly is COTO and knows the committee dialectic.

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  7. In Nesta Webster's work the reader will find a side by comparison of the Protocols to the instructions of Wieshaupt writing as Sparticus.
    Other than obvious technological updates they are a reflection of the same program.

    In the late 90s in the lead up to the turn of the century there was a flurry of anti-Orwell articles pointing out his "antisemitism". As a matter of course all of these critiques were from members of the "chosen" tribe.

    It could be reasonably postulated that Orwell took a lot of what might be sparked in the imagination to define what the world would be like under the despotism described in the protocols.

    And now....we happened to land there, despite a century of warnings. Silly human race.
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  8. Ok, I'm getting a bit freaked out. I was reading PD's latest post and watching videos on agenda 21 and then mk ultra in hollywood. I keep getting calls from this weird number and my phone rang 4x's while I was watching these videos making me feel paranoid. I've seen this number on my caller id many times before. I won't pick up on any number I don't recognize. After the last call from this number (before I unplugged my phone minutes ago) I listened to see if there was any message. Very faintly as if in the background I heard a man say "pick up....." I can't make out the last word.

    Here's the #. .. I googled it and there is no such listing. I thought maybe it was a foreign number...5-093-656-0512 It's probably one of those fake clone numbers because a number with my area code rang my phone a second after that call.

    Anyone have any experience like this before?

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  9. http://www.callferret.com/area-codes/093-area-code.html

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  10. Jersey,

    I haven't had such an experience, no.
    But try not to freak out and let your imagination run away with you.
    Just remain alert and don't allow panic or hysteria to enter your picture.

    Now is the moment of power, as always.

    You are more powerful than silence on a phone line, or faint whispers that could be anything from cross signals to kinky teenage thrill boinkers.

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  11. http://batr.org/gulag/122610.html

    Money is more powerful than guns and bullets in this New Age global slave plantation. The reason why Open Borders will not be closed is that the destruction of America’s independence is a primary goal of the NWO. The domestic war on liberty requires the elimination of patriotic dissent. Official terror policy is aimed at us. No rational and informed citizen can any longer argue that the Republic can be restored. The last decade buried the corpse and incinerated the body of laws that once ruled a free people. The impending fate of the apathetic sheeple that allowed the crimes of this century to go unpunished is bleak. While hope is eternal, tyranny is inevitable. ~SARTRE

    Amerikan Dystopia...tyranny is not only “inevitable', it is presently manifest.~ww

    So great is their infatuation with the "Beast," with whom they have rolled in bed for more than a century, that evangelicals seem willing not only to be repeatedly bitten by this "Beast" but also to be devoured by it.~Rev. Ted Pike

    Those who deny this speak in ignorance with a deluded tongue.~ww

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  12. Thanks Patrick & Will. I think it freaked me out because it was late and I was watching videos of MK Ultra slaves at the time of the calls with very creepy background music. I'm defiinitetly not afraid of being alone but I must admit, sometimes my imagination does run wild if I let it.

    PD I did go to that site you linked me too and also another similar one. It seems many others have gotten calls from a number that starts 5-093 and they've had a foreign voice scream at them when they picked up..lol. What's that about. At least my creep whispered. Next time I get a call from that number I intend to pick up the phone and blow a whistle into it. That should end it. If not, I'll keep doing it until it does:)

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  13. Almost half of the articles posted on the Rense site are not allowed access by my browser...this incendent is increasing every day for the last two weeks.

    I get a message that the action has been aborted.

    There was an article by the White Aryan racist Prof. Kevin McDonald that this happened to. I wanted to see it because we got into an argument just a month or so ago on another article thread he posted.

    When his article on Rense was shot down by Explorer--I tried going through Bling search...NOTHING having to do with McDonald was accessable.

    Now, I find McDonald's ideas deplorable--but I find net censorship even more so.

    If this keeps up, I have to wonder how long our very own COTO becomes 'topic non grata'...???

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  14. Future, what future? I am extremely pessimistic. In my opinion the world is moving ineluctably towards a third world war—a strategic nuclear war. I do not believe that anything can be done to prevent it. The international system is simply too unstable to survive for long. The SALT II Treaty is important for the present, but over the long haul it cannot stop the momentum. Fortunately, I do not believe that I will live to see that day. But I am afraid you might.~Hans Morgenthau

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  15. Guantánamo not near to closure, White House admits
    The White House has acknowledged that it is "probably going to be a while" before the prison at Guantánamo Bay closes, nearly two years after President Barack Obama declared that the facility would shut within a year.~Telegraph UK

    Well file under no snit snearlock...what are you serious? Fuckin' Amerikans, it has to be “admitted”.

    ww

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  16. Obama administration preparing executive order to authorize indefinite detentions
    By John Burton 23 Dec 2010


    The Obama administration is drafting an executive order, scheduled for release early in 2011, which authorizes indefinite detention without charge of prisoners currently held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The new order means that the prison will remain open, or that these prisoners will be transferred to permanent locations in the US... According to reports first published Tuesday evening... unnamed US officials have revealed that the executive order, which will for the first time establish indefinite detention as an Obama administration policy, has "been in the works for more than a year."

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  17. On the Cusp of 2011--what are the signs in heaven?

    I would say that for Amerika, it's all over but the screaming.

    It is very quite all across the boards today. Just like the stillness here in my personal invironment. I feel like the character in I AM LEGEND.

    All the zombies have taken to their cocoons. But what of COTO?

    etu brute?

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  18. You're not alone Will. I've not fallen asleep with the pod under my bed. I'm here at work and coping with a lousy head cold. I've used up all my sick time until January so I must slog on. I'm so tired of working but I'll never have the means to retire and SS is going to disappear, I'm sure, before I can even collect the full amount. Sucks to be me............boohoo

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  19. Cheer up, the City of London arrived 13 minutes ago...they "feel your pain", I'm sure...if ya know what I mean.

    Sorry to hear about your headcold sista...I understand you must be in some pretty severe weather as well {?}.
    It has become milder here for the last two days.
    Too bad you're feeling down--veils are lifting--amazing things on the web...
    I tried to put something up on COTO but the link is frozen for me...??? The page loads frozen--everytime.
    Seems the Internet may be under a subtle attack...maybe building--I get a lot of 404s; Page Not Available.

    Keep on keeping on, \\ll//

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  20. Candid rather than candied, Hippocratic rather that hypocritical...historical rather than hysterical.~ww

    Two great articles for New Years Eve:

    http://www.rense.com/general92/70m.htm

    http://www.rense.com/general92/2011.htm

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