To Hear ..., To See ..., or Not?

(Echoes of George Orwell¹)

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.

This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time,

The essential job is to get people to recognise war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda.

If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions.

Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac.

There is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years.

[T]he existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.

I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.

Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists.

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

[I]f public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.

Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.

What now strikes us as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists.

One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing.

Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.

Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.”

So, are we open to hearing and seeing the greater reality of our 21st Century world by examining the prescience of 20th Century George Orwell?

The Orwell Tapes [A Biography]:
  Part One at http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-orwell-tapes-part-1-1.3513191 (Time 53:51)
  Part Two at http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-orwell-tapes-part-2-1.3527732 (Time 53:59)
  Part Three at http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-orwell-tapes-part-3-1.3540777 (Time 53:59)

YouTube version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcxNtZjkivM (Time 2:41:34)

Then let us see if George Webb has anything Orwellian to open our 2017 eyes and ears—https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrQ-wHKVi0JDWjQGcuoYnew

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
Above quotes from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Orwell
Some additional quotes from the same source:
» Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.
» War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
» It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.
» Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.
» In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
» The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
» As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.
» The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.
» Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Observations / Lessons from Egypt

(A Global Pattern?* A New Revolution 2.0?)

Five years ago, Wael Ghonim published a memoir^† of his experiences during the “Arab Spring” as it played out in Egypt, 2010-2011. How déjà vu his observations seem to our circumstances in “freedom-loving” North America in 2017! If one doesn't believe the déjà vus,  ask those whose YouTube, Twitter, PayPal, Facebook and other accounts are being demonetized, cancelled, or closed by “authorities” because their views and investigations are exposing too much crime and corruption by the powers that BElieve in the primacy of power and gain.

Consider how universal Ghonim's words from Egypt have become for US:

Egyptian State Security reached deep into society, involving itself in every detail of life. It thrived on the emergency law, enacted in 1958 but not enforced until after the Six-Day War in 1967, and still in effect in mid-2011. That law gives executive authorities the right to arrest, interrogate, and imprison any Egyptian for up to six months without a warrant or any legal grounds or even the right to an attorney. It also empowers the authorities to ban all types of protests as well as gatherings of any group of people without a security clearance (p. 2).

The Egyptian regime lived in fear of opposition. It sought to project a façade of democracy, giving the impression that Egypt was advancing toward political rights and civil liberties while it vanquished any dissidents who threatened to mobilize enough support to force real change (p. 3).

This all amounted to what I came to call “weapons of mass oppression.” No matter how far down we spiraled, no matter how much corruption spread, only a few people dared to swim against the current. Those who did ended up in a prison cell after an unfriendly encounter with State Security, or were subjected to character assassination in the media, or were targeted on fraudulent charges or long-ignored violations (p. 3).

... cheating and fraud gradually became everyday activities in Egypt, making their way from education to business and commercial transactions, and ultimately to elections (p. 13).

He was right: regimes of terror cannot stand exposure (p. 37).

Worse yet, the media, under the usual pressure from State Security, ignored the protest. As with many past examples of human rights abuses, the public was kept in the dark. / The media’s suppression of the physical world made the virtual world a critical alternative for promoting the cause (p. 63).

This is not a political stand. It is a humanitarian stand in solidarity with victims of torture in prisons (p. 88).

I used to think, like you, that there was nothing wrong with our country and that accidents were minimal . .  . Then I realized that catastrophes happen on a daily basis, but no one sees them . .  . The police torture people systematically . .  . the informers threaten the citizens . .  . and work with thugs . .  . and the law is only enforced on the helpless . .  . Anyone who is not well connected in our country loses his rights . .  . and when injustice takes place, they threaten anyone who could open his mouth to tell the truth (pp. 96-97).

Gandhi replies, “In this cause, I too am prepared to die, but my friends, there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill. Whatever they do to us, we will attack no one, kill no one, but we will not give our fingerprints, not one of them. They will imprison us. They will fine us. They will seize our possessions. But they cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.” A member of the audience shouts: “Have you been to prison?  .  .  . They beat us, they torture us.” Gandhi interrupts: “I am asking you to fight. To fight against their anger, not to provoke it. We will not strike a blow, but we will receive them. And through our pain we will make them see their injustice. And it will hurt, as all fighting hurts. But we cannot lose. We cannot. They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body— not my obedience!” (pp. 107-108)

In the past, the government maintained a long-standing tradition of telling lies to the people through its state-owned [-controlled] puppet media . .  . ... . .  . The people lost trust in the government, and the government thinks that since the people are silent, then they are satisfied, or that there is no problem until the people take action (p. 147).

Jan25 is not a revolution in the sense of a coup, but rather a revolution against our government to let them know that we have taken interest in one another’s problems and that we shall reclaim all our rights and will not be silent anymore (p. 165).

The revolution brought out the best in people. It successfully proved that a multifaceted society like Egypt’s could easily unite when its members shared the same dream, and could do so with dignity. Everyone came together for the sake of the country (pp. 225-226).

The guards entered the room one by one, and I saw their faces and got to know them all. As a group, I had thought them to be nothing but indecent animals. As it turned out, they surprised me by appearing to be perfectly normal. Their faces were the same ones you see every day on the streets of Egypt. Some of them even carried the same hint of goodness you see in many Egyptian faces. It was hard to believe that these people could, under the right circumstances, turn into evil torturers. It was really mind-boggling. This only confirmed my conviction that these men were not my enemies; they were just tools of my real enemies. Egypt’s real enemies were the leading figures of the regime, who had corrupted these people and stripped us of freedom and dignity for the sake of sustaining themselves in power (p. 247).

I implored everyone not to think of personal gains at this point. This was not a time for promoting, let alone imposing, any ideology or for settling old grievances. Egypt had to come first, and nothing must stand in the way of realizing our dreams (p. 260).

At the end, I asked everyone to set aside personal wishes and ideologies. It was time for Egypt to come first and to rule over everything else (p. 264).

The sense of solidarity transcended differences of age, class, culture, education, and religion (p. 265).

I began to realize that many of the conspiracy theories that I kept hearing about may actually have been true. Tyrants maintain power by conspiring against the will of their own people. We ranted in disappointment and anger, while Mostafa and Khaled reminded us of what they had said all along: this regime was not going to change overnight and suddenly start caring more about Egypt than it did about its personal interests (pp. 281-282).

Revolutions of the past have usually had charismatic leaders who were politically savvy and sometimes even military geniuses. Such revolutions followed what we can call the Revolution 1.0 model. But the revolution in Egypt was different: it was truly a spontaneous movement led by nothing other than the wisdom of the crowd. One day revolution seemed utterly impossible, and there were just a few people dreaming of change. And then, after the brave people of Tunisia ignited a fire that had been smoldering in the hearts of Egyptians and many other Arab people, the impossible quickly became possible. People who would only post comments in cyberspace became willing to stand in public; then those protesters, among many others, made the great leap to become marchers and chanters, and grew into a critical mass that toppled a brutal and tyrannical regime (pp. 293-294).

The revolution in Egypt would certainly have happened without many of the common faces that are linked to it today— and that is the best point of all. This book is a personal memoir and not a comprehensive historical account, and the few names mentioned in the previous chapters, including mine, certainly have no primacy over others in this leaderless revolution. It has been jokingly said that no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible, and when it comes to Jan25, I couldn’t agree more. This was the Revolution 2.0 model: no one was the hero because everyone was a hero (p. 294; bold emphasis added).

We shall never forget all those who sacrificed their lives on our path to freedom, and we will continue to sacrifice so that future generations live in the Egypt that their brave predecessors aspired to. The selfless heroes who died defending the dreams of millions of their fellow citizens will forever be our beacon of light. Indeed, it was their courage, determination, and grace that reminded us and the rest of humanity of a universal truth that many seemed to have forgotten: the power of the people will always be stronger than the people in power (p. 294).

So what is the great universal take-away?

“The power of the people

will always be stronger

than the people in power”

[if only we will wake up

to the realities and deceptions around us

and stand united for truth and justice].

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* Old Testament | Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 ~ The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
† Ghonim, Wael. Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

Swamp Dwellers?

A book that every USian must read to understand the swamp; how and why said swamp proliferated so rapidly; and why un-examined patriotism and blissful ignorance is the quicksand of another déjà vu.

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YouTube discussion at



David Talbot: Allen Dulles & 'The Devil's Chessboard' (Time 1:10:35) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXzsQlMpfUs