Orwell Explains How Socialists Alter Language to Alter History. George Orwell wrote that through alterating the past, and by portraying any remembered history as evil, socialist regimes could render classic texts such as the U.S.
Declaration of Independence incomprehensible in their original context. People then would be incapable of understanding the original intentions behind them. And as if to demonstrate how close today’s society has come to what Orwell warned of, the Declaration of Independence has been framed just like this today. Under the new idea of “hate speech,” the censors at Facebook flagged the Declaration of Independence as containing offensive language.
To demonstrate the full scale of irony, let’s look at what Orwell predicted in his novel “1984”: “In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.” Subverting Totalitarianism Orwell saw this coming. ‘Thoughtcrime’ Is Becoming a Reality. In several Western countries, people are receiving visits from the police to question them about their political views, and some have been arrested.
Cases in the UK and New Zealand have involved people who made comments against mass migration and Islamism. In a May 4 viral video posted on Facebook, a New Zealand man is questioned by police for his alleged posts about the mosque shooting in Christchurch. Of course, the real issue isn’t about religious “intolerance.” It’s publicly accepted for people, including public leaders, to openly condemn religions such as Christianity. This is very specifically a political issue, related to state policy on mass migration, which is often heavily from Muslim countries. Condemning state policies has become synonymous with a double standard on “intolerance,” which is punishable by the state. Even in the United States, similar practices are now in place, only they’re being enforced by large corporations. ‘Doublethink’ ‘Repressive Tolerance’ Self-Censorship.
DEMOCRACY. THE most striking thing about the founders of modern democracy such as James Madison and John Stuart Mill is how hard-headed they were.
They regarded democracy as a powerful but imperfect mechanism: something that needed to be designed carefully, in order to harness human creativity but also to check human perversity, and then kept in good working order, constantly oiled, adjusted and worked upon. The need for hard-headedness is particularly pressing when establishing a nascent democracy. One reason why so many democratic experiments have failed recently is that they put too much emphasis on elections and too little on the other essential features of democracy. The power of the state needs to be checked, for instance, and individual rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to organise must be guaranteed. Robust constitutions not only promote long-term stability, reducing the likelihood that disgruntled minorities will take against the regime. Video Democracy: A view from Cairo.
PETER HITCHENS: The sinister, screeching mob who want to kill free speech (And no, I DON'T mean the Islamist terrorists in our midst) By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday Published: 00:02 GMT, 11 January 2015 | Updated: 01:34 GMT, 11 January 2015 Global shock: Memorials have sprung up around the world to the Paris massacre victims Once again we are ruled by a Dictatorship of Grief.
Ever since the death of Princess Diana, we have been subject to these periodic spasms when everyone is supposed to think and say the same thing, or else. We were told on Friday that ‘politicians from all sides’ had lined up to attack Ukip’s Nigel Farage for supposedly ‘exploiting’ the Paris massacre. Mr Farage had (quite reasonably) pointed out that the presence of Islamist fanatics in our midst might have something to do with, a) uncontrolled mass migration from the Muslim world, and b) decades of multicultural refusal to integrate them into our laws and customs. Rather than disputing this with facts and logic (admittedly this would be hard), the three ‘mainstream’ parties joined in screeching condemnation. Why ever not? The King David You Never Knew. Thomas Piketty and his ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ are white hot, but he’s no ‘Tocqueville for Today’—and he and his fan club have Tocqueville all wrong.
In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a new Frenchman in town. Armed with progressives’ two favorite things—statistics and a European accent—the celebrity economist Thomas Piketty has hit American shores in support of his new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Sadly for Piketty, his explanatory socialism is a nonstarter for every American except a handful of media, academic, and policy elites. In an ominous example of just how out of touch those elites have become, two of them have produced a wildly mistaken assessment of Piketty’s work—and haven’t raised so much as a peep of objection.
The review in question is “A Tocqueville for Today,” written by Jacob S. Hacker and Pierson are respected scholars in their field. Tocqueville, not Piketty, is our best guide to the problem of inequality in America.