Orwell's '1984' Revisited

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Margaret Atwood called George W. Bush, the greatest threat to world peace to date! What Atwood did not mention was that Bushco derived its power from the deliberate and well-planned attack on truth by way of language. George Orwell predicted it; his works remain the textbook example of how governments may manipulate people by first manipulating the language.

If all else fails, a totalitarian regime may make the telling of truth a crime. Traditionally, the names given those truths are treason or sedition. A young United States experimented with the Alien and Sedition Acts giving near dictatorial powers to President John Adams, specifically, the power to imprison or deport aliens upon the mere suspicion that activities posed a threat to the new national government.

To his credit, Adams made no use of them but neither did he rebuke the Congress for passing them. George W. Bush proved a greater threat. Bush arrogated unto himself the power to 'define' the very word "terrorist"! Bush could create a 'terrorist' at will by merely re-defining a target. Indeed --Bush assumed and asserted the power and authority to make you a 'terrorist' by merely 'deeming' you to be one!

Orwell's classic cautionary tale, 1984, describes a fascist, totalitarian government spying on its own citizens, denying reality and creating an alternate state that exploits a fictional enemy in order to wage a perpetual war. Orwell's Big Brother tried to re-write history and succeeded.
In "It Can't Happen Here" Sinclair Lewis describes the dictatorship of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip who might have been inspired by George W. Bush had 'he' not preceded him. In both '1984' and in Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here", a fascist state justifies an omni-present dictatorship by maintaining states of perpetual war and perpetual terror.

The lesson of 1984 is less about the state itself than about the individual. When states are absolutely powerful, the individual ceases to exist. Philosophically, individuals robbed of free will are denied person-hood even as mere 'legal abstractions' (corporations) are made 'persons' by decree. In the U.S. 'corporations' are decreed to be persons by way of a bogus and dishonest decision by our Supreme Court, It remains the very worst decision since Dredd-Scott legitimized the keeping of slaves.

"In order to acknowledge the collapse of Soviet Communism and the failure of fascism to reemerge as a potent political force, I ditched Orwell's oppressive totalitarian state in favor of an entertainment-fueled nihilism in which dimwitted citizens frittered away their lives watching web TV and working at slightly overpaid jobs to buy worthless junk ... on web TV, natch. Where Orwell envisioned endless rows of soldiers marching in perfect unison to the strains of the Two-Minute Hate, I saw a world where nations had been replaced by trading blocs and the objects of hatred were the immigrants in our midst."

--Ted Rall, Addicted To Perpetual War

The images from 1984 are seared into our memories --big brother, the telescreen, the grotty bedroom, the cubicle, the memory hole, the drab gray existence, the rat cage. But 1984 is as much about language. It is more than mere sub-text. Language, in 1984, is the means by which Big Brother creates an alternate reality. It is only in the 'alternate reality' that Big Brother has power.
Big Brother is the Wizard of Oz, an illusion, an image on smoke if not mirrors. If millions suddenly deny the illusion, the lies, the bullshit, Big Bro is finished. The bad news is that, like the cowardly lion, we dare not challenge the great and powerful Oz

The most glaring use of Newspeak is the invention of what I have chosen to call "focus group phrases"; so called because they are invented, full cloth, by consultants who most certainly know their way around a focus group. "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is just such a phrase. "911 Denier" is another. "Al Qaeda iln Iraq" is designed to make a lazy populace forget that the war was begun upon blackhearted lies about WMD.

"911 Denier" is 'Orwell-speak' or 'Newspeak' designed to shift the burden of proof when it is, in fact,  Bush who must prove his theory of 911 --a theory for which there is not a shred of evidence --let alone proof. Anyone believing it is either a part of the plot or stupid! The Bush administration used up several ex post facto rationales for war. None of them were true! "Al Qaeda in Iraq", for example, implies the existence of a shadowy enemy that was never defined! That was by design! A real enemy is defined and can be targeted! Shadows may be summoned up whenever they are needed! 'Al Qaeda in Iraq', we can be sure, tested well.

A lazy news establishment liked it because it saved them the trouble of trouble of describing reality! Orwell understood as few have the power of language and in, 1984 the "tool of power" is language. Language empowers the all-powerful party which dictates the nature and use of language. The institutions of state maintain their power by exploiting the power of language to shape the nature of thought itself. That is, in fact, the job of the protagonist, Winston Smith. Examples may be found in any study of the recent Bush administration.

The George W. Bush regime very nearly gave the game away with the use of the phrase Total Information Awareness. In response to criticism, the regime stopped using the phrase to denote their program of widespread domestic and illegal surveillance.

Orwell is, of course, most famous for 1984 but his great essay on politics and language should also be required reading. See: Orwell: Politics and the English Language. Orwell explores how politicians exploit language to accrue absolute power. Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

--George Orwell

All who have read Orwell's essay on how easily politicians debase the language for nefarious purposes have recognized in the Bush administration the very techniques that Orwell warned us about.

The White House saw September 11 as a golden opportunity. The first catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil sparked an unprecedented case of leadership projection: desperate for protection and answers (why do they hate us? can we kill them before they kill us?), Americans wishfully compared Bush to FDR and Churchill. Approval ratings hit 92 percent. But Bush's political advisors knew that peaking early wouldn't guarantee reelection in 2004. Bush's father had been turned out of office just 20 months after the Gulf War ratcheted his score up to 911.
...
The Bushies have lifted their reelection strategy straight out of "1984," and not just by creating ominous-sounding agencies like the Office of Homeland Security, the supposedly-closed Office of Strategic Information, and a "Shadow Government". As in "1984," the Bush regime tolerates zero dissent --a two-party system in name only has been distilled to one in which only Republicans express acceptable opinions. And an absence of follow-up attacks has been met by endless alerts, advisors and empty hysterics in the name of security, most recently culminating with Tom Ridge's much-mocked color-code warning system. 

--Ted Rall, Why Bush Is Addicted To Perpetual War

To be fair, it is not only politicians but bullshit artists who make us vulnerable to tyranny. This has been done by dumbing down the language and, thus, our ability to think critically. Until Bush, even Republican "Presidents" paid lip service to the Constitution.

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

—Sinclair Lewis, author of "It Can't Happen here"!

In It Can't Happen Here Sinclair Lewis showed us how it might happen here and in ways not unlike those predicted by both Lewis and Orwell. The characteristics of the fascist state so vividly described by both authors were found in abundance in Bush's fascist regime. Millions are still in denial, evidence that truth is tragically denied. A quote from Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here":

"Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we’re the huskiest nation going."

--It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis, page 20

Orwell and Lewis not only warned us, they predicted precisely how it would be done. As Shakespeare said: "All is true!" So --why didn't we listen? We did not listen because this nation has a fierce anti-intellectual streak which at its best makes us independent and at its worst makes us stupid!

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The Age of the 'Unperson'

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Thanks to the increasingly absurd, bought-and-paid for Supreme Court, corporations are now people but real people can be declared Orwellian 'un-persons' with but a stroke of a pen. This is an unconstitutional power given POTUS by SCROTUS but has no basis in law.

Everything you were told in school with respect to the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus, the rule of law, the right to trial, the right to be confronted by your accusers --all of that is by the boards, 'repealed', rendered moot, defunct with yet another idiotic, stupid and dead wrong decision by the most subversive, traitorous 'Supreme Court' in history.

Moreover, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that government officials are immune from lawsuits because --at the time --it was unclear whether the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal. Let me help them out on this one: every 'prisoner' held in Guantanamo is held in violation of every treaty and international principle to which the U.S. is obliged. I believe that applies as well to Abu Ghraib. Clearly --every action of the U.S. in Iraq is illegal stemming from the illegal invasion, a violation of every international principle and/or treaty to which the U.S. is bound. Any death following as a result of any action taken by the U.S. in or to Iraq violated U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441 is a capital crime! Bush himself is in violation of that provision. Others, farther down the food chain, can always plead: 'but ve ver only folloving orters!'

This affront to the rule of law must not stand! It is more repugnant than the so-called 'Intolerable Acts' which motivated the colonial separation from England. Can we have that revolution now?

As everyone knows by now, SCROTUS recently declared corporations --mere words on paper --to be 'real people' having rights that are NOW denied to you who are living, breathing real people. This is intolerable and absurd. The Supreme Court should be dismissed! One wonders now what additional bullshit must the government try to pull before it is declared illegitimate by a 'people's tribunal' and eventually replaced a real government representing REAL people not 'legal abstractions' and the ambitions of the Military/Industrial complex?

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."

[....]

Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" -- did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."

--US: Guantanamo Prisoners Not ‘Persons’, Anti-War Dot Com

In Orwellian terms, an 'unperson is a person who has been vaporized perhaps not literally by the state but nevertheless robbed of his/her natural rights and records of his/her ever having existed. This erasure of personhood itself consists of removing all references to the person in existing books, the destruction of photographs, in fact, any documentary proof of existence at any time, i.e, no trace or evidence is to be found in the historical record.

Even close friends or relatives are 'expected' to forget that an 'un-person' ever existed. The very mention of the unperson's name becomes a 'thought crime'. The concept is not so far-fetched. Consider the Stalinist practice of erasing from photographs the images of convicted 'enemies' of the state. That individuals --real persons --may be subject to this treatment by the 'state' --itself a mere abstraction --is double-plus absurd and more so when corporations are given rights that, by right, belong only to real, living, breathing, biological human beings. Revolution now!

1984 might not have been late in arriving as is often thought. It's implementation may have been complicated but only temporarily delayed by the arrival of the internet. Certainly, the Reagan administration was poised to concentrate, consolidate the conventional and broadcast media into very few and controllable hands. Much of that has occurred. Fox, nothing more than a shrill propaganda organ, is a prime example. Fox arrived on time. The rest of the right wing coup cannot be far behind.

But for the internet and independent blogs, it is this Reagan legacy of concentrated, biased right wing media that you would depend upon for information. That should scare you! If it does not, you're reading the wrong article. Meanwhile, we should not be surprised that the 'conventional' media has yet to grasp the many harms done the world by Reagan, Bush and Bush. The conventional media still speaks another language! Newspeak?

In George Orwell's 1984, life is lived in a state of perpetual war. The U.S. has been at war in one form or another since the beginning of World War II. In 1984 an oligarchical society is defined by its having voided the rights of citizens. It accomplishes this with pervasive government surveillance, mind control, and a 'ministry of truth'. This has been accomplished in the U.S. with the repeal of the Communications Act of 1934 which had established the recently defunct notion that the 'air waves' are owned collectively by the people! That is no longer the law of the land and consolidation of broadcast and print media into very few hands is the result. The internet, we suspect, will eventually be brought under the control of Big Bro. Enjoy it while you can!

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Big Bro Data Base Called 'a Step Too Far'

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

When London is already the world's most surveilled city, there are plans afoot to implement a 'Big Brother' society that even Orwell could not have imagined. In a global economy, the consequences will not be confined to the British Isles. The good news is that a proposal to create a huge database of phone call details, e-mails and internet use has kicked up a firestorm of controversy. The name George Orwell comes up repeatedly.

In London, the Information Commissioner Lord West warns that such a database could be a "step too far for the British way of life".

The most 'Orwellian' aspect of this threat to person hood itself it that not even Orwell might have imagined its implications. The technology exists right now to enslave the entire world. Every movement by every single individual could be monitored 24-7 with implanted chips implanted at birth. Your every movement, perhaps your feelings now and, later, your very thoughts, could be monitored via satellites and a world wide network of super computers. If Google can spider every web site on the world wide web, a network could monitor the implanted, dynamic profiles of every person on earth. There is no place you could go and nothing you could do that could not be traced and documented. In such a society, you could be executed remotely.

Proposals for a central database of all mobile phone and internet traffic have been condemned as "Orwellian".

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the police and security services needed new powers to keep up with technology.

And she promised that the content of conversations would not be stored, just times and dates of messages and calls.

But the Lib Dems slammed the idea as "incompatible with a free country", while the Tories called on the government to justify its plans.

Details of the times, dates, duration and locations of mobile phone calls, numbers called, website visited and addresses e-mailed are already stored by telecoms companies for 12 months under a voluntary agreement.

The data can be accessed by the police and security services on request - but the government plans to take control of the process in order to comply with an EU directive and make it easier for investigators to do their job.

--BBC, Giant database plan 'Orwellian'

As the British government debates how and whether it should monitor every aspect of a citizens life until death, other interests, primarily corporate, are studying the creation of a computerized 'Big Bro' against which to measure your resume.

There is evidence of a growing concern regarding the authenticity of qualifications presented at interviews. Today's computer software makes it simple to edit documents, thereby allowing falsification of information by the unscrupulous. The use of sophisticated document scanners, printers and copiers further complicates the issue. The research revolved around an investigation of the need for authentication of education qualifications and the establishment of the feasibility of doing this by using information technology to allow for efficient and effective verification that an education qualification was attained that the results were accurately reflected. The research concluded that there is a growing incidence of and concern regarding qualification fraud, that there was a need for authentication of qualifications by Human Resource practitioners as part of the recruitment process and presented a model that met all the research objectives - an innovative model deemed to offer an efficient, effective and feasible technology solution to the problem of qualification fraud in South Africa

--The feasibility of using the world wide web to authenticate higher education qualifications issued by universities and technikons

Some people do make inflated claims on resumes, some tell bald-faced lies. So what? Corporations tell much bigger and more harmful lies to the entire world every minute of every day of every year. In fact, most corporations --perhaps the very concept of 'corporation itself -are themselves deliberate frauds. Enron is the most famous example. The recent financial melt down was the result of numerous frauds by both government and corporations. The resulting bailout is --itself --a hoax!

Government and corporations apparently believe that they have a right to hoax you, lie to you and cheat you! Neither 'computers' NOR 'organizations/corporations' are people. Yet, it is believed as a principle of law that 'corporations' are 'persons' that have rights. As a result, machines are given priority over living, breathing human beings because a small percentage of them may be incipient 'terrorists' or might have fibbed about a degree they almost got but didn't.

This is absurd!

Government thinks it has a right to 'shakedown' a portion of your income every year to finance the campaign of lies and hoaxes that it perpetrates upon you. In other words, you pay for the privilege of being lied to and hoaxed. Government is a shakedown.

Government andl corporations operate only at the collective will of the people. Perhaps the time has come to abolish and bury the idiotic idea that corporations have rights, that corporation are people!

Unless human beings re-assert their sovereignty over both the machines and the 'souless organizations' of their creation, we will have been enslaved by them in the end.

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Why the Bush Regime is an Orwellian Threat

It was Margaret Atwood who called Bush, the greatest threat to world peace. What Atwood didn't mention was that Bush derives his power from a deliberate and well-planned attack on our language. George Orwell predicted it in the now classic 1984. His works remain the textbook examples of how governments manipulate people by first manipulating the language.

Orwell describes a fascist, totalitarian government that spies on its own citizens, denies reality, and exploits a perpetual state of war. Orwell's Big Brother succeeds in re-writing History, reshaping thought by reshaping language, creating an alternate reality.

It is true that in a fascist state all is done in order to maintain the regime in absolute power. Nevertheless, the lesson of 1984 is less about the state than it is about the individual. When states are absolutely powerful, the individual ceases to exist. Individuals robbed of the ability to exercise free will are denied personhood. From a theological standpoint, individuals are robbed of their very souls.

In order to acknowledge the collapse of Soviet Communism and the failure of fascism to reemerge as a potent political force, I ditched Orwell's oppressive totalitarian state in favor of an entertainment-fueled nihilism in which dimwitted citizens frittered away their lives watching web TV and working at slightly overpaid jobs to buy worthless junk ... on web TV, natch. Where Orwell envisioned endless rows of soldiers marching in perfect unison to the strains of the Two-Minute Hate, I saw a world where nations had been replaced by trading blocs and the objects of hatred were the immigrants in our midst.

--Ted Rall, Why Bush Is Addicted To Perpetual War

Images of 1984 are seared into our memories --big brother, the telescreen, the grotty bedroom, the cubicle, the memory hole, the drab gray existence, the rat cage. But 1984 is as much about language. Not just sub-text, language is a major player. It is the means by which Big Brother creates an alternate reality, the source of "his" power. Language is how Big Brother gets inside your head.

The "official language" is Newspeak, remembered for the slogans: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. From newspeak we derive doublespeak which most certainly describes how the Bush administration and a sycophantic news media has empowered Bush --Homeland Security for the unlawful and omnipresence of Big Brother itself; operation Iraqi freedom for what is, in fact, a war of naked aggression; war on terrorism for a perpetual war which, on its face and by definition, cannot be won.

Interestingly, the origin of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" gives the game away. It was originally called Operation Iraqi Liberation, or OIL.

When the GOP uses the term "war" it is done so for the emotional reaction that it is sure to provoke. Americans rallied to defeat real enemies in World War II, a lesson that the GOP has never forgotten. The GOP is altogether too eager to elicit the same response with phony wars waged on crime, porn, drugs, and illegal immigrants. Real wars, however, are fought between armies representing nations. The GOP has always envied FDR his real war.

The War on Terrorism is a GOP code word for global police state or police action. A very hardcore GOP base knows precisely what Bush is up to and supports it. Like Reagan's War on Drugs or the war on porn, some kind of war will always be waged so that the GOP might maintain themselves in power.

The most glaring use of Newspeak is the invention of what I have chosen to call "focus group phrases" as they are invented, full cloth, in focus groups. "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is just such a phrase, designed make a lazy populace forget that the war was begun upon a pack of blackhearted lies about WMD. The GOP use it because it tests well in focus groups. The media like it because it wraps up in three little words a long and complicated lie. It omits the obvious fact that al Qaeda had not been "in Iraq" until the US was "in Iraq". The US in Iraq is a threat to civilization, the world.

When WMD were not found, the history of the Bush administration became the list of equally absurd ex post facto rationales for a war of aggression. It is significant that Bush will never tell the nation his real reasons he bombed Afghanistan, his real reasons for attacking and invading Iraq. I will. Bush bombed Afghanistan so that Unocal might build a pipeline through that country to the Caspian Sea. The Taliban was targeted because they had apparently driven a hard bargain in a meeting they held with Unocal officials in Tom DeLay's old stomping grounds --Sugar Land, TX. Iraq was invaded because Saddam Hussein controlled the amount of oil exports and thus the world price of oil. Persian Gulf I had been fought for the same reasons. Bush Sr --as evil as Jr --was at least smart enough to know when to pull out.

Indeed, Orwell understood as few have the power of language and in, 1984 the "tool of power" is language. The institutions of state maintain power by exploiting the power of language to shape the nature of thought itself. In the novel, 1984, the state manipulation of language is the job of protagonist, Winston Smith. Smith's personal tragedy is symbolic of the tragedy of our civilization, if not our species.

Examples abound in the Bush administration. The Bush regime's use of the phrase "Total Information Awareness" very nearly gave the game away. In response to criticism, the regime stopped using the name "Total Information Awareness" to denote their program of widespread domestic surveillance. But that does not mean that Bush has stopped spying on you, invading your privacy, or violating your Constitutional right to be safe and secure in your own home. It does not mean that your email is not fair game. It does not mean that your phone is not tapped. It does not mean that you have nothing to fear from this venal administration. "Total Information Awareness" is no doubt called something else, a name designed not to attract the attention of the media, a less scary name to lull the "folk".

Orwell is most famous for 1984 but his great essay on politics should also be required reading. He explores how politicians explore language to accrue absolute power.

The White House saw September 11 as a golden opportunity. The first catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil sparked an unprecedented case of leadership projection: desperate for protection and answers (why do they hate us? can we kill them before they kill us?), Americans wishfully compared Bush to FDR and Churchill. Approval ratings hit 92 percent. But Bush's political advisors knew that peaking early wouldn't guarantee reelection in 2004. Bush's father had been turned out of office just 20 months after the Gulf War ratcheted his score up to 91.

The Bushies have lifted their reelection strategy straight out of "1984," and not just by creating ominous-sounding agencies like the Office of Homeland Security, the supposedly-closed Office of Strategic Information, and a "Shadow Government." As in "1984," the Bush regime tolerates zero dissent --a two-party system in name only has been distilled to one in which only Republicans express acceptable opinions. And an absence of follow-up attacks has been met by endless alerts, advisors and empty hysterics in the name of security, most recently culminating with Tom Ridge's much-mocked color-code warning system.

--Ted Rall, Why Bush Is Addicted To Perpetual War

In fact, all who have read Orwell's essay on how easily politicians debase the language for nefarious purposes have recognized in the Bush administration the very techniques that Orwell warned us about.

Orwell: Politics and the English Language

To be fair, it is not only politicians but bullshit artists who have made us vulnerable to tyranny. This is done by dumbing down the language, dumbing down our ability to think critically.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

--George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

"Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 plus 2 equals 4"

Until Bush, even Republican "Presidents" paid lip service to the Constitution. But there were warnings.

“"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."”

—Sinclair Lewis, author of "It Can't Happen here!

The characteristics of the fascist state so vividly described by both authors are to be found in abundance in Bush's fascist regime. That millions are in denial is merely evidence of the truth that is denied.

A quote from Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here":

"Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we’re the huskiest nation going." – page Page 20, It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

Clearly —Orwell and Lewis not only warned us, they predicted very precisely how it would be done. As Shakespeare would have said: "All is true!"

So --why didn't we listen? Because this nation has a fierce anti-intellectual streak which at its best makes us independent but at its worst makes us stupid!

1984 Trailer

Big Brother is Watching You

Big Brother Loves Torture

Apple's 1984 Take-off

Here's the searchable version in its entirety:

George Orwell: 1984

Scary shit!

Was a Covert Attempt to Bomb Iran with Nuclear Weapons foiled by a Military Leak?

By Michael E. Salla, M.A., Ph.D.

09/13/07 "The Canadian" --- - Critically exploring whether or not there was a covert attempt to instigate a catastrophic nuclear war against Iran is illuminated through an introduction using the recent B-52 Incident. On August 30, a B-52 bomber armed with five nuclear-tipped Advanced Cruise missiles travelled from Minot Air Force base, North Dakota, to Barksdale Air Force base, Louisiana, in the United States. Each missile had an adjustable yield between five and 150 kilotons of TNT which is at the lower end of the destructive capacities of U.S. nuclear weapons. For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13 kilotons, while the Bravo Hydrogen bomb test of 1954 had a yield of 15,000 kilotons. The B-52 story was first covered in the Army Times on 5 September after the nuclear armed aircraft was discovered by Airmen. LINK

What made this a very significant event was that it was a violation of U.S. Air Force regulations concerning the transportation of nuclear weapons by air. Nuclear weapons are normally transported by air in specially constructed planes designed to prevent radioactive pollution in case of a crash. Such transport planes are not equipped to launch the nuclear weapons they routinely carry around the U.S. and the world for servicing or positioning.

The discovery of the nuclear armed B-52 was, according to Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists, the first time in 40 years that a nuclear armed plane had been allowed to fly in the U.S. LINK. Since 1968, after a SAC bomber crashed in Greenland, all nuclear armed aircraft have been grounded but were kept on a constant state of alert. After the end of the Cold War, President George H. Bush ordered in 1991 that nuclear weapons were to be removed from all aircraft and stored in nearby facilities. ...

What Bush's Nuclear Holocaust Might Look Like

Bush is a threat to civilization, possibly to most life on this planet. This update from Buzzflash:

Brilliant Mark Morford Column: "Because the truth is, we are well past the point of salvaging anything noble or honest from Bush's massive, historic debacle. We have only this brutal reality: Iraq is, and forever will be, one of the most extraordinary wastes in all of American history." A must read that puts the war as a symbol of America's tectonic plate of culture clash into perspective.

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