The more things change, the more they stay hopelessly the same

Orwell was right.

Back in 1975, David Goodman wrote in The Futurist magazine that 100 of 137 Orwell predictions in “1984” had come true.

Is our world taking on an Orwellian cast?

Is the computer age leading to fewer freedoms and a world like “1984”?

Sociology professor David Throgmorton quickly answered: “Yes, I unequivocally say yes to that. And where it’s taking place is in the financial institutions — banks, insurance companies and so on and so forth. You write a check … somebody takes a picture of that check. Somebody else wants to know how you spend your money, what your lifestyle is and so forth. They find the picture somebody has taken of your check … tells about your life.”

Throgmorton recalled the recent attempts to cross-check IRS tapes against welfare tapes to find fraud. “Nobody gets too excited about that. Yeah, let’s go out and get a few welfare chiselers. That all find and good …” he said. “What do they do when they start cross-listing those IRS tapes with something that pertains to you?” Gun registration perhaps?

In recent weeks there have been reports of the IRS checking tax returns against mailing lists containing names of high-income families in an effort to find names of people who didn’t file returns.

Political science professor Joseph Koshansky told of a woman who had written several letters to the president complaining about the way her son was treated in the reserves. For the past 10 years she has been periodically interviewed by the Secret Service. Is this what Orwell called “thoughtcrime”?

“A day never passed,” Orwell wrote, “when spies and sabateurs … were not unmasked by the Thought Police.”

Koshansky is worried by the exclusion of the press from war zones.

“When something like that goes on there should a hue and cry from the populace as a whole,” he said. “But there absolutely isn’t. Everybody says well that’s what he should have done. That’s what should have been done in Vietnam. Lock the press out. That scares me more than the fact that they were locked out.”

If Orwell’s “1984” becomes reality, Throgmorton said, “it’s not going to be because something was imposed on the populace like in the Soviet Union … It’s going to be because the population willingly allows themselves to be drug down that line.”

And Koshansky says that we should not expect our fate to parallel that of Germany or Italy on the road to fascism. “Don’t look for guys in brown or black shirts. Don’t look for Jews as scapegoats. Our scapegoats are probably going to be inflation, depression, labor unions, communists, young radicals. Those are our scapegoats.”

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With a few minor edits to mask some elements of time, substituting “war zone” for “Grenada,” for example, I wrote the above not this week or last but nearly 30 years ago in 1983 on the eve of “1984” as the conclusion of a two-page spread in the Shreveport Journal, where I was city editor at the time.

This is the last paragraph of that piece:

“Koshansky was none too optimistic on the eve of 1984: ‘Actually, I feel now, Joe Koshansky, December … 1983, feel exactly how these people feel in this book. No hope. No evolution. No progress. No change for the better. I think a lot of people feel that way too.”

Orwell as prophet: ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever’

On this day in 1949 “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was published.

It added to the lexicon: Big Brother, thoughtcrime, newspeak, doublethink, Room 101, as well as the painted slogans WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Today our ignorance is indeed strength for politicians who get away with telling us debt is wealth and “green” will save us all from a warming planet. 

In fact the president recently told us we are not at war with Muslim jihadist, we are at peace.

This week we learned Big Brother really is watching — tapping data from phone companies, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple and soon Dropbox, grabbing email, phone numbers, video, photos, audio, documents.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Obama reassured us Friday. “We have to make choices as a society … It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.”

He went on to say: “If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

Trust the executive branch in which the IRS targets tea partiers? Trust the Congress, which passes bills no one has read or understands? Trust the judiciary where something is a fine one day and a tax the next and it is OK to gather the DNA of people who have not been convicted of anything?

The Constitution was written expressly because the Founders did not trust government, and the Bill of Rights was added to even further tie its hands, such as the Fourth Amendment:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

As I pointed out some time ago, our one-worlder president doesn’t believe in fighting a global war against man-caused disasters. His Defense Department (They don’t call it the War Department anymore.) sent out a memo saying: “this administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT.] Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’” And a man standing on a table, firing a gun, shouting Allahu Akbar is merely workplace violence.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Orwell wrote in “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

The last words of the book: “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”