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It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

Some either ignore his socialism or espouse a legend that by 1948 and in Nineteen Eighty-Four he had abandoned it -- what one may call the Time-Life and Encounter view of Orwell. Part of his anger against the Communists was not only that they had become despots who squandered human life and despised liberty, but that they were also discrediting democratic Socialism. There is really no mystery about the general character of his politics. From 1936 onwards he was first a follower of the independent Labour Party and then a Tribune socialist; that is, he took his stand among those who were to the Left or on the left of the Labour Party: fiercely egalitarian, libertarian and democratic, but by Continental comparisons, surprisingly untheoretical, a congregation of secular evangelicals.

Actually, I'd be happy if the people who quote Orwell in every politics thread would take some time to read this one damn essay -

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/en glish/e_nat

It's got a few jabs at their political opponents, but a lot more jabs at them.

In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants -- all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.

That isn't immensely helpful thinking. It does nothing to improve the lot of "poor drudges," but it acknowledges what most polemicists don't: that after all our fine talk about fairness and opportunity and hard work and everybody getting ahead, what most want isn't that at all. We want to keep some people down so that we may be kept up.

We hardly need limit this to Orwell's era or social context, either--in its bluntness, it's a very American realization. From the slave trade and coolie labor and the United Fruit Company to today's overseas sweatshops, we have always been wont to use others badly. Orwell's forebears may have had much longer to perfect the art of working foreigners to death, but we've been quick studies.

Now, of course, we are again using our own badly. The dreary Wal-Mart economy is a grim joke upon a nation whose favorite self-congratulatory myth is the offer of generalized prosperity in the American Dream! Outsourcing, H1B hiring and vast forced-work prison labor populations also mock the myth, show how empty it's become.

And so yes, build robots to pick oranges because it's cruel labor for people. But five minutes after the robots start plucking oranges, migrant farm populations will be available for new cruel usage by new masters. It's not the hot sun or the work that brutalizes them so much as it is an ethos. Please build a machine that can change that!

Look, The point is really simple, just because you don't like what is reported by Al-Jazeera doesn't mean what they report is wrong, just because it goes against the US position, does not make Al-Jazeera a terrorist organisation. Moreover just because someone is a Muslim doesn't make them intolerant, violent or anti-western/anti-American, just as being Christian doesn't make someone intolerant, violent or anti-evolution, and neither position excludes the possibility of being any or all of those things.

I don't really like Christianity either, but comparing it to present day Islam is laughable. Present day Islam is more like Dark Ages Christianity, and in practice it does make you hostile, at least theoretically to all the things that make up a decent society. I think comparisons with other totalitarian ideologies are not overstating this.

The only official documentation that says anything other than "conspiracy" is a statement by Tayssir Alouni, prior to his arrest stating that he carried messages between Al-Jazeera and the Taliban, and cash to help some of his friends, there is no explanation as to what amounts of cash or its purpose. According to information that came out during the trial he was supposed to have taken about $4,500 US to Mohamed Bahaiah, who is, apparently "considered at the international level as a supposed courier for the Al Qaeda organization between Afghanistan and Europe".

Jesus what a whiner. Cash for his friends. The most annoying thing about people like him is the way the dissimulate to fool the naive.

He brought money to "his friends" the Taliban, and helped them infiltrate Spain so they could kill people. As far as I'm concerned if you are a Muslim living in the West, helping the Taliban or any similar movement attack your country is treason and you should be locked up somewhere very unpleasant.

And with respect to the gay rights stuff, you specifically mentioned it as evidence that al Jazeera were liberal with respect to homosexuality. My point about the report is that a typical Muslim reader will probably not read the report in this way - they will see it as a sign that the Russians are rejecting liberal values.

Oh and one more question - Alluni was able to capture images of civilian victims in the destitute villages of Afghanistan and the miserable streets of Kabul. - How do you take bias pictures? Should civilian victims in Afghanistan not be shown?

If they are genuine and your report on both sides equally then yes. But I've heard other examples of Arab media fabricating reports of civilian casualties by the US and hiding reports of casualties by the insurgents. E.g. two young Iraqi girls used to sleep near to US soldiers because it was the safest place. The Arab media used the picture of them sleeping but claimed the Americans had shot them. Insurgents and terrorists are utterly unconcerned about Iraqi civilian casualties - suicide bombing crowds of children to get the few GIs giving them candy - but the Arab media never report this.

Once again, the Orwell link springs to mind.

http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/pacifism/eng lish/e_patw

It's not pacifism if you exaggerate the sins of the good guys and hide the sins of the bad ones. You're actually on the side of the bad guys. And it's not journalism either, and shouldn't be protected as such.

I guess you think your civilization is perfect and should be implemented worldwide at any cost, disrespecting any local traditions or cultures by supplanting your own views

No, I just think that China would be improved if it had free elections. And all those Islamic countries would be improved if they had a culture which respected the rights of people other than rich, straight men - probably expecting a Jeffersonian democracy there is wishful thinking at this point. More to the point, not only would these changes be better for the Chinese and Arabs, they would make the world a safer place for the US and its allies.

Incidentally, don't you see the irony of arguing anonymously on the internet that local traditions like secret police torturing people for discussing politics should be respected? The only reason that you're free to do it is because your ancestors were willing to kill and die to stamp out those sorts of traditions.

I think you should re-read 1984 and consider what part the Ministry of Truth played.

You realise that Orwell actually worked for the IRD and other propaganda bodies which did exactly what I suggested, right? Both against the Fascists in WWII and the Communists in the Cold War. Incidentally 1984 is set in hellish world where people allowed totalitarian movements to take over everywhere so it shouldn't be entirely unexpected that he would do this, if you actually understand what it is about.

Maybe you should read this

http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/pacifism/eng lish/e_patw

Can someone explain why copyrights and patents should expire? I'm being serious.

Congress shall have Power
...
To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; ...

Actually, after they left, it was sort of taboo to mention or talk about them. Weird.

Taboo how?

(not that I think Google is that bad, but it was the first thing that stroke my mind when reading the above comments)

And a company thinking they can be fascist about everything risks losing their employees.

when the war is over

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, he that is not with me is against me. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be objectively pro-British. But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious freedom station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

I am not interested in pacifism as a moral phenomenon. If Mr Savage and others imagine that one can somehow overcome the German army by lying on ones back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand moral force till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. But though not much interested in the theory of pacifism, I am interested in the psychological processes by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism. Even pacifists who wouldnt own to any such fascination are beginning to claim that a Nazi victory is desirable in itself. In the letter you sent on to me, Mr Comfort considers that an artist in occupied territory ought to protest against such evils as he sees, but considers that this is best done by temporarily accepting the status quo (like Déat or Bergery, for instance?). a few weeks back he was hoping for a Nazi victory because of the stimulating effect it would have upon the arts.

Because nothing says "free" (liber, not gratis) like imposing seemingly arbitrary limits upon what one can do with the "free" software in question.

As for pacifism, I defer to Mr. George Orwell's thoughts on the matter: "Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that 'according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be "objectively pro-British".' But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious 'freedom' station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U." from Pacifism and the War by George Orwell, 1942.

Interestingly enough, The Elements of Style seem not to mind using "but" or "and" at the start of a sentence:

Write in a way that comes easily and naturally to you, using words and phrases that come readily to hand. But do not assume that because you have acted naturally your product is without flaw.

...

And would you write "The worst tennis player around here is I" or "The worst tennis player around here is me"? The first is good grammar, the second is good judgment although the me might not do in all contexts.

...

"But," you may ask, "what if it comes natural to me to experiment rather than conform? What if I am a pioneer, or even a genius?" Answer: then be one. But do not forget that what may seem like pioneering may be merely evasion, or laziness - the disinclination to submit to discipline. Writing good standard English is no cinch, and before you have managed it you will have encountered enough rough country to satisfy even the most adventurous spirit.

From here

Unfortunately, fascsim is a word loosing meaning:

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/engl ish/efasc

( George Orwell - What is Fascism?)

--jeffk++

Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness. If one started by asking, what is man? what are his needs? how can he best express himself? one would discover that merely having the power to avoid work and live one's life from birth to death in electric light and to the tune of tinned music is not a reason for doing so. Man needs warmth, society, leisure, comfort and security: he also needs solitude, creative work and the sense of wonder. If he recognised this he could use the products of science and industrialism eclectically, applying always the same test: does this make me more human or less human? He would then learn that the highest happiness does not lie in relaxing, resting, playing poker, drinking and making love simultaneously. And the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the progressive mechanisation of life would be seen not to be a mere sentimental archaism, but to be fully justified. For man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity in his life, while the tendency of many modern inventions---in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane---is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals.

There is no use in multiplying examples. 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.

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say 'Guns before butter', while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words.

Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one's subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one's thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.

Speaking of The Elements of Style, the full text of the book can be found here. It's online now. Use it.

From Orwell's letter Pacifism and the War:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that 'according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be "objectively pro-British".' But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious 'freedom' station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

Orwell is respected by the Right, his socialist credentials notwithstanding, because he wasn't a Useful Idiot.

Pacifism and the War. Quite a few other essays by Orwell are available on that site.

From the essay:
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that 'according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be "objectively pro-British".' But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious 'freedom' station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

You should read The Lion and the Unicorn before you make any more stupid comments about "left-wing people [who] have hijacked the book 1984." It is you on the right who have hijacked Orwell: the man was a dedicated leftist. The problem is that you are so poorly educated you can't distinguish between the Left and Communism (which is to the Left as Wahabbism is to Islam, or the KKK is to Conservatism - a badly distorted variant).

Orwell's attacks on the Communist Party were motivated by his belief that they were anti-revolutionary: that they were Facists in sheeps' clothing: for him, democracy was a necessity for socialism. The joke to "English Socialism" that you obviously don't understand is that it is the same sort of duck speak as "Ministry of Love" - it calls itself socialism, but is actually totalitarian - just like Stalinism.

If you actually read 1984 or Animal Farm with any literary sensitivity, you'd see how in both cases Orwell imagines socialism becoming perverted by the actions of power-hungry Communists - the very same thing he saw happening in the Spanish Civil War (and described in Homage to Catalonia, where he sees the Communist Party as second only to Franco's Facists as agents of injustice). Orwell saw real danger in socialism, true - but the danger he saw was not to a healthy capitalism (which Orwell says bluntly in The Lion and the Unicorn "does not work") but to democracy - Orwell saw democracy as always unstable, as something that had to be supported by the exertions of those dedicated to justice.

Orwell made a lot of mistakes: I think he doesn't understand that all economic systems, capitalist and socialist, are corrosive to democracy because they require either competition (which naturally leads to economic disparities, which give more power to the wealthy, and which therefore undermine democracy) or control (which suppress individual initiative and submits the individual to mass control). For democracy to work, you need to create an unstable equilibrium between planned and open economy that is sufficiently bounded to prevent either repressive sociailism or unfetterred capitalism from gaining the upper hand and suppressing individual freedoms, jolting back and forth like the pistons of a machine. But then Orwell didn't have the benefit we have of having seen what happens to a planned economy.

A digression...
The interrogator's question is not
"How Long Have You Been Beating Your Wife?", as a loving husband could answer "0 months",
but rather
"Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or No?"

as a "Yes" could be an admission of abuse in the past, and a "No" is a admission of continuing abuse. Attempting a more complex answer could be taken as evidence of dissemblance...

Orwell pointed out that many writers, too lazy to invent novel metaphors capable of evoking a powerful visual image, use worn out ones instead, and sometimes mix incompatible phrases together: "a sure sign that the author is not interested in what he is saying."

Sadly, it's not a new trend. Ever read Orwell's famous essay on the topic? Published 1946.

It's official..
Somebody even made a webpage about it:

http://orwell.ru/a_life/USA/

Nineteen Eighty-Four (never, incidentally, known to any but the illiterate as 1984)

George Orwell's complete works, available online:

http://www.orwell.ru/

Actually, when one refers to language as ``Orwellian'', it is exactly to doublespeak that he is referring -- one of history's supreme ironies, since Orwell himself, of course, was a constant advocate against such political speech-games, as in his famous essay Politics and the English Language.

This is the claim which the original poster was attempting to make about the name ``Department of Homeland Security'', and it is a claim which rings false, inasmuch as, competent or not (and that remains to be seen), the department's purpose is, in fact, to secure the American homeland.

Ad a bit of food for thought, here is a relevant selection from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which coined the term 'memory hole':

But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, `doublethink'.

George Orwell (most famous for being the author of Animal Farm and 1984) also wrote an article about brewing the perfect cup of tea.