Intentionally Untitled

     “When it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and acts like a duck, I call it a duck. Call it a bunch of roses. It still quacks.” – Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road

     Some pieces need no titles. Others can’t abide them. As for the quote above, hang in there. You’ll get it.

     Human life under the veil of time exists in a hyper-ephemeral present: a moment so brief that it’s gone before you can finish pronouncing its name. Yet our attention invariably spreads into the past and the future. Indeed, it must be this way. We plan in hope of a future that’s better, or at least no worse, than what we have now. The past provides the information and wisdom we need to do that planning.

     The past is being taken from us. The future is being nullified.

     Sounds a bit bleak? I can’t disagree. But how else would you characterize the cumulative import of the following stories:

• The bureaucrat and the eternal pandemic.
• They want you isolated and afraid – forever.
• NY Times: Adoption more traumatic than abortion?
• Any children that are born will be twisted.
• The young must not know about the real nature and historical performance of socialism.
• The Usurpers want to shape the news.
• Cataclysmic drop in productivity.
• “Everything’s wonderful! Really!”
• Penalties without crimes.
• Lots and lots of penalties without crimes.
• A defense of penalties without crimes – by an enforcer!

     Yes, there’s a bit of reading to do. If you find it too burdensome, you’ll have to take what you’re given…and here it is:

     Do you need more evidence? There’s plenty. Just read a few news sites.

     George Orwell showed us the future our enemies intend for us:

     “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

     Innumerable commentators have pointed to such an endpoint. The suggestion has largely been shrugged aside as hyperbole. It is not. The shape of the future our enemies intend for us is now clear.

     For Orwell’s Party, the eternal emergency was war and the threat of infiltration by Oceania’s foes. For us, it’s the threat of disease. What matters isn’t the rationale, but the intentions and the methods.

     Why would they seek such a future? They want power. Power is their only love. They can only conceal their own evil from themselves by oppressing others. While they have their boots on our necks, they can forget how worthless and vile they are.

     Yes, it’s appalling. That doesn’t mean it’s untrue.

     Who needs telescreens? Your television already listens to you. So do your computer and your phone. Oh, you think you’ve turned them off, do you?

     There are still too many people who reject the evidence of their senses…just as The Party told Oceania’s people to reject it:

     He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you — something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy….
     The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

     Yet millions of our countrymen look at developments, including developments they know are irrational by any decent standard, and they tell themselves “They can’t mean it that way. They’re just…misguided.”

     They are not misguided. They mean business.

     And their business won’t end short of you.

     I have to stop here. It’s too much. I might not be back for a while. Hopefully, the other Co-Conspirators of Liberty’s Torch will weigh in with less depressing stuff. I need a respite.

     Be well.