CSotD: Ignorance is Strength
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Anderson offers a contrast that we should not only contemplate now but ready ourselves to deal with if and when the fever breaks. And that had better happen before Big Brother finishes wiping out the parts of history we aren’t supposed to remember.
That’s neither a joke nor partisan exaggeration:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Department of Justice is acknowledging it has removed from its website news releases about criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, calling the information about the prosecutions “partisan propaganda.”
That was Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth in 1984: Changing history to conform with Big Brother’s views, and sending papers with wrong information down the memory hole into the furnace.
Joyce Vance elaborates on the parallels between Orwell’s novel and our current day, quoting the original:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
As has been noted before, there is a precedent beyond literature, because the Chinese government has eliminated the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and killings from its history. People under 40 likely don’t know it happened; people over 40 know better than to bring it up.
What I remember from Watergate is that Nixon, his staff and his re-election committee were isolated in their plotting, and that, while some in Congress were loyal even after the corruption was revealed, the bulk of the government, and the majority of citizens, became horrified as facts surfaced.
And those who continued to deny it were seen as isolated cranks, there being no divisive talk radio, no Fox News to promote the president’s case.
Perhaps you have to be over 50 to understand.
Today there is no cover-up beyond the fig leaf of a claim that “march to the Capitol” and “fight like hell” were not calls to arms, and that the Department of Justice has to cleanse the record of “partisan propaganda” and compensate those who were “victimized” by trials, lawyers, and convictions by juries.
Telnaes is less likely than the comedy writers of the Simpsons to brand these fellows as “reputable businessmen,” as they take money from the government without the formality of a vote in Congress, and set it aside to reward those who were “victimized” by “weaponized” courts.
Orwell provided a glossary of Newspeak to explain the Party’s jargon; we in the real world simply have to figure it out for ourselves.
The result is that, while not all the witnessed, recorded and documented history of the attempted coup has been eliminated, those things that were proven have been mixed in with unhinged rumors that were not, which has much the same effect.
The response when those rumors are disproven being “that’s what they want you to think!”
Which is why Orwell named it “the Ministry of Truth.”
Noth is a good remedy for those people who think all cartoons, even political cartoons, are supposed to be funny, because he consistently comes up with observations that are both incisive and darkly humorous.
I suppose, however, that this one, pointing out that the king himself is leading the rioters, doesn’t have enough of a pie-in-the-face slapstick to signal the humorless that it’s funny.
And, similarly, the humor in Broelman’s cartoon is so dark as to escape those who expect soda down their pants rather than a cup of bitter sarcasm.
Another look at us from a foreign vantage point makes the observation that we sure seem to have a lot of assassination attempts, but these things often come in waves: Jerry Ford survived a couple, and neither the golf course ambush attempt nor the assault on the WHCA dinner came anywhere near as close to success as Squeaky Fromme or Sara Jane Moore did.
It’s not clear if one inspires another, but it boggles the mind that the latest shooting — which Trump likely wouldn’t have known about if it hadn’t been reported — is justification for his renewed insistence on needing a bullet-proof ballroom.
Is he suggesting that, to remain safe, he should stay in a billion-dollar bunker under the White House permanently?
Never mind. We’re living in Wonderland, where logic no longer applies, and where the Queen of Hearts holds all the cards.
Then again, Alice did eventually wake up. We can still hope.
Juxtaposition of the Day
It may not matter whether the remnants of our aging generation wipes out its own history, because there are new battles raging on an all-new battleground, and the generation coming into focus is not rolling over to have their tummies scratched by the electronic marvels we’ve prepared for them.
Horsey marks a trend at various college graduations in which students booed and heckled the purveyors of Artificial Intelligence, and while this article, summing up the trend, says nearly half of graduates feel AI will take over entry level jobs, its catalog of cluelessness becomes tellingly self-referential when it includes a photo of Annapolis middies tossing their caps in the air.
Military officers have less to worry about from AI than they do from the Secretary of Defense, who told West Point grads that the Army is no place for diversity, just in case the cadets hadn’t realized how many of the senior officers Hegseth has cashiered were women and minorities.
And the jobs AI puts at risk are not all entry-level. The hallucinations Zapiro’s machine cites are raining havoc on established attorneys who have infuriated judges by submitting briefs written by AI that cite nonsensical, non-existent cases, ending at least one 17-year career, while judges themselves have been blasted for bogus AI citations in their own documents.
Katauskas wonders if the pushback from this emerging generation will have any impact beyond making them feel better about themselves, and it’s a reasonable question, given the resources being expended to, as she has the kids put it, shove AI down their throats.
But their elders have seen how passive acceptance pays off.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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