For those of you who think that American government has now achieved Orwell’s “Big Brother” status, I think you should contemplate the quote from the excellent article on this subject appearing the the June 19 edition of Newsweek, authored by Michel M. Moynihan:
“If you are invoking ‘1984’ in a country which ‘1984’ is available for purchase… you likely don’t understand the point of 1984”
In other words if our government had achieved “Big Brother” status, you would not be able to buy the book, like you still cannot in such countries North Korea and where unable to get it legally in the USSR until the fall of the Berlin wall.
Mr. Moynihan goes on to write:
“In 1959, just five years after the death of Joseph Stalin, Soviet cultural officials praised Orwell’s Anti-Soviet masterpiece. The Book wouldn’t be legally available in the Soviet Union for another 30 years — it only existed in samizdat form, translated, typed, and copied by dissidents — yet Kremlin propagandists recast the story of Winston Smith’s futile revolt against “Big Brother” as a premonition of “America in 1984.”
Mr. Moynihan also states the irony of Mr. Snowden — the leaker of the moment — first fleeing to China and seeking asylum in that “free society”, and when that didn’t work, flew to Russia — while not quite the perfect model for 1984 that the former Soviet Union was, certainly not a bastion of the free press and freedom of information, and then to finally request asylum in that bastion of freedom Uruguay, where they are staunch supporters of whistle blowers — as long as they are blowing their whistles about the US or its allies, but who have an iron hand wrapped around their own dark secrets.
All that being said, I am not sure that in a sense, we are all(the entire world) under the thumb of big brother in the form of big business — the banks, energy companies, etc.
worldtake 