STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
There Ought to Be Consequences
By Staff News & Analysis - June 28, 2013

When the Guardian and the Washington Post revealed details about the National Security Agency collecting phone data from telecommunications companies and U.S. government programs pulling in emails and photographs from internet businesses, suddenly "George Orwell" was leading the news. The British essayist predicted it all, commentators asserted, and the United States now seems straight out of 1984, Orwell's novel about a dystopian future. "Big Brother" had arrived. This is ridiculous. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden might claim that America is under the Big Brother's glare, but he does not understand what this really means. I grew up in the Soviet Union. I knew Big Brother. This is not even close. – Reuters

Dominant Social Theme: The West is in pretty good shape, actually.

Free-Market Analysis: There ought to be consequences for this kind of article.

We know from historical narratives that Wall Street helped FUND the Russian Revolution because the bankers of the day needed to create an enemy to solidify the kind of authoritarianism they had in mind for the West. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Globalists funded Hitler and apparently used Nazi Germany as a dry run for the kinds of authoritarianism now taking place in the West.

So how can this Reuters article claim that the West's version of Leviathan is not nearly as bad as the USSR's when it was the West that created the system?

Journalism in the West is consumed by a certain narrative. Reality be damned. Here's more from the column:

In 1982, for example, when I was in high school in Moscow, I was on the phone with one of my closest friends, talking about how relieved we were that Leonid Brezhnev had finally died, after 18 years of stifling power. Suddenly, there was a metallic click on the line and we heard a dour man's voice. A KGB functionary, no doubt. "Hang up the phone," he demanded, "immediately." We did. I dare anyone to tell me that this has happened to you in the United States.

Both supporters and critics of this sweeping NSA surveillance are passionate in their arguments. Advocates insist that the NSA's metadata gathering is a legitimate use of state power, because all three branches of government have signed off on the program, and it keeps the country safe. Critics assert this is what Big Brother is all about — manipulating the rule of law for the benefit of the few at the top.

Their spying doesn't protect the nation but helps maintain their grip on power. But when Orwell wrote his novel in 1948, he wasn't warning against the NSA — which was actually created four years later in order to break enemy codes in defense of American values of freedom. Orwell's Big Brother, in the nation of Oceania in 1984, was about Nazi Germany's Gestapo or Joseph Stalin's NKVD (precursor to the KGB), dictatorial outfits that surrender to the views of just one man.

Under those despotic regimes, the public was manipulated and harsh punishments against "thoughtcrime" and free will were rationalized as necessary for public good. In the Soviet Union, writers were sent to the gulag for the critical thoughts of their fictional characters. At school, we had to start every paper praising the Communist Party. If you began with your own thoughts, you were guaranteed an "F" — no college, no job, no nothing. Beat that!

Why should the article be setting up an authoritarian competition between the West and the East? In fact, the USSR is no more, and many of her satellites have spun away. Russia itself is less aggressive and certainly the full-fledged communist state is not directly in evidence.

But in the West, authoritarianism proceeds apace. People are not necessarily concerned that the West is like the former Soviet Union. People are concerned that the trends are in that direction.

The main danger to the world is the globalist trend to which the West is subject. The issue is being forced via the same kind of authoritarianism that infected Germany and the USSR. If people are going to write about these issues, they ought to be grounded in reality.

After Thoughts

Consequences?

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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