The Ministry Of Truth
Deborah Venable
12/24/08
As
promised, this is a follow-up to last month’s article, The
Ministry Of Plenty. Things seem right on track for the incoming government
to proceed with goals that would see us plunging toward an environment eerily
resembling Orwell’s descriptive 1984.
Alarmist, you say? I think not.
One
of the mainstays that controlled the environment of that novel was what Orwell
called doublethink. If you can’t find
some similarities in that and what we are currently witnessing, I don’t know
what to tell you. Read this excerpt
narrated by the novel’s main character’s thoughts:
“Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly
refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of
doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness
while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions
which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to
it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the
guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to
draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then
promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the
process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce
unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of
hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink'
involved the use of doublethink.”
This
has been going on at least as long as we’ve heard politicians and citizens
alike spout the gibberish about “supporting the troops, but not supporting the
war,” has it not? Claiming to support
capitalism and socialism at the same time is another example. Allowing the Constitution to be ignored or
ridiculed under the guise of upholding “Constitutional rights” definitely
qualifies, don’t you think? The very
destruction of individualism requires an adherence to the principles of
doublethink. And if anyone can argue
that morality has not been simultaneously repudiated by folks laying claim to
it – well, all I can say is that your argument would fall way short – even in a
debate of logic against logic.
As
further proof of a good correlation here, let’s take a look at one more excerpt
from the novel. You might recall that
Winston, the main character, was employed in the Ministry Of Truth. His job in the “records” department of that
ministry was to “adjust” the records of history and events to fit the present
so that the Party and Big Brother could never be proven wrong. In this excerpt, he tells us the overall job
of the Ministry Of Truth in the society:
“And the Records Department, after all, was
itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not
to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers,
films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels -- with every
conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue
to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's
spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply
the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at
a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of
separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and
entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing
almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent
novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed
entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a
versificator. There was even a whole sub-section -- Pornosec, it was called in
Newspeak -- engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent
out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on
it, was permitted to look at.”
If
there is any doubt left that much of our “mainstream media” – our own Ministry
Of Truth, if you will, doesn’t already resemble this description - again, I
can’t help you.
The
American people have continued to depend on our Ministry Of Truth even as we
state the obvious, that much of it cannot be believed. The events that have led us to our current
circumstances were foreseen decades ago, yet the blind eye some turned to the
possibilities delivered the results to us all.
It just took a little longer than Orwell predicted. The machinations of this Ministry Of Truth
are in full swing to deliver that final blow with the reenactment of that
oh-so-well defined in doublespeak, “Fairness Doctrine.” Watch for it with both eyes open and
remember the mantra:
“WAR
IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”