The Grand Conspiracy

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When I was in school many decades ago, one of the books on the reading list was called "1984". It is novel by English novelist George Orwell, published on 8 June 1949. Time magazine included it on its lists of 100 best English-language novels. It gave a futuristic vision of dystopian world. Parallels have been drawn between the novel's subject matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other themes.

[According to Wikipedia: A dystopia (from Ancient Greek δυσ- "bad" and τόπος "place"; alternatively cacotopia or simply anti-utopia) is a community or society that is undesirable or frightening. It is an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Sir Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence and poverty.

So in Greek dystopia is a bad place, a very bad place.

The book is about a crushingly intrusive government that uses constant and inescapable surveillance paired with a steady stream of falsehoods marketed as truth that caters to the 1% (the Inner Party) while the lower castes (the Outer Party and the Proles) suffer in poverty and neglect. But is also a love story. A story of a man and a woman willing to risk it all.

The novel popularized the term "Orwellian" as an adjective, with many terms used in the novel entering common usage, including "Big Brother", "doublethink", "thoughtcrime", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "2 + 2 = 5", "proles", "Two Minutes Hate", "telescreen", and "Room 101".

I read the book as a teenager and all-in-all, I was impressed. So if you want to know what is going on in society today, I strongly recommend this book.

George Orwell (pseudonym for Eric Blair [1903-50]) was born in Bengal and educated at Eton; after service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he returned to Europe to earn his living penning novels and essays. He was essentially a political writer who focused his attention on his own times, a man of intense feelings and intense hates. An opponent of totalitarianism, he served in the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Besides his classic Animal Farm, his works include a novel based on his experiences as a colonial policeman, Burmese Days, two firsthand studies of poverty, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia; and the extraordinary novel of political prophecy whose title became part of our language, 1984.

*Freedom is slavery* is a common argument made on this site.

Because "free" people have to work and pay bills, so they're * wage slaves* to a job and to a capitalist system.

My favorite aspect of 1984 was how Winston's friend would think of new ways of reducing the number of words in the government dictionary.

The government believed ...

Less words = less robust thoughts = people are more easy to control

Words like "bad" can be eliminated, and replaced with "un-good".

So, at breakfast, Winston's friend would share in his delight in recalling the word reductions he made.

My all time favourite book!

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. The only way to be free is to stop wanting to. Discipline is Freedom."
-- Crypto 138

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Well, you’re not going to get an actual Orwellian society because in the most practical terms it’s too unlikely you’ll be able to maintain a lie in a grand enough scale to gain universal acceptance by the Outer Party and the Proles. It’s just not a feasible system, not even for the most die-hard communists out there.

While it won’t ever make it that far, don’t imagine for a second that dedicated adherents won’t at least try. When I was a SUNY student, if you didn’t toe the line on student housing policy, you could be subject to “re-education.” While keeping your dorm room neat might demand a certain level of priority, using the same negative language as indoctrination isn’t going to sit well with folks concerned with their individual rights or being told what they have to think.

In Russia you had the gulags, and in N. Korea you have re-education camps. But what both countries have failed at is actually directly controlling the mind as The Party did in 1984. The difference is that The Party devised various means of forcing victims to willingly accept (note the doublethink here) everything they say and devote themselves to it entirely. N. Korea is pretty close to that society. The problem is that NorKs KNOW what will happen to them if they drop all the pretense of their daily lives and openly acknowledge that something is wrong about their government. Winston et al may initially fall in line out of fear of Big Brother, but The Party doesn’t want their fear or the resentment that goes with it. Big Brother has learned how to enslave the minds and make his victims believe that’s what they actually want. The Soviets failed, and the NorKs have yet to succeed.

It’s also important to note that Orwell himself was a Socialist. 1984 is in part propaganda for Orwell’s idea of what socialism is supposed to look like—i.e. the exact opposite of his books. His fear was that the Soviet solution would predominantly influence socialism and turn it into the exact thing socialists feared: just another means of concentrating vast amounts of power into a tiny minority of people. National Socialists in Germany demonized specific groups of people that the Germans would always be at war with, plus Russian communism was the polar opposite of the German vision. Both are socialist systems. But their goals and means of achieving those goals come into conflict. This ongoing conflict and perpetual war is reflected in 1984 when you have a world totally divided into various socialist blocs that are alternately cooperative and belligerent. Orwell’s dream was one big happy family without power struggles. The alternative is dystopia.

With 1984 and Animal Farm, I’m afraid Orwell accidentally hit too close to the mark. The end result, taken to its logical conclusion, is something closely resembling IngSoc. I think the NorKs have effectively realized what might have been Orwell’s Eastasia. The best any population can work out is that socialism is a dead philosophy and can never play a long-term, useful form of government.

Brave New World is required reading AFTER 1984 and Animal Farm. Lord of the Flies as well.

In sociology I was taught a theory by Leon Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

If you hold two contradictory beliefs/opinions or are confronted with two conflicting facts, it is so psychologically uncomfortable that you will allow yourself to be convinced that one idea/belief/fact is correct and the other is not. We have a strange need to have things make sense.

Further, whatever you choose will have to fit with whatever sense you have of yourself. If you have convinced yourself you are a villain, you will choose beliefs, ideas, and facts that support a villainous universe. If you think you are a healthy person, you will make a choice and convince yourself of why your idea/fact/belief supports health.

This is why we have such strong and different narratives going on right now. Much of it does not make sense and we are each trying to settle it for ourselves.

You might not be able to unless the "thought police" had absolute power. With the advent of the Internet, tech companies to control the arteries of the network and social media to read the minds and desires of everyone, 1984 is in play. This is the Grand Conspiracy. Look at China. Every action of its citizens is observed by "Big Brother". If someone steps out of line it is off to the reeducation camps.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has identified 380 suspected detention facilities built since 2017 in the Xinjiang region of China. Some of these facilities are massive. “Upwards of 1 million” Uighurs have been detained there. [Source: China Still Expanding Xinjiang Re-Education Camps, Report Says]

Social media as "better instrument of control". WeChat has over one billion registered accounts with 850 million active users. The app and its competitors are amassing never-seen amounts of data about its users in China – data that the Chinese government can monitor. Oppressive regimes have always had an eye on what its citizens can say and do, but the sheer amount of information that social media and its features collect make this government control so much easier. Leaders in those authoritarian countries have a better instrument for surveillance.

This manifests itself most clearly on the micro-blogging platform Weibo, often dubbed the Chinese Twitter. David Strömberg, professor at the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University and his colleagues analyzed over 13.2 billion blog posts published on Weibo over the course of four years. On the one hand, they found millions of posts discussing protests and an even larger number accusing government officials of corruption. But the other side of the coin is that through that activity, planned protests can be predicted with startling accuracy even before they happen – giving the government opportunity to clamp down on dissent. AND THEY DID!



It is not only public posts that the government is controlling. WeChat censors private and group chat conversations, banning words linked to Tiananmen Square, Tibet or the forbidden religious group Falun Gong, as well as nicknames mocking its or its allies' leading politicians.

Previous investigation into the former Chinese version of Skype, TOM-Skype, has shown that the Chinese government went one step further: not only were the contents of private messages censored, but conversations deemed suspicious were meticulously logged.

Last September, China unveiled its plan to create an all-encompassing "social credit score" to keep tabs on its citizens' activities, due to be in place in 2020. The idea is that "if trust is broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere." That score is influenced by financial transactions, political and social behavior as well as general lifestyle – basically everything you do everyday.

[Source: Hello, Big Brother: How China controls its citizens through social media]

The Chinese people are already living in 1984.

Ok, so take a huge country like China. The problem there is that you have literally billions of people, billions of minds you have to somehow control. China’s main problem in making progress is that a China’s government has worked it out so that people’s lives aren’t really so bad. Individuals actually do have some degree of opportunity in China, and being a communist country is pretty much just a nominal thing at this point, anyway. The Chinese people are able to game the system in ways the NorKs cannot.

To a Chinese person, one is faced with the choice of living and working in China. In his or her mind, surveillance is not a big deal because if you really are doing something the government would bust you for, then it’s probably something you have no business doing, anyway. Even the police recognize the ridiculousness of it. We hear stories about how police break down doors and point guns at Christians meeting in underground churches. Nobody gets sent to re-education camps, however, because local governments are well aware of what would happen if they tried to purge underground Christianity. People would convert faster than the police could round them up. So the police show up as a mere show of force, just as a way to remind Christians who REALLY runs China. Once the cops leave, they just go back their Bible study like nothing happened. Nobody is even really afraid of them.

Sure, things DO HAPPEN. I’m not denying China is a bad situation. But it’s also important to recognize as a communist nation, as communist nations go, China is pretty weak.

As long as my Chinese-made Apple products don’t let me down, I really don’t care what they do.

Its my favorite novel and have read it many times over the years. It helped shape my worldview as a teenager.

According to Wikipedia:

As of 2018, it was estimated that Chinese authorities may have detained hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians as well as some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis, who are being held in these secretive internment camps which are located throughout the region. In May 2018, US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Randall Schriver said "at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens" were imprisoned in detention centers, which he described as "concentration camps". In August 2018, Guy McDougall, an American representative at the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, said that the committee had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in "re-education camps".

----------------------

Kayrat Samarkand, a Kazakh citizen who migrated from Xinjiang, was detained in one of the re-education camps in the region for three months for visiting neighboring Kazakhstan. On 15 February 2018, Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov sent a diplomatic note to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the same day as Kayrat Samarkand was freed from custody. After his release, Samarkand claimed that he faced endless brainwashing and humiliation, and that he was forced to study communist propaganda for hours every day and chant slogans giving thanks and wishing for a long life to Xi Jinping.

Mihrigul Tursun, an Uyghur woman detained in China, after escaping one of these camps, talked of beatings and torture. After moving to Egypt, she traveled to China in 2015 to spend time with her family and was immediately detained and separated from her infant children. When Tursun was released three months later, one of the triplets had died and the other two had developed health problems. Tursun said the children had been operated on. She was arrested for the second time about two years later. Several months later, she was detained the third time and spent three months in a cramped prison cell with 60 other women, having to sleep in turns, use the toilet in front of security cameras and sing songs praising Chinese Communist Party.

Tursun said she and other inmates were forced to take unknown medication, including pills that made them faint and a white liquid that caused bleeding in some women and loss of menstruation in others. Tursun said nine women from her cell died during her three months there. One day, Tursun recalled, she was led into a room and placed in a high chair, and her legs and arms were locked in place. "The authorities put a helmet-like thing on my head, and each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently and I would feel the pain in my veins," Tursun said in a statement read by a translator. "I don't remember the rest. White foam came out of my mouth, and I began to lose consciousness," Tursun said. "The last word I heard them saying is that you being an Uyghur is a crime." She was eventually released so that she could take her children to Egypt, but she was ordered to return to China. Once in Cairo, Tursun contacted U.S. authorities and, in September, came to the United States and settled in Virginia.

Former inmates claim that they are required to learn to sing the national anthem of China and communist songs. Punishments, like being placed in handcuffs for hours, waterboarding, or being strapped to "tiger chair" (a metal contraption) for long periods of time, are allegedly used on those who fail to follow.

According to detainees, they were also forced to drink alcohol and eat pork, which are forbidden in Islam. Some reportedly received unknown medicines while others attempted suicide. There have also been deaths reported due to unspecified causes. Detainees have alleged widespread sexual abuse, including forced abortions, forced use of contraceptive devices and compulsory sterilization. It has been reported that Han officials have been assigned to reside in the homes of Uyghurs who are in the camps. Rushan Abbas of the Campaign for Uyghurs claims that the actions of the Chinese government amount to genocide according to United Nations definitions which are laid out in the Genocide Convention.

There are many other testimonies of treatment in these camps. Xinjiang re-education camps

No doubt these things happen, and honestly what else would you expect in a communist country? We're on the same page in that respect. My point is that you have all these folks in concentration camps for a reason: Their minds CAN'T be effectively controlled, their behavior can't be forced without risking a massive public uprising and overthrow of the government. The problem for the Chinese is that the majority of people like the status quo just enough that they choose not to challenge it in any meaningful way. Communist governments will never overtly admit to making mistakes, but you will find very subtle changes in policy or looking the other way when people violate policy that keep collectivist societies minimally livable. For the Chinese, this is all they want. And, unfortunately, that's what many people want worldwide. If you were to suddenly uproot the government entirely and replace it with a capitalist, federal system, probably most Chinese would starve to death or die from treatable illness because they've all been born into a society in which they can expect those things as entitlements. The government doesn't make it difficult to fall in line, so I'd be willing to bet that much of the anti-government sentiment gets ignored while the government focuses their attention on hot spots that could spark a rebellion. For the average Chinese person, the mindset might be the same as the mindset for Americans hearing fellow citizens complain about the country: If you don't like it, you can leave.

As to your spoiler and me being callous--first, I don't waste time getting offended by people who disagree with me. Second, if I or my words are callous, it's only because I'm not good at telling lies, and truth is often unpleasant for many people if not most. While I cannot share the same values as the Chinese government, and while human rights is important to me, the problem with the Chinese is a problem FOR the Chinese. Is there or is there not a significant body of people who could potentially destroy the Chinese government among those that the ChiComms oppress? We're talking a few million versus a few BILLION people the ChiComms could conscript to fight them. See, the problem is if it were that important to the people, China could fall. But it's not. What China has to do to change that is launch a military attack on someone who could take them on and win.

There's a huge difference between China and pre-war Germany and even people globally between then and now. Back then, it was almost a sacred duty to rescue your friends. Once Germany declared war on the US, we were obligated to protect ourselves, which in turn meant taking the war to Europe instead of waiting for it to come for us. These days people value a relative state of peace over rescuing perfect strangers, and FWIW in retrospect I think our involvement in the Persian Gulf was wrong. Vietnam was wrong.

The important questions here are: Does a state of war exist between the United States and China? Are we willing to commit millions of ground troops to rescuing minorities we have no connection to? Are we willing to risk a Chinese nuclear first strike on American soil? Because if you really are worried about the Uyghurs and Kazakhs, that is what you're looking at to make it happen. Don't forget your history. The liberation of Jews in Germany was a side effect of our victory in Europe. It was never an intended or a stated goal of our entry into the war. The extermination program against the Jews was not widely known outside of Germany, and even if it had been it was certainly not unprecedented (pogroms in Russia). And look at all the lives lost on the way to defeating Germany! You'll find the reality of war against China to liberate the Uyghurs will cost many, many more lives than it will save. Don't. Doubt. Me.

Until we have an actual plan that will WORK, I'll just be over here in my corner saving up my money for my new iPhone.

The Ministry of Truth

Joe Toscano is a former Google consultant. He has been warning others about the harmful side effects of the Internet and social media. Social media sites, networks are actively manipulating your mind.Toscano noticed that while Google and other tech giants do a lot of good for the world, there are “fundamental issues” causing significant damage. “When you’re impacting billions of people, it creates very large-scale problems and we’re seeing that right now in the way that elections and communities are getting so aggravated and aggressive,” Toscano said. “We’re also polarizing our people and changing the way information is distributed and therefore changing the way society understands itself and communicates within each other.”

Toscano explained that years ago during the pre-internet era, only a handful of media companies existed in the United States. Network newscasts and major newspapers dictated the conversation, with esteem journalists typically making the key decisions. Everyone had access to the same information, so people were able to passionately debate a topic using the same set of facts. “We could lean right or left and talk about the issues. We might not agree, but we could talk about them,” Toscano said. “Now, the internet is based on sorting information with algorithms based on likes, engagement, comment shares, things like that. You don’t actually know what is true, what is good or what is bad.”

Fake news is shared six times more than actual news, as radical sensationalism often leads to engagement. “The internet has totally changed the way you make news and information,” he said. “We’ve lost journalistic integrity. We’ve lost production time, we have this 24-hour news cycle where journalists who are trained and professional and know what they need to do are now competing with citizen journalists who have gone viral with some fart videos or something and become an influencer. It’s just ridiculous.”

“If the algorithm of the internet were a highway and on the side of that highway, there was an accident that we were all looking at, which we do, right? Everyone does, but every time someone looked at that accident, it’s like a click, like or engagement. So if the algorithm of the internet were a highway, the internet would think we need more car accidents,” Toscano said.

Source: Ex-Google consultant sounds alarm on negative impact of Big Tech in ‘The Social Dilemma’

So the social media's solution has been to hire "fact checkers". These fact checkers are not unbiased and not objective. Many have axes to grind. They are elevated to the role of censors who shape what is truth and what is lies. They have turned the Internet into The Ministry of Truth.

Restructuring Social Media into the Ministry of Truth

One of the things I found quite peculiar was meetings that occurred between the various social media giants and the World Health Organization (WHO). At the time when WHO should have been laser focused on preventing the pandemic, they were instead fashioning themselves into the Ministry of Truth.

An article in the BBC reported that Andrew Pattison a digital business solutions manager for WHO traveled to Silicon Valley around 13 February 2020 to speak directly to tech firms about the spread of false information on their platforms. Mr Pattison spoke on Thursday to a meeting of tech companies hosted at Facebook's headquarters in Mountain View California. Other firms in attendance included Google, Apple, Airbnb, Lyft, Uber and Salesforce. Earlier in the week, he held talks with Amazon, at the e-commerce giant's headquarters in Seattle. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok are already directing users that search for coronavirus on their sites to the WHO.

Source: WHO says fake coronavirus claims causing 'infodemic'

As a result WHO fashioned itself into becoming the final Ministry of Truth when it came to the coronavirus. So how did that work out? There has been around 1.2 million deaths and 43.7 million infections thus far. Would you call that a roaring success? Not in my book! And many of the deaths can be attributed by the misinformation from WHO.

At the beginning of the pandemic WHO said there was no evidence of human to human transmission even though other nations began sounding the alarm in early January. The 15-page document from the intelligence agencies of the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, was obtained by Australia's Saturday Telegraph newspaper and states that China's secrecy amounted to an “assault on international transparency." The dossier touches on themes that have been discussed in media reports about the outbreak of the virus, including an initial denial by China that the virus could be transmitted between humans, the silencing or "disappearing" of doctors who tried to speak up, the destruction of evidence in laboratories and refusal to provide live samples to international scientists working on a vaccine. Specifically, the file notes that China began censoring news of the virus on search engines and social media beginning Dec. 31, deleting terms including “SARS variation," “Wuhan Seafood market” and “Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.” Three days later, on Jan. 3, China’s National Health Commission ordered virus samples to be either moved to designated testing facilities or destroyed, while simultaneously issuing a "no-publication order" related to the disease. The Saturday Telegraph report includes a timeline of Chinese obfuscation. On Jan. 5, for example, Wuhan's Municipal Health Commission stopped releasing daily updates on the number of new cases and would not resume them for 13 days. On Jan. 10, Wang Guanga, a respiratory specialist at Peking University First Hospital who had been investigating the outbreak, said it was "under control" and largely a "mild condition." (Wang himself would disclose 12 days later that he had been infected with the virus.) Two days later, on Jan. 12, a Shanghai professor's lab was closed down after it shared data on the virus' genetic sequence with the outside world. On Jan. 24, Chinese officials stopped the Wuhan Institute of Virology from sharing virus samples with a lab at the University of Texas.

Perhaps most damningly, the dossier states that Chinese authorities denied that the virus could be spread between humans until Jan. 20, "despite evidence of human-human transmission from early December." The file is similarly unsparing about the World Health Organization (WHO), stating that it toed the Chinese line about human-to-human transmission despite the fact that "officials in Taiwan raised concerns as early as December 31, as did experts in Hong Kong on January 4.”

Source: Leaked Western intel dossier reveals how China deceived the world about coronavirus

The dossier goes on to state that throughout February, Beijing pressed the U.S., Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbors and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions, even as China imposed severe restrictions at home.

And then there was the fiasco with face masks. First WHO said face mask were not necessary. Then they advised people to wear the wrong kind of face mask - cloth face mask instead of face mask that could stop the transmission of the virus, the N95s. This guidance is misinformation.

The coronavirus is primarily airborne and is spread by aerosols. WHO almost completely ignored this transmission route. It wasn't until 6 July when 239 scientist from 32 countries challenged the WHO about aerosol transmission that they finally acknowledged the possibility of aerosol transmission.

Source:
Scientists Urge Consideration of Airborne SARS-CoV-2 Transmission

If WHO was really a world class organization, they should have been way out in front of this, instead of acting like some lethargic government organization who was more concerned about it reputation than its mission.

And what is this mass of misinformation that WHO deems it important to censor?

YouTube is on a purge of content by credentialed and experienced professionals who are giving differing views on the Covid-19 pandemic. A few weeks ago it took down the popular hour-long video by Dr. Erickson, as well as Aytu Bioscience's short demo clip of an interesting new technology. Just now it took down Journeyman Pictures' interview of Dr. Wittkowski for "violating community guidelines"

Ultimately, YouTube can do whatever it likes. But I and many, many others have lost all faith in it as a platform for open public discourse. Censoring bigots and extremists is one thing - censoring doctors, scientists and researchers for perspectives that do not align with the official narrative is quite another. It is contrary to democracy and it is fundamentally contrary to science. This is a horrible look and you're only making people more skeptical.

Why is YouTube censoring scientists, doctors, and researchers with differing views on Covid-19?


From where I sit, there is a grand conspiracy underway. It is a global conspiracy. In a way it is like the book 1984. Big Brother directs The Ministry of Truth (social media giants) to censor free content on the Internet. The common man loses. In this case, the world has 1.2 million fewer souls and counting.

Censoring people who spread dangerous information is probably the best possible use of censorship.

In the cases you cite:

- Dr Wittkowski claimed that the pandemic would end after two-three weeks and so people should just ignore restrictions. This has proven laughably incorrect.

- The "medical device" had not received FDA approval. It was a device for shining UVA light inside people's lungs (UVA light does not inactivate coronaviruses: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17002634/). This is not something that the public should be attempting to replicate. The very reason we have the FDA is to stop biotech companies pushing dangerous, unproven treatments.

If you're spreading dangerous misinformation, you're spreading dangerous misinformation, regardless of whether you're a contrarian researcher or a biotech company. Misinformation causes people to make bad decisions, and big tech companies have a responsibility to not let it propagate. That is a very long way from the Ministry of Truth.