The New, Improved 1984

By Charles Hugh Smith
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/

George Orwell's prescient book 1984 envisioned a technologically enabled authoritarian state of ubiquitous surveillance, propaganda and fear that constantly rewrote history to suit the needs of the present regime. Published in 1949, 1984 took the totalitarian templates of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and extended them into a future where the state employed technology to perfect not only control of the populace via police state repression but control of their minds via propaganda extolling the state and revising "facts" to support the current party line.

Welcome to the new, improved 1984, America 2013.

Ubiquitous surveillance: check.

Ubiquitous propaganda extolling the state and central bank: check

Perpetual fear-mongering: check

Perpetual war against an unseen enemy who can never be defeated: check

Police state with essentially unlimited powers to suppress "enemies of the state": check

Continual revision of history to support the current party line: check.

Have you noticed that every key metric of the economy is constantly being revised, rewriting history and installing a shiny new set of "facts"? In a recent podcast I recorded with Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity, Chris pointed out that downward revisions in economic data are made only when the data point is safely over the horizon of history; that the U.S. GDP dipped into negative numbers in 2011 was masked at the time with the usual ginned-up positive numbers, and revised down to an approximation of reality years later when the reality has zero impact on the public perception of the state-managed "recovery."

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