Jan

6

James Cameron in avatar studioSmash hit Cameron film "Avatar" fits well with current Laureate apologia:

"John Podhoretz, writing a critique for the Weekly Standard, goes so far as to call the movie "anti-American."

"The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism-kind of," Podhoretz writes." (ABC news)

Not surprisingly the film is setting records in Russia, where the mafiacracy foments resentment against the US imperialist military-industrial complex. Expect louder cheering from those quarters as we become layered with increasing taxes, bureaucracy, and official corruption, evening the playing field.

Janice Dorn writes;

In 1984, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past', ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'."

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions and diffuse enemies". He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible.

Stefan Jovanovich comments:

I don't think Orwell would have agreed with Dr. Dorn. He wrote 1984 after working for the BBC during WW II when private letters were read by government censors; food, petrol and housing were all under government control; the currency had, within very recent memory, ceased to be exchangeable for gold; And –most important of all– all the citizens of a common law state were subject to impressment at will. That is hardly the situation now.

Measured by Orwell's standards, the glorious good old days of the 1960s were a great deal closer to 1984. The Tet offensive debacle of the NVA was a "success" because Walter Cronkite said it was; the New York Times knew best; and we had a draft. Over the past half century the tyrannies of academia have become far worse, and the civil servant class has expanded to the point that the U.S. and Europe are now equally oppressed by bureaucracies and airport security is truly a tyranny invented by the telephone sanitizers; but freedom of thought has never been greater. It becomes less and less possible to say "everybody knows".

As for perpetual war, there has been one going on in Africa for the past decade and a half. No one has done a census of the casualties, just as no one did a census of the deaths from Mao's Great Leap Forward or Stalin's rationalization of Soviet agriculture, but reasonable people agree that the scale of all 3 atrocities is comparable - somewhere between 15 and 30 million deaths beyond what would have occurred from normal aging and disease and ordinary mayhem. Thank God that perpetual war, which surely dwarfs our own petty struggles against Islamofascists, is coming to an end. Those who decline to believe in Almighty Providence can attribute the onset of peace to other causes: simple exhaustion and the decline in the supply of Kalashnikovs and other implements of less than mass destruction. Whatever the cause, someone much closer to peace has broken out in Africa. In the world of Oceania that would not have been allowed. 


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