Question for all those using the "Big Brother" reference...how many of you have actually read "1984"?
in the U.S., be careful what you read
by teejay 50 Replies latest jw friends
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Pleasuredome
Good for them! The Patriot Act is by far the most egregious affront to our civil liberties ever. We need to do what we can to protect ourselves from the overwhelming paranoia that the government is trying to use to get us to quietly go along while they strip us of our most basic rights to privacy.
well said az!
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Reborn2002
Question for all those using the "Big Brother" reference...how many of you have actually read "1984"?
I have read 1984.
George Orwell (although actually that was not his birth name) is one of my favorite authors next to J.R.R. Tolkien and a select few others.
In some instances the US government does fit the analogy of Big Brother. Alas, if you actually read 1984 (Why does the Ministry of Truth come to mind when considering that novel?) IMHO, the Jehovah's Witness organization matches the paradigm much more precisely.
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teejay
Freedom96,
It's comforting to think that if something bad happens to people it's only because they were in the wrong place or with some shady characters. Not so. Check out this transcript of a recent 60 Minutes program ( http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/06/60minutes/main548023.shtml ):
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Hady Omar came to the United States from Egypt three and a half years ago. He lives in Arkansas with his wife Candy, an Arkansas native, and their daughter Jasmine.
He’s never been charged with any criminal offense, but he says he was held in custody in a maximum-security prison for 73 days because he is a Muslim.
On September 12th, Omar just returned from a trip to Florida, where he was trying to start an antiques business. Minutes later, police and FBI agents pulled up in front of his house.
“They were running actually, toward me,” remembers Omar. “They had their hands on their guns.”
The agents told Omar that they just wanted to talk. He was taken into custody and grilled for more than seven hours. Then he was taken in handcuffs to the local jail and placed under arrest. He asked to see a lawyer, but he was told that he couldn’t use the phone. He says he even passed a lie detector test, but still wasn't allowed to leave.
The next morning, Omar was the talk of his town. The headline of his local paper read “Terror Strikes Home.” His picture was on the front page.
His wife, Candy, says she had no idea what was going on. No one told her, for example, that her husband had been taken from the local jail, in shackles, and driven through the night to Louisiana, where he wound up in a maximum-security prison.
Before going to his cell, Omar says prison officials videotaped him as he was stripped naked and given a rectal exam in front of an audience of male and female agents.
“I don't feel like a man, you know, once they're searching me like this,” says Omar. “I don't feel like a man.”
Authorities deny that women were watching, but they don't deny that Omar spent the next two months in solitary confinement, with the lights on 24 hours a day.
“The cell was freezing. It was cold,” says Omar. “I didn’t get to change clothes for 14 days. They kept the shower very cold. No warm or hot water. Nothing.”
Omar says one federal agent told him he had been arrested because he bought a plane ticket from a computer terminal at a Kinko's in Florida -- the same Kinko's where Mohammed Atta, leader of the September 11th terrorists, had also purchased a ticket. But no one has officially told either Omar, or the lawyer he was eventually allowed to contact, why he was kept in a maximum-security prison.
“I just start feeling that I'm not going to ever get out of there,” says Omar, who ended up contemplating suicide. “Sometimes I felt that – I am dead, and this is hell for me. And, you know, this is my grave.”
The government was able to hold Omar and hundreds of other Muslim detainees by charging them not as criminals but as visa violators. The law says criminals, even murderers, must be charged with a crime quickly – usually within 48 hours – or released.
Immigration laws used to work the same way, but after 9/11, the justice department rewrote the rules so that suspected visa violators could be held in jail as long as the government wants – without any charges filed against them.
Omar, who was arrested as a suspected terrorist, was ultimately charged only with overstaying a tourist visa, even though he had married an American citizen, had a work permit, and had applied for permanent residency.
After two and a half months in custody, he was released on bond. Robert Rubin is Omar's lawyer and the legal director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. He says that before September 11th, it would have been unheard of to arrest someone like Omar and put him in solitary confinement.
The government may believe that extraordinary circumstances equals extraordinary treatment. But Rubin believes this certainly doesn’t justify denying Omar access to legal counsel and his wife and child, who are both U.S. citizens. “Any concern that the United States may have had about Omar being a security risk, a terrorist threat, could have been easily resolved in a number of hours, if not days, of humanized treatment -- not the kind of dehumanizing conditions that he was subject to,” says Rubin. -
WildHorses
I was right. This country is no longer what it claims to be.......A FREE COUNTRY!
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gitasatsangha
1984 is crucial reading (even though the American equivalent of Big Brother operates with more finesse)
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Uzzah
Just so people don't think such concerns are just in the States, there is a heated debate in Canada right now about civil liberties.
Many have heard of the brutal killing and mutilation of 10 year old Holly Jones in Toronto. The Police have decided to go door to door in the neighbourhood (7-10 blocks in any direction from the child's home). This visit is not to ask for helpful information but to collect DNA samples from any male over the age of 15. If you refuse to provide a sample you are added to a list of suspects for investigation.
Of course the Police say the records are only for this investigation. I believe the individual cop who tells me this and I trust him. But he has no control of the sample. I don't trust the bureaucrat who decides this huge library of DNA is too valuable to just throw away.
Would you allow a sample to be collected from you if the cops came knocking? I would do near anything to help the cops find the animal(s) who did this to Holly but does this justify the forced collection of DNA?
I would gladly let the cops check out my library habits long before I would give over DNA. And "I have nothing to hide!" I think it is a shame that people are being forced to have to make that statement.
Uzzah
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Reborn2002
1984 is crucial reading
I agree. For the general public as a whole, but especially for Jehovah's Witnesses and members of other high-control group cults.
While I acknowledge that the US government does have many similarities to Big Brother in 1984, to be fair, in some aspects it does not deserve that comparison.
The United States government has tried to deceive the general public, let there be no doubt of that. The first instance that comes to mind is the Watergate scandal with Richard Nixon. However the government has not to date confiscated libraries and history books in an attempt to rewrite the past to make it as though the United States is guilty of no wrongdoing. The United States does not demand absolute devotion (life for The Party as Orwell put it) and execute opposers (like Hussein and Iraq's Baath party in real life) More importantly, currently, and that is the key word, the United States government does allow dissent and critics to openly voice their views in public forums. (do you see that in Tehran or Pyongang?) Big Brother in 1984 did not, tyrannical dictatorships such as Iraq and North Korea do not, just as the Jehovah's Witnesses do not among their own membership.
Believe me, I do not personally accept or condone many of the actions recently taken by the Bush Administration. While I find them despicable and a future threat to a citizen's civil liberties and freedoms, I do not feel as though it is nearly severe enough to label them Orwellian or JW-like in nature at this time.
What has taken place concerns me, and as Yeru said, citizens voicing their complaints should be encouraged for the health of the nation.
I love America, and as a citizen of this nation, I support it. I will fight for my freedoms, and the freedoms of others around me. I also try to remain balanced and unbiased in my views.
Just my $1 minus 98 cents.
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ThiChi
You guys are too much! -
foreword
Or maybe (first time posting a picture, hope it works)...
edit: guess not....let me retry.
You guys are too much!