The Great Impoverishment and Pet Cemetary, Inc.

 Flag of IngSoc from 1984

I was writing in a post:

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2010/12/amsoc-war-is-peace-emmanuel-goldstein.html

about the Great Impoverishment, which is what other people call the Great Recession... which is not actually a Recession, having been declared officially dead some time in the past due to a certain number of fiscal quarters in succession meeting certain levels of activity.
Perhaps it has come back, like a zombie that our popular culture is so fond of. Maybe it is a double dip, or a triple dip.

Regardless, we spoke of Orwell's 1984 and how it is coming true in ways we find hard to grasp. Orwell's exact details are off, but the main thrust of our history is spot on with his story. Case in point, the obvious correlation between Orwell's Oceania and our NATO. From the BBC covering new WikiLeak material:


Another cable, signed by Mrs Clinton, instructs US embassies how to deal with the new Nato plan for the Baltic states, and stresses that the project must be kept secret.


"We see the expansion of Eagle Guardian as a step toward the possible expansion of Nato's other existing country-specific contingency plans into regional plans," it says.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11933089

Oceania extends itself right up to the borders of Eurasia, or the Russian Federation.

This parallel between NATO : Oceania, Russian Federation : Eurasia, and China (as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) is so patent that it makes my repetition of it tedious. The parallelism also indicates how far along each Bloc is:  NATO (Oceania) is well defined, China (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) is not so well defined, but is on the road to its full complexity and self-awareness, and Russia(Eurasia) has yet to define itself and the limits of its body - unless, since it is already a Federation, we accept present boundaries as the limits; the Russian Federation is pretty massive.

None of any of this is as interesting as the fact that the state of society in 1984 was that of Victory Gin and low quality cigarettes, reflecting the stresses and shortages of World War II. The people eat synthetic foodstuffs which fare is very prophetic of the deterioration of the quality of food today, taste having been bred out for shelf life, tasteless meats, GM foods (and the problem with genetically modified food is the fact that for all the tinkering with genes and the environment, we shall have GM food designed for the bottom-line of food companies and not for the consumer's enjoyment!)

Our present straitened circumstances are our entry into 1984. It will never go back. If you think it will, I ask: Go back to what?
You would have to say, back to the dream days following World War II, the first generations after that engagement where we came out, not exhausted but in our prime and re-built the world... and made a pretty penny doing it. Everything goes back to WW II, Victory Gin, ration books...

What we have learned is that you cannot kill Authoritarian systems by defeating them, for they will have bitten you on the hand during the struggle, and by the prevailing logic of zombie stories, you will become one of those Zombies which fill popular culture, along with werewolves and vampires: a disease that procreates itself in its death.

We shall not all die, but we ourselves must all be changed.
If we do not change, we create a Stephen King Pet Cemetary world where all the perversions come back to haunt us!

--
ps. I intended to put a zombie picture at the beginning as an illustration, but I find I can not bring myself to put such a diseased notion into this blog. It is a terrible blasphemy against God's love in my mind.