Newspeak

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 21 Oct 2002 12:00:00 GMT
From the hafiz mailing list:
"If God would stop telling jokes, I might act serious." -- Tukaram

From tle:

L. Neil Smith at Rational Review - Whaddya mean we, Bluebelly? - L. Neil realizes that the Confederates and the Indians were on the same side, the opposite side from King George (of England), Lincoln, and Bushnev. [smith2004]

I'll preface this by saying that I've spent the last year or two enjoying all of the historical revisionism about the War Between the States. I'd like to think I helped to kick it off with a column I wrote several years ago about Abraham Lincoln called "The American Lenin," but there are probably lots of writers who can make a similar claim.

In the years after that, we've seen a couple of astonishing books, Freeing Slaves, Enslaving Free Men by my old friend Jeffrey Rodgers Hummell, and The Real Lincoln by Thomas DiLorenzo who has a friend in me if he ever needs one. We've seen countless columns, too, by DiLorenzo and other Dixie Cup savers who hang out on a regular basis at LewRockwell.com. Thanks to them, we now have a clearer view of what the Late Unpleasantness was about, and what kind of a hairpin Saint Abraham was. I was all wrong about him. I should have compared him to Hitler.

...

Robert E. Lee, who struggled in vain for five bloody years to preserve the Constitution and the American way of life as the Founding Fathers conceived it, and Crazy Horse, who struggled equally in vain to prevent the expansion of the vile Federal Empire, were on the same side!

Richard Glen Boire at The Journal of Cognitive Liberties - On Cognitive Liberty (Part 2) - compares the war on drugs to newspeak from George Orwell's 1984. The war on some drugs is a blatant violation of the first amendment to the Constitution. [grabbe]

I submit that in the same way, the so-called "war on drugs" is not a war on pills, powder, plants, and potions, it is war on mental states -- a war on consciousness itself -- how much, what sort we are permitted to experience, and who gets to control it. More than an unintentional misnomer, the government-termed "war on drugs" is a strategic decoy label; a slight-of-hand move by the government to redirect attention away from what lies at ground zero of the war -- each individual's fundamental right to control his or her own consciousness.

...

Free speech, free exercise, free association, a free press and the right to assemble, are all moot if the thought that underlies these actions has already been constrained by the government. If the government is permitted to prohibit the experiencing of certain thought processes, or otherwise manipulate consciousness at its very roots--via drug prohibitions, religious indoctrination, monopolizing media, or any number of methods--it need not even worry about controlling the expression of such thoughts. By prohibiting the very formation of mind states--by strangling the free mind itself--free expression is made meaningless.

...

As I will show in the next installment of this essay, the government's War on Unapproved Mental States, besides violating core principles of the First Amendment, also violates the very essence of the right to privacy.

The Libertarian Enterprise has a new issue, "Are We Playing in Peoria?" I'll comment on it tomorrow, in sha' allah.

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