By Jim Quinn - July 26, 2023
In Part 1 of this article, I explored how Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury foretold the use of technology by totalitarians to subjugate and control the masses. Now we move on to a currently hot topic – censorship.
“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Censorship
“There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” – Ray Bradbury
The primary theme of Fahrenheit 451 is censorship. In Bradbury’s dystopia, burning books was the principal method of censorship, directed by the government, but generally supported by the masses. A form of self-censorship developed, as the dullards, intellectually lazy, and willfully ignorant, preferred books to be burned so they felt that would put them on a level playing field with the critical thinkers and intellectually curious minded.
It always comes back to the government doing everything in their power to keep the masses apathetic, ill-informed, entertained, and distracted, to ensure their continued control over society. Bradbury believed the masses would go along with censorship because they already had television, radio, and fast cars, with vacuous programming, loud music, and unceasing advertising creating over-stimulation and distraction for the populace. They were too distracted to read a book, learn, think critically, or question the authorities.
Bradbury doesn’t have much faith in either government or the people they rule. His view of humanity in general was not positive in the early 1950s. Imagine what he would think of American society seventy years later. The hostility towards books in Fahrenheit 451 for many was based on envy. The lazy, willfully ignorant masses didn’t want to feel intellectually inferior to those who wanted to read books, learn, inquire, think, and question the government narrative.
Seeing your neighbor’s books burned gave a warped sense of satisfaction to the intentionally ignorant. When your government wants to keep you ignorant to better control you and you choose ignorance because it’s easier to not think, you’ve achieved dystopian perfection. Thinking is hard. Watching a screen is easy.
The 1930’s and 1940’s saw the height of book burnings, with Goebbels and the Nazis burning books contrary to their ideology in the early 1930s, and then the counter book burnings of Nazi literature after 1945. It spread to the U.S., with the Karens of their day burning textbooks and literature they didn’t agree with. There will always be an authoritarian-minded segment of the population who seek power to decide what you should read or see. They do not believe freedom of speech as defined in the Constitution should be available to those they disagree with.
“I wasn’t worried about freedom, I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV…the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news and the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids.” – Ray Bradbury
Censorship is the cudgel they utilize to keep you from making up your own mind about ideas, historical events, opinions, and facts. If you don’t want the masses to know the truth, don’t let them see both sides of issues, keep them distracted by technology, and overload their brains with meaningless drivel. Bradbury’s dystopian fears have come to fruition, seventy years later. We are now a nation of low IQ sheep who “feel” smart because their overlords have lowered the bar so low, every dullard believes themselves to be smarter than Einstein, even though they can’t subtract 57 cents from $1.00 in their head. Generations have been indoctrinated to feel rather than think. They don’t even know what thinking means.
“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
One of Bradbury’s real pet peeves was special interest groups and minorities censoring books that offended them because they felt their group was either portrayed unfairly or not portrayed at all. In particular he regularly received complaint letters regarding his portrayal of female or black characters in his novels. Essentially every special interest group wants to be portrayed in a positive manner and will use all means necessary to censor portrayals they don’t like, including book burning and invoking hostility towards the author.
Rather than make a cogent argument counter to a portrayal in a book, they scream at the top of their lungs and throw a temper tantrum. And this was fifty years before the introduction of social media platforms, where censorship has become an art form, and online temper tantrums by the easily offended have been aided and abetted by your government and their social media co-conspirators. Cancel culture is a cancerous tumor on our society and must be eradicated before it kills us.
The depth and breadth of censorship in our world today far surpasses any dystopian visions Bradbury could conceptualize in Fahrenheit 451. The book burning firemen couldn’t hold a candle to what Twitter, Facebook, Google, Youtube, and the legacy regime media have done since the start of this century. We are now in the Woke Age of Censorship, where the outrage of the day results in mass censorship by the masters of deception and deceit. Even though censorship was used extensively during WWI and WW2 by governments trying to cover-up military defeats, I believe the modern Age of Censorship began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy by elements within the U.S. Deep State.
The CIA could not allow the truth to be told, so the feckless Warren Commission produced a fake report about the lone gunman and if anyone questioned the official narrative, the CIA created a derogatory term to silence them – conspiracy theorist. As we know, this term is screeched by the regime media and their brain-dead acolytes on a daily basis in order to shut the rest of us up. One problem for these mouthpieces for the Deep State – virtually every conspiracy theory has been validated and proven true over the last several years.
As we saw during the Vietnam War, censorship wasn’t quite as efficient as today. They were successfully able to pull off the Gulf of Tonkin false flag without the press uncovering the truth and the media went along with the narrative we were winning in the early years. But there were still some journalists with integrity in the 1960s like Seymour Hersh who refused to be censored. Even the networks started showing videos of the death and devastation.
The entire war, based on lies, unraveled, brought down a president, and created turmoil and violence in the streets of America. The Deep State got slightly more sophisticated with 9/11 and the Iraq wars. As with JFK’s assassination, the government entities who would be implicated used a commission to cover-up their failures and lies regarding the 9/11 attacks. The no longer independent legacy media mouthed the official narrative and called all the independent journalists who revealed uncomfortable truths, conspiracy theorists.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” ― George Orwell, 1984
The mainstream media was tightly censored during the Iraq wars and willingly censored themselves in order to have continued access to military command. The real turning point for censorship and surveillance occurred with the passage of the totalitarian manifesto – The Patriot Act. This despotic legislation, pre-written and waiting for the opportunity to be unleashed upon America by Cheney and his neo-con co-conspirators, created a surveillance/censorship state that has grown to such a Constitution crushing size, it has effectively stripped citizens of all their rights.
The regime media is all in on enforcing the dictates of their censorship masters . . .
[SNIP]
