How i got the foreword:
1: I went to https://www.amazon.de/1984-Roman-George-Orwell/dp/3423282320
2: i viewed the preview
3: i took a snapshot of all the forewood pages.
4: i ran each image through https://www.prepostseo.com/image-to-text
5: i ran the german text through https://translate.yandex.com/ German to english:
6: then i spaced it out like the foreword showed:
Views on truth
Foreword by Robert Habeck
George Orwell is the analyst of totalitarianism. Until 1989 and the end of real socialism, his novels "1984< and >Farm of Animals< remained perhaps the most current books of their time. With the collapse of the Soviet Republic and the conjured victory of global capitalist liberalism, they seemed to have become historical. But today, thirty years later, they are relevant again, perhaps more relevant than ever. Not only are authoritarian regimes gaining popularity on a global scale, but also states that may believe that they are the former torchbearers of freedom and democracy are being shaken by authoritarian populism. In this respect, we are not just experiencing a new division of the world into liberal and illiberal democracies, authoritarian rule against a liberal, liberal order. We are witnessing how the poison of totalitarian thinking is also seeping into the foundation of democracy and threatening to hollow it out from within. New alliances are emerging between governments with very different ideological orientations, all of which, however, are united by a rejection of civil liberties, freedom of the press and the separation of powers. For all those who want to understand the instruments of the authoritarian, the totalitarian, rereading George Orwell is a must.
This development and system competition between authoritarian and liberal states is threatening, because the former, unlike in the past, may also have an economic advantage due to the mass tapping of data. While it was considered clear in the analogue world that competition, freedom and creativity and a market economy are superior to planned economies, managed processes, oligopolies and cartels at least in the long term, because they produce knowledge and innovations more efficiently and faster, this is far from certain in the digital economy. China, for example, with its large, centrally collected data on behaviors, clinical pictures, personal preferences, knows much more about society than the European states. The state has a huge information advantage over decentralized economic systems. Especially when artificial intelligence comes into play and evaluates the amount of data. For democracy and civil rights, this state control is unacceptable. However, the power advantage over a free society that does not spy on and exploit the private lives of its citizens is immense. Whether or not the liberal democracies will survive this new system confrontation depends very much on the question of whether they will succeed in proving themselves capable of acting in the face of the great challenges of our time.
For today's generations, who voluntarily share their most private affairs on the Internet and who are used to the fact that Google always knows where we are at the moment, surveillance by the technique that Orwell points out in "1984" may seem downright old-fashioned. It is overlooked how up-to-date the associated warning is. Cynically, the corona crisis in particular provides examples en masse of what technical monitoring is now able to do. And the authoritarian rulers around the world radically exploited the threat to life from the virus. Parliamentary co-determination, separation of powers and the rule of law have been restricted. China, in particular, made full use of its technical-totalitarian complex during the corona period and used its "social scoring" system to isolate people with corona infection, for example by preventing them from using trains, buses or trains or shopping. Third parties were able to identify where corona infected people were using their smartphones. A preliminary diagnosis could be made via the face recognition of the mobile phone and the temperature measurement of the finger on the touchscreen. The Chinese state exercised total surveillance and controlled the behavior of its citizens down to the last detail. China created the transparent subject through "social scoring". If one was already used to the fact that crossing roads was filmed and stored without permission, the extension of social control to people's health data is another dimension on the way to social manipulation. The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in a guest article in the Financial Times on March 20, 2020 that emotions are measurable biological phenomena like symptoms of illness. If a technique is used on mobile phones or in bracelets that can detect colds and infections, it is also able to detect laughter or rejection - and could use this knowledge to influence opinions. This marks the boundary between surveillance and manipulation. And it is precisely this border that Orwell made visible already in 1984. As bad as it is to live in a state in which the right to free speech has been taken away, it is worse to live in a country that manipulates people so that they no longer think of contradicting them at all, or their language is taken away from them. Here, too, recent history provides striking examples of exactly such attempts being made again and again, including in Germany. After the state elections in Thuringia in 2019, AfD officials could be watched for an evening as they claimed that their election success was a victory over hatred and incitement. Those who push and cross all the boundaries of what can be said complain that there are language bans in Germany. Those who lack decency and morality call themselves bourgeois. Those who completely transform democracy into a people's rule denounce it as a dictatorship and a facade democracy. We are experiencing an Orwellian newspeak par excellence in these times. A lie becomes truth and a lie becomes truth.
1984 re-reading had a peculiar effect on me. When I first read the book, while still at school, it was for me a metaphor for the totalitarian regimes of the darkest years of the twentieth century, Stalinism and Nazism. It demonstrated how people are broken and manipulated, how fascism works, how reality becomes a single manipulation. It is not known whether the war that Eurasia is waging against Oceania and East Asia in the novel is actually taking place, or whether the rocket attacks are not being blamed on their own governments to justify their violence, just as, for example, the Reichstag fire in Berlin in 1933 was set by the Nazis to imprison Communists and Social Democrats. And at the end of the day, a big victory is announced, as in the newsreel of the Nazis. It is also not known whether Emmanuel Goldstein, the opponent of the system, and the underground movement of the "brotherhood" even exist. Supposed friends turn out to be spies, the thought police not only track down betrayal, but implement the thought of betrayal in their heads, only to then knock them off. And in the end, the main characters who love each other, Winston Smith and Julia, also betray each other. There remains only shame and broken individuality. Nothing good remains. There is no hope left.
1984 used to be for me the literary intensification of what I knew from history books and news programs. It was an illustration of what the generation of my grandparents must have experienced under National Socialism and my uncles and aunts in the GDR. It was a convincing representation of how it must feel when the intimate sphere is illuminated. "His eyes were constantly watching you, his voice was constantly surrounding you. When sleeping and waking, at work and eating, at home and on the street, in the bath and in bed - there was no escape. Nothing belonged to yourself, except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.<<
But it had nothing to do with my reality at the time. And I also found all the campaigns of the last few years, which relied on "Orwellian surveillance", against data retention, data leaks, censuses, video surveillance, warning about Amazon's Alexa, etc., ultimately pulled by the hair. Reducing the Orwellian surveillance state to the screen reduces the novel to the listing of technical instruments. After all, we live in a free democracy, that has always been my firm conviction. And the trust in it has made the Orwell reading a mirror of the past for me. Insistent, yes. Basically, absolutely. After all, >1984< is one of the few novels in world literature, elements of which have made it into our linguistic common knowledge – "Big Brother is watching you". But to call this novel, moreover, present? Somehow this interpretation seemed to me a little exaggerated, a little too dystopian.
When I read it again, it was completely different for me. To be honest, I didn't think about 1933-1945 or the GDR or Soviet Russia at all. I was just thinking about our time, our immediate present. And this is due to Orwell's razor-sharp analysis of how language can be manipulated. How history can be reinterpreted. How society is deprived of a solid foundation of values, so that in the end only fear and total submission remain.
First of all, there is the main person Winston, who with her work in the "Ministry of Truth" herself contributes to rewriting history in such a way that it fits into the current prevailing doctrine. In a certain sense, politics always interprets the past in their favor. But Orwell shows that the past is not only interpreted in a certain way, but is actually changed. This is something completely different. It makes a difference whether you argue about what constitutes German history, or whether you claim that the "Wehrmacht" of the Nazis stands in a humanistic tradition, or the Holocaust has been a "bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history", as politicians of the AfD have done in recent years. In his dystopian novel, Orwell demonstrates this reinterpretation of the truth and, as a result, its loss. And then there is above all >Newspeak". A language that is purified, that has"eradicated harmful concepts" and thus is no longer just propaganda, but creates its own reality, one in which there is no longer any truth, but only views on truth, where then "ignorance" is "strength", "war" >>peace", "freedom" is "slavery". Thus, "doublethink" is formed, a logic according to which, of two contradictory beliefs, both are correct. Today this is called "alternative facts" or "fake news". But the mechanism is the same. The truth as the basis of a shared and interpreted reality is destroyed. Newspeak and doublethink, both are celebrating happy premieres today - both are needed as a political means. The manipulation through lies and fake quotes, the dissection of public space into loud groups and groups, often supported by social media. "The party said that one should not trust one's eyes and ears. That was their decisive, ultimate commandment," it says in 1984. And this is exactly how populists act worldwide. Perhaps the most radical is the US president, who claimed, for example, that pictures of his inauguration, in which it can be seen that significantly fewer people were present than with Barack Obama, were manipulated by the media. What does not correspond to his worldview cannot be true and is "fake news" or in German Pegida jargon "lying press".
In 1984," it is said, after the images of evidence were manipulated: "You believed that you had seen irrefutable evidence that their confessions were false. There was a photo that caused hallucinations in you. You even believed that you had it in your hand.«
...
How i got the foreword:
1: I went to https://www.amazon.de/1984-Roman-George-Orwell/dp/3423282320
2: i viewed the preview
3: i took a snapshot of all the forewood pages.
4: i ran each image through https://www.prepostseo.com/image-to-text
5: i ran the german text through https://translate.yandex.com/ German to english:
6: then i spaced it out like the foreword showed:
Views on truth
Foreword by Robert Habeck
George Orwell is the analyst of totalitarianism. Until 1989 and the end of real socialism, his novels "1984< and >Farm of Animals< remained perhaps the most current books of their time. With the collapse of the Soviet Republic and the conjured victory of global capitalist liberalism, they seemed to have become historical. But today, thirty years later, they are relevant again, perhaps more relevant than ever. Not only are authoritarian regimes gaining popularity on a global scale, but also states that may believe that they are the former torchbearers of freedom and democracy are being shaken by authoritarian populism. In this respect, we are not just experiencing a new division of the world into liberal and illiberal democracies, authoritarian rule against a liberal, liberal order. We are witnessing how the poison of totalitarian thinking is also seeping into the foundation of democracy and threatening to hollow it out from within. New alliances are emerging between governments with very different ideological orientations, all of which, however, are united by a rejection of civil liberties, freedom of the press and the separation of powers. For all those who want to understand the instruments of the authoritarian, the totalitarian, rereading George Orwell is a must.
This development and system competition between authoritarian and liberal states is threatening, because the former, unlike in the past, may also have an economic advantage due to the mass tapping of data. While it was considered clear in the analogue world that competition, freedom and creativity and a market economy are superior to planned economies, managed processes, oligopolies and cartels at least in the long term, because they produce knowledge and innovations more efficiently and faster, this is far from certain in the digital economy. China, for example, with its large, centrally collected data on behaviors, clinical pictures, personal preferences, knows much more about society than the European states. The state has a huge information advantage over decentralized economic systems. Especially when artificial intelligence comes into play and evaluates the amount of data. For democracy and civil rights, this state control is unacceptable. However, the power advantage over a free society that does not spy on and exploit the private lives of its citizens is immense. Whether or not the liberal democracies will survive this new system confrontation depends very much on the question of whether they will succeed in proving themselves capable of acting in the face of the great challenges of our time.
For today's generations, who voluntarily share their most private affairs on the Internet and who are used to the fact that Google always knows where we are at the moment, surveillance by the technique that Orwell points out in "1984" may seem downright old-fashioned. It is overlooked how up-to-date the associated warning is. Cynically, the corona crisis in particular provides examples en masse of what technical monitoring is now able to do. And the authoritarian rulers around the world radically exploited the threat to life from the virus. Parliamentary co-determination, separation of powers and the rule of law have been restricted. China, in particular, made full use of its technical-totalitarian complex during the corona period and used its "social scoring" system to isolate people with corona infection, for example by preventing them from using trains, buses or trains or shopping. Third parties were able to identify where corona infected people were using their smartphones. A preliminary diagnosis could be made via the face recognition of the mobile phone and the temperature measurement of the finger on the touchscreen. The Chinese state exercised total surveillance and controlled the behavior of its citizens down to the last detail. China created the transparent subject through "social scoring". If one was already used to the fact that crossing roads was filmed and stored without permission, the extension of social control to people's health data is another dimension on the way to social manipulation. The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in a guest article in the Financial Times on March 20, 2020 that emotions are measurable biological phenomena like symptoms of illness. If a technique is used on mobile phones or in bracelets that can detect colds and infections, it is also able to detect laughter or rejection - and could use this knowledge to influence opinions. This marks the boundary between surveillance and manipulation. And it is precisely this border that Orwell made visible already in 1984. As bad as it is to live in a state in which the right to free speech has been taken away, it is worse to live in a country that manipulates people so that they no longer think of contradicting them at all, or their language is taken away from them. Here, too, recent history provides striking examples of exactly such attempts being made again and again, including in Germany. After the state elections in Thuringia in 2019, AfD officials could be watched for an evening as they claimed that their election success was a victory over hatred and incitement. Those who push and cross all the boundaries of what can be said complain that there are language bans in Germany. Those who lack decency and morality call themselves bourgeois. Those who completely transform democracy into a people's rule denounce it as a dictatorship and a facade democracy. We are experiencing an Orwellian newspeak par excellence in these times. A lie becomes truth and a lie becomes truth.
1984< re-reading had a peculiar effect on me. When I first read the book, while still at school, it was for me a metaphor for the totalitarian regimes of the darkest years of the twentieth century, Stalinism and Nazism. It demonstrated how people are broken and manipulated, how fascism works, how reality becomes a single manipulation. It is not known whether the war that Eurasia is waging against Oceania and East Asia in the novel is actually taking place, or whether the rocket attacks are not being blamed on their own governments to justify their violence, just as, for example, the Reichstag fire in Berlin in 1933 was set by the Nazis to imprison Communists and Social Democrats. And at the end of the day, a big victory is announced, as in the newsreel of the Nazis. It is also not known whether Emmanuel Goldstein, the opponent of the system, and the underground movement of the "brotherhood" even exist. Supposed friends turn out to be spies, the thought police not only track down betrayal, but implement the thought of betrayal in their heads, only to then knock them off. And in the end, the main characters who love each other, Winston Smith and Julia, also betray each other. There remains only shame and broken individuality. Nothing good remains. There is no hope left.
1984< used to be for me the literary intensification of what I knew from history books and news programs. It was an illustration of what the generation of my grandparents must have experienced under National Socialism and my uncles and aunts in the GDR. It was a convincing representation of how it must feel when the intimate sphere is illuminated. "His eyes were constantly watching you, his voice was constantly surrounding you. When sleeping and waking, at work and eating, at home and on the street, in the bath and in bed - there was no escape. Nothing belonged to yourself, except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.<<
But it had nothing to do with my reality at the time. And I also found all the campaigns of the last few years, which relied on "Orwellian surveillance", against data retention, data leaks, censuses, video surveillance, warning about Amazon's Alexa, etc., ultimately pulled by the hair. Reducing the Orwellian surveillance state to the screen reduces the novel to the listing of technical instruments. After all, we live in a free democracy, that has always been my firm conviction. And the trust in it has made the Orwell reading a mirror of the past for me. Insistent, yes. Basically, absolutely. After all, >1984< is one of the few novels in world literature, elements of which have made it into our linguistic common knowledge – "Big Brother is watching you". But to call this novel, moreover, present? Somehow this interpretation seemed to me a little exaggerated, a little too dystopian.
When I read it again, it was completely different for me. To be honest, I didn't think about 1933-1945 or the GDR or Soviet Russia at all. I was just thinking about our time, our immediate present. And this is due to Orwell's razor-sharp analysis of how language can be manipulated. How history can be reinterpreted. How society is deprived of a solid foundation of values, so that in the end only fear and total submission remain.
First of all, there is the main person Winston, who with her work in the "Ministry of Truth" herself contributes to rewriting history in such a way that it fits into the current prevailing doctrine. In a certain sense, politics always interprets the past in their favor. But Orwell shows that the past is not only interpreted in a certain way, but is actually changed. This is something completely different. It makes a difference whether you argue about what constitutes German history, or whether you claim that the "Wehrmacht" of the Nazis stands in a humanistic tradition, or the Holocaust has been a "bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history", as politicians of the AfD have done in recent years. In his dystopian novel, Orwell demonstrates this reinterpretation of the truth and, as a result, its loss. And then there is above all >Newspeak". A language that is purified, that has"eradicated harmful concepts" and thus is no longer just propaganda, but creates its own reality, one in which there is no longer any truth, but only views on truth, where then "ignorance" is "strength", "war" >>peace", "freedom" is "slavery". Thus, "doublethink" is formed, a logic according to which, of two contradictory beliefs, both are correct. Today this is called "alternative facts" or "fake news". But the mechanism is the same. The truth as the basis of a shared and interpreted reality is destroyed. Newspeak and doublethink, both are celebrating happy premieres today - both are needed as a political means. The manipulation through lies and fake quotes, the dissection of public space into loud groups and groups, often supported by social media. "The party said that one should not trust one's eyes and ears. That was their decisive, ultimate commandment," it says in 1984. And this is exactly how populists act worldwide. Perhaps the most radical is the US president, who claimed, for example, that pictures of his inauguration, in which it can be seen that significantly fewer people were present than with Barack Obama, were manipulated by the media. What does not correspond to his worldview cannot be true and is "fake news" or in German Pegida jargon "lying press".
In 1984," it is said, after the images of evidence were manipulated: "You believed that you had seen irrefutable evidence that their confessions were false. There was a photo that caused hallucinations in you. You even believed that you had it in your hand.«
...
How i got the forewood:
1: I went to https://www.amazon.de/1984-Roman-George-Orwell/dp/3423282320
2: i viewed the preview
3: i took a snapshot of all the forewood pages.
4: i ran each image through https://www.prepostseo.com/image-to-text
5: i ran the german text through https://translate.yandex.com/ German to english:
6: then i spaced it out like the foreword showed:
Views on truth
Foreword by Robert Habeck
George Orwell is the analyst of totalitarianism. Until 1989 and the end of real socialism, his novels "1984< and >Farm of Animals< remained perhaps the most current books of their time. With the collapse of the Soviet Republic and the conjured victory of global capitalist liberalism, they seemed to have become historical. But today, thirty years later, they are relevant again, perhaps more relevant than ever. Not only are authoritarian regimes gaining popularity on a global scale, but also states that may believe that they are the former torchbearers of freedom and democracy are being shaken by authoritarian populism. In this respect, we are not just experiencing a new division of the world into liberal and illiberal democracies, authoritarian rule against a liberal, liberal order. We are witnessing how the poison of totalitarian thinking is also seeping into the foundation of democracy and threatening to hollow it out from within. New alliances are emerging between governments with very different ideological orientations, all of which, however, are united by a rejection of civil liberties, freedom of the press and the separation of powers. For all those who want to understand the instruments of the authoritarian, the totalitarian, rereading George Orwell is a must.
This development and system competition between authoritarian and liberal states is threatening, because the former, unlike in the past, may also have an economic advantage due to the mass tapping of data. While it was considered clear in the analogue world that competition, freedom and creativity and a market economy are superior to planned economies, managed processes, oligopolies and cartels at least in the long term, because they produce knowledge and innovations more efficiently and faster, this is far from certain in the digital economy. China, for example, with its large, centrally collected data on behaviors, clinical pictures, personal preferences, knows much more about society than the European states. The state has a huge information advantage over decentralized economic systems. Especially when artificial intelligence comes into play and evaluates the amount of data. For democracy and civil rights, this state control is unacceptable. However, the power advantage over a free society that does not spy on and exploit the private lives of its citizens is immense. Whether or not the liberal democracies will survive this new system confrontation depends very much on the question of whether they will succeed in proving themselves capable of acting in the face of the great challenges of our time.
For today's generations, who voluntarily share their most private affairs on the Internet and who are used to the fact that Google always knows where we are at the moment, surveillance by the technique that Orwell points out in "1984" may seem downright old-fashioned. It is overlooked how up-to-date the associated warning is. Cynically, the corona crisis in particular provides examples en masse of what technical monitoring is now able to do. And the authoritarian rulers around the world radically exploited the threat to life from the virus. Parliamentary co-determination, separation of powers and the rule of law have been restricted. China, in particular, made full use of its technical-totalitarian complex during the corona period and used its "social scoring" system to isolate people with corona infection, for example by preventing them from using trains, buses or trains or shopping. Third parties were able to identify where corona infected people were using their smartphones. A preliminary diagnosis could be made via the face recognition of the mobile phone and the temperature measurement of the finger on the touchscreen. The Chinese state exercised total surveillance and controlled the behavior of its citizens down to the last detail. China created the transparent subject through "social scoring". If one was already used to the fact that crossing roads was filmed and stored without permission, the extension of social control to people's health data is another dimension on the way to social manipulation. The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in a guest article in the Financial Times on March 20, 2020 that emotions are measurable biological phenomena like symptoms of illness. If a technique is used on mobile phones or in bracelets that can detect colds and infections, it is also able to detect laughter or rejection - and could use this knowledge to influence opinions. This marks the boundary between surveillance and manipulation. And it is precisely this border that Orwell made visible already in 1984. As bad as it is to live in a state in which the right to free speech has been taken away, it is worse to live in a country that manipulates people so that they no longer think of contradicting them at all, or their language is taken away from them. Here, too, recent history provides striking examples of exactly such attempts being made again and again, including in Germany. After the state elections in Thuringia in 2019, AfD officials could be watched for an evening as they claimed that their election success was a victory over hatred and incitement. Those who push and cross all the boundaries of what can be said complain that there are language bans in Germany. Those who lack decency and morality call themselves bourgeois. Those who completely transform democracy into a people's rule denounce it as a dictatorship and a facade democracy. We are experiencing an Orwellian newspeak par excellence in these times. A lie becomes truth and a lie becomes truth.
1984< re-reading had a peculiar effect on me. When I first read the book, while still at school, it was for me a metaphor for the totalitarian regimes of the darkest years of the twentieth century, Stalinism and Nazism. It demonstrated how people are broken and manipulated, how fascism works, how reality becomes a single manipulation. It is not known whether the war that Eurasia is waging against Oceania and East Asia in the novel is actually taking place, or whether the rocket attacks are not being blamed on their own governments to justify their violence, just as, for example, the Reichstag fire in Berlin in 1933 was set by the Nazis to imprison Communists and Social Democrats. And at the end of the day, a big victory is announced, as in the newsreel of the Nazis. It is also not known whether Emmanuel Goldstein, the opponent of the system, and the underground movement of the "brotherhood" even exist. Supposed friends turn out to be spies, the thought police not only track down betrayal, but implement the thought of betrayal in their heads, only to then knock them off. And in the end, the main characters who love each other, Winston Smith and Julia, also betray each other. There remains only shame and broken individuality. Nothing good remains. There is no hope left.
1984< used to be for me the literary intensification of what I knew from history books and news programs. It was an illustration of what the generation of my grandparents must have experienced under National Socialism and my uncles and aunts in the GDR. It was a convincing representation of how it must feel when the intimate sphere is illuminated. "His eyes were constantly watching you, his voice was constantly surrounding you. When sleeping and waking, at work and eating, at home and on the street, in the bath and in bed - there was no escape. Nothing belonged to yourself, except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.<<
But it had nothing to do with my reality at the time. And I also found all the campaigns of the last few years, which relied on "Orwellian surveillance", against data retention, data leaks, censuses, video surveillance, warning about Amazon's Alexa, etc., ultimately pulled by the hair. Reducing the Orwellian surveillance state to the screen reduces the novel to the listing of technical instruments. After all, we live in a free democracy, that has always been my firm conviction. And the trust in it has made the Orwell reading a mirror of the past for me. Insistent, yes. Basically, absolutely. After all, >1984< is one of the few novels in world literature, elements of which have made it into our linguistic common knowledge – "Big Brother is watching you". But to call this novel, moreover, present? Somehow this interpretation seemed to me a little exaggerated, a little too dystopian.
When I read it again, it was completely different for me. To be honest, I didn't think about 1933-1945 or the GDR or Soviet Russia at all. I was just thinking about our time, our immediate present. And this is due to Orwell's razor-sharp analysis of how language can be manipulated. How history can be reinterpreted. How society is deprived of a solid foundation of values, so that in the end only fear and total submission remain.
First of all, there is the main person Winston, who with her work in the "Ministry of Truth" herself contributes to rewriting history in such a way that it fits into the current prevailing doctrine. In a certain sense, politics always interprets the past in their favor. But Orwell shows that the past is not only interpreted in a certain way, but is actually changed. This is something completely different. It makes a difference whether you argue about what constitutes German history, or whether you claim that the "Wehrmacht" of the Nazis stands in a humanistic tradition, or the Holocaust has been a "bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history", as politicians of the AfD have done in recent years. In his dystopian novel, Orwell demonstrates this reinterpretation of the truth and, as a result, its loss. And then there is above all >Newspeak". A language that is purified, that has"eradicated harmful concepts" and thus is no longer just propaganda, but creates its own reality, one in which there is no longer any truth, but only views on truth, where then "ignorance" is "strength", "war" >>peace", "freedom" is "slavery". Thus, "doublethink" is formed, a logic according to which, of two contradictory beliefs, both are correct. Today this is called "alternative facts" or "fake news". But the mechanism is the same. The truth as the basis of a shared and interpreted reality is destroyed. Newspeak and doublethink, both are celebrating happy premieres today - both are needed as a political means. The manipulation through lies and fake quotes, the dissection of public space into loud groups and groups, often supported by social media. "The party said that one should not trust one's eyes and ears. That was their decisive, ultimate commandment," it says in 1984. And this is exactly how populists act worldwide. Perhaps the most radical is the US president, who claimed, for example, that pictures of his inauguration, in which it can be seen that significantly fewer people were present than with Barack Obama, were manipulated by the media. What does not correspond to his worldview cannot be true and is "fake news" or in German Pegida jargon "lying press".
In 1984," it is said, after the images of evidence were manipulated: "You believed that you had seen irrefutable evidence that their confessions were false. There was a photo that caused hallucinations in you. You even believed that you had it in your hand.«
...