In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

George orwell

The Ministry of Truth is where the main character of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, works.  The Ministry of Truth is involved with news, entertainment and the fine arts. Its purpose is to rewrite history and change the facts to fit party doctrine, for propaganda effect. For example, if Big Brother makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, the employees of the Ministry of Truth go back and rewrite history so that any prediction Big Brother previously made is accurate.  There is no record kept of the previous history as it is destroyed as soon as history has been rewritten.

After this weeks revelation that Australian Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet were editing Wikipedia articles to remove details that might be damaging to the Government, the Ministry of Truth doesn’t sound so far fetched after all.  Of course I am not surprised, are you?

IF YOU believe the Premier's Department version of history, an outburst Morris Iemma had at a media conference last year - calling the then chief executive of Sydney's Cross City Tunnel a "f---wit" - never happened.  The online encyclopaedia's entry on Mr Iemma included details of last year's profanity-laden remarks, which he made not knowing his microphone was switched on. But on September 12 last year someone using a computer in the NSW Premier's Department - which includes Mr Iemma's office and those of his cabinet ministers - removed all traces of the outburst from Wikipedia.

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The most embarrassing edit traced to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) is an act of vandalism on a martial-arts related entry, in which the user wrote, “Poo bum dicky wee wee” on the page in an apparent test. (See it here.)

In June this year a user linked to the PMC removed a description of Peter Costello as “Captain Smirk”.

You can see the full catalogue of changes made by the PMC department here

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Of course the Australian Government isn’t alone when it comes to changing Wikipedia entries.

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.  

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

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Wikipedia Scanner outs Vatican, CIA

It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and "massaged" entries on several Catholic Saints.

Other, more innocuous, changes include tweaks to celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.

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However unlike The Ministry of Truth in the George Orwell novel and to Wikipedia’s credit, when changes are made to Wikipedia the changes can be traced and the original article is not lost after a change has been made. 

You cannot actually change anything in Wikipedia...   …you can only add to it. Wikipedia is a database with an eternal memory. An article you read today is just the current draft; every time it is changed, we keep both the new version and a copy of the old version. This allows us to compare different versions, or restore older ones as needed. As a reader, you can even cite the specific copy of an article you are looking at. Just link to the article using the "Permanent link" at the bottom of the left menu, and your link will point to a page whose contents will never change.

When you bring up a page at Wikipedia you will notice a “History” tab at the top of the entry and if you click on this tab you will be able to see all of the editing that has occurred to the article.  Plus now with Wikiscanner if the edit was made anonymously you can trace where the change came from.

 
An important point in Wikipedia’s own words:
 

We do not expect you to trust us.

 It is in the nature of an ever-changing work like Wikipedia that, while some articles are of the highest quality of scholarship, others are admittedly complete rubbish. We are fully aware of this. We work hard to keep the ratio of the greatest to the worst as high as possible, of course, and to find helpful ways to tell you what state an article is currently in. Even at its best, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a primary source, with all the limitations it entails. We ask you not to condemn Wikipedia, but to use it with an informed understanding of what it represents. Also, as some articles may contain errors, please do not use Wikipedia to make important decisions.

I thought that this article was nicely written and please note it is a work of satire:

President tries to calm investors by making edits on Wikipedia

By Philip Maddocks

GateHouse News Service

Fri Aug 24, 2007

Natick -

Seeking to calm nervous investors, President Bush announced on Thursday that he had edited the entry on Wikipedia on subprime mortgages to change all mentions of "credit crisis" to "credit liquidity."

"The fundamentals of the U.S. economy are strong," the president explained during a break between vacations and Wikipedia entries. "The fundamental question is, 'Is there enough liquidity in our system? And I think we have answered that emphatically with my entry on Wikipedia.’"

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson also tried to strike a reassuring tone in his own entry on Wikipedia, editing out all references to foreclosures and late payments, especially among people with spotty credit histories.

"We're really focused on the subprime market, and we're really focused on the homeowners -- mortgage holders -- who are in danger of losing their homes," Paulson said. The administration "is thinking through options on Wikipedia to address that segment of the market," he added.

White House spokesman Tony Snow pointed out the White House isn’t the first powerful entity to edit information on Wikipedia.

Last year, someone at PepsiCo deleted several paragraphs of the Pepsi entry that focused on its detrimental health effects. In 2005, someone using a computer at Diebold deleted paragraphs that criticized the company's electronic voting machines.

That same year, someone inside Wal-Mart Stores changed an entry about employee compensation.

Snow said the White House was simply "following the lead of some of the most successful business minds in the country when it came to crisis management."

A spokesman for the Department of Defense, which is organizing the White House’s rewrite effort, said that although the revisions have come from the oval office, and some 80,000 government computers are being employed for the all-out editing blitz, "this historical change is really coming from the American public because this is what they want to hear."

"We are here to do the people’s work and that’s just what we are doing," noted the spokesman.

Paulson urged patience among Wikipedia readers, saying it was going to take the government team some time to get all the editing revisions right as they reassess their appetite for risk in trying to manipulate the financial markets.

'I think what the American people need to understand is these things take a while to play out."

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, meanwhile, urged Wikipedia to allow the White House use of "all its available tools" so the credit crisis and home mortgage mess don't undermine the national economy.

Dodd said he welcomed the White House's steps thus far to deal with the credit problems. In addition to injecting billions of edits into the Wikipedia system, the White House last week added an entry that sliced the Fed’s discount rate -- the rate it charges banks for direct loans -- to negative 3.75 percent, meaning that the Fed will now be paying banks to borrow money.

"We’re not sure where the money is going to come from. We’ll just let Wikipedia sort that one out," Paulson said.

White House officials also have been urging banks to borrow from the Fed's so-called Wikipedia window, trying to remove a stigma that it is a place for banks to turn to only in times of emergency or last resort.

Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, participated in a conference call last Friday with major investment banking firms. He suggested use of the Wikipedia window would be viewed as a sign of strength.

After a five-year boom, the housing market turned to bust last year. The combination of higher interest rates and weaker home values have put many homeowners, especially those with higher-risk subprime mortgages, in financial hardship. Mounting defaults have forced some lenders out of business. Credit problems have spread to other borrowers. Nervous lenders have tightened standards, making it harder for individuals and companies to obtain credit -- the lifeblood of the economy.

But Paulson said he is confident that in Wikipedia the government has found a new tool that is not subject to the whims of the marketplace, but only those of the Web site’s many contributors.

"This is something that, with a little bit of work and a lot of whimsical entries, we should be able to manage into a soft literary landing," said the treasury secretary.

Meanwhile the Pentagon said it had recovered almost $999,000 of taxpayer money by editing an entry on Wikipedia to say that it had paid $1, and not nearly $1 million, for two metal washers worth 34 cents from the plumbing and electrical firm C&D Distributors.

"This isn’t the perfect way of doing business," said a Pentagon spokesman, "but you go to economic war with the army you have."

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“Big Brother – We are watching YOU!”

“In a way, the world-view of the party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.” George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four

Sex sex - crime crime

Can I take this for granted with your eyes over me?
In this place this wintery home
I know there's always someone in.

Sex crime
sex crime - 1984
1984.

And so I face the wall
turn my back against it all.
How I wish I'd been unborn wish I was unliving here.

Sex crime
sex crime - 1984
1984.

I'll pull the bricks down one by one.
Leave a big hole in the wall just where you are looking in.

Sex crime
sex crime - 1984
1984.

The Eurythmics and Annie Lennox were my all time favourite music group while growing up and I still enjoy both the old Eurythmics music and the songs performed by Annie Lennox as a solo singer.  The song 1984 was released in conjunction with the movie "George Orwell 1984" and I am sure that not many people actually realise the connection between the two.  I have read comments on YouTube in relation to this song (another listing which didn't allow embedding) and it is obvious that many have not made the connection at all.  I saw this as a  protest song.
 

We The People - Time Magazine

We should never give away our civil rights, as once they are gone it is very difficult to have them restored.

George Orwell 1984 Part 1. See YouTube for next parts of this movie.

Unfortunately and how ironic is this, you will not be able to see parts 6, 8 and 9.  Why you ask?
Simple answer really, they were removed by YouTube due to censorship, "apparently" those parts "offended" people.

I am not sure which people were offended. 
However I know I am offended by the fact that they were removed.
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I read Nineteen Eighty-Four , "Brave New World" and "On The Beach" as part of the subject of English in my last year of high school in 1983 and each of these novels left an indelible imprint in my mind. These novels have definitely had an impact on my way of thinking and my fears and hopes for the future of our world.  I cannot recall any of the other novels studied during my years at High School, but these books I shall never forget, that is the impact that they have had on me.  May these novels never come to fruition.  The worrisome thing is however, it appears that there are some aspects of 1984 that have already been implemented or at least are being considered.
.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

On the Beach. Neville Shute

In George Orwell's futuristic novel published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four posits a world wherein the government is totalitarian in word and deed. All mass communications media are subordinate to the government's interpretation of reality. Television, as technology and as communicated content, is the principal means of thought control, buttressed by the press and publishing. Through such, the population — the ruling Party, its government employees, and the proletariat — are controlled through perpetual war and all of its concomitant material and intellectual shortages. According to the government, this life must be endured for the collective good, until the war ends; the war ends when the government says so.

The citizens have no right to a personal life or to personal thought. Leisure and other activities are controlled through a system of strict mores. Sexual pleasure is discouraged; sex is retained only for the purpose of procreation, although artificial insemination (ARTSEM) is more encouraged.

The mysterious head of government is the omniscient, omnipotent, beloved Big Brother, or "B.B.", usually displayed on posters with the slogan "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU" and this phrase refers to invasive surveillance.  It is never made clear whether Big Brother is an actual person or whether he is a fictitious leader created as a focus for the love of the Party. 

The three slogans of the Party, on display everywhere, are:

    * WAR IS PEACE
    * FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
    * IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Each of these is of course either contradictory or the opposite of what is normally believed, and in 1984, the world is in a state of constant war, no one is free, and everyone is ignorant.

The Party can rewrite history with impunity, for "The Party is never wrong." The ultimate aim of the Party is to gain and retain full power over all the people.  The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

DoubleThink: The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The Perpetual War: The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is built around a never-ending war involving the book's three superstates, with two allied powers fighting against the third. Each superstate is so strong it cannot be defeated even when faced with the combined forces of the other two powers. The allied states occasionally split with each other and new alliances are formed. Each time this happens, history is rewritten to convince the people that the new alliances were always there, using the principles of doublethink. The war itself never takes place in the territories of the three powers; the actual fighting is conducted in the disputed zone.

The war is unwinnable, and that its only purpose is to use up human labor and the fruits of human labour so that each superstate's economy cannot support an equal (and high) standard of living for every citizen.

Living standards for the population are generally very low — everything is in short supply and those goods available are of very poor quality. The Party claims that this is due to the immense sacrifices that must be made for the war effort. They are partially correct, since the point of continuous warfare is to be rid of the surplus of industrial production to prevent the rise of the standard of living and make possible the economic repression of people.  The Inner Party, at the top level of society, enjoys the highest standard of living.

It is not clear to what extent Orwell believed his work was prophetic.

His character O'Brien described his view of the future of the world:  "There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face …for ever."

The above dialogue was taken from: Nineteen Eighty-Four

In the shadow of Big Brother

Avril Moore
The Age Monday April 23, 2007

The novel 1984 resonates long after the year has passed.

IT HAS been exactly 30 years since I studied George Orwell's political satire 1984 for my year 12 certificate. In 1976, I was mesmerised but not wholly convinced by the idea that government control, when pushed to its limits, could produce a society such as Winston's Oceania.

And yet the year in question, although long since passed, remains in our lexicon, no longer as an abstract idea but as a perpetual warning on how effortlessly democracy can transform into autocracy if our vigilance is not maintained……………………………..

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Due to the novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" no longer being under copyright it is legally available as a free download at this address: http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/index.html