{"id":207041,"date":"2022-03-14T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T12:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=207041"},"modified":"2022-03-14T05:32:29","modified_gmt":"2022-03-14T05:32:29","slug":"orwell-was-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/03\/orwell-was-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Orwell Was Right"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From free speech to “spheres of influence” to our passion for endless war, we’ve become the doublethinkers 1984 predicted.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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13 Mar 2022 – <\/em>This weekend I re-read 1984<\/em>, a book I tend to reach for when I get Defcon-1 depressed about the state of the world. Deep in the novel, Winston ponders the intricacies of\u00a0doublethink<\/em>:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them\u2026 To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again\u2026 that was the ultimate subtlety.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the last weeks, Russia took an already exacting speech environment to new extremes. A law was passed\u00a0that would impose 15-year prison sentences<\/a>\u00a0for anyone spreading \u201cfake news\u201d about the Ukraine invasion; access was cut to\u00a0Facebook<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Twitter<\/a>; stations\u00a0like\u00a0<\/a>Echo Moskvi<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/a>TV Rain<\/a><\/em>\u00a0as well as\u00a0BBC Russia, Radio Liberty, the\u00a0<\/a>New Times<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0<\/a>Deutsche Welle<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0<\/a>Doxa,\u00a0<\/a><\/em>and Latvia-based Meduza<\/a>\u00a0were effectively shut down; Wikipedia was\u00a0threatened with a block<\/a>\u00a0over its invasion page; and national authorities have appeared to step in to\u00a0prevent coverage of soldiers killed in the war<\/a>, requiring local outlets to use terms like \u201cspecial operation\u201d instead. The latter development is connected to the state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, issuing a\u00a0remarkably desperate dictum<\/a>\u00a0requiring news outlets to \u201cuse information and data received by them only from official Russian sources.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russia also appears in the middle of a general crackdown on local media, not so much because those outlets are dissenting, but because they\u2019re more likely to provide indirect evidence of war failures or the effect of sanctions. The desperation to control news has grown to the point where Russian diplomats in foreign countries are pressuring state outlets in countries like Iran to\u00a0stop using the term \u201cwar<\/a>\u201d to describe what\u2019s going on in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

On the flip side, a slew of actions have been taken to crack down on \u201cfake news\u201d and \u201cmisinformation\u201d in the West. The big one was the European Union\u00a0banning<\/a>\u00a0RT and Sputnik:<\/p>\n

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Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, we\u2019re blocking YouTube channels connected to RT and Sputnik across Europe, effective immediately. It\u2019ll take time for our systems to fully ramp up. Our teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to take swift action.<\/p>\n

— Google Europe (@googleeurope) March 1, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n