Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Don't Mess with Firefly!

5 comments:

STAG said...

Quote 1: "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU" Part 1, Chapter 1, pg. 3

Quote 2: "WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." Part 1, Chapter 1, pg. 6

Quote 3: "A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic." Part 1, Chapter 1, pg. 16

Quote 4: "one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended." Part 1, Chapter 2, pg. 23

Quote 5: "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." Part 1, Chapter 2, pg. 27

Quote 6: "The past was dead, the future was unimaginable." Part 1, Chapter 2, pg. 28

Quote 7: "With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm." Part 1, Chapter 3, pg. 33

Quote 8: "'Who controls the past', ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" Part 1, Chapter 3, pg. 37

Quote 9: "Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar." Part 1, Chapter 4, pg. 50

Quote 10: "Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom." Part 1, Chapter 6, pg. 64

Quote 11: "She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her." Part 1, Chapter 6, pg. 67

STAG said...

Your homework today, people, is to take those quotes from George Orwell's 1984 and find sound bites from American politics which match.

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/11/140367706/homeland-security-remains-an-agency-in-progress

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/17/anti-latino-hate-crimes-rise-immigration_n_1015668.html

http://www.chomsky.info/books/fateful01.htm

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/03/22/war-is-peace-a-reply/

This should just be a good start.

I would also suggest "Lords of War", a movie about arms dealing to see an example of the double dealing and double think which goes on.

Cerulean Bill said...

Are you SURE you're just some backwoods iron-bending hockey fan?

STAG said...

Foot stompin, Scotch drinkin, Winnipeg boy.

Cerulean Bill said...

Well, I got two out of three. Kind of.