George Orwell published 1984 sixty-five years ago. He did us all a great public service. Michael Harris writes:
After all, it was Orwell who lifted the curtain on how the end of free thought was creeping across western democracies. In the end, stripped of the very language needed to form ideas, future citizens would be shuddering under a government colossus whose most efficient agency was the Thought Police.
The central premise of Orwell’s horror-scape dystopia, 1984, is that the facts are mutable.
Simple really: if there are no objective facts, there is no knowledge. That leaves it to a vastly empowered government to impose whatever ‘facts’ are required — and then to change them in the bat of an eye if necessary. Think of Stephen Harper on income trusts. Only the masters of Doublespeak can deny a flip-flop.
In Stephen Harper's world, facts are the enemy -- unless they are what you say they are:
In Harperland, there is no weed as noxious as independent facts. If possible, they are pulled up by the roots. Science is just another corporate enabler as far as the PM is concerned; if it’s not that, then it’s a potentially dangerous source of independent public information.
Last week, David Schindler once again tried to lay out some immutable facts about the tar sands:
After all, when someone sends you a picture of tumours, lesions and spinal deformities, the probability is that they are seriously unhappy about something.
When they include a letter pointing out that fish downriver from the tar sands development in Alberta are exhibiting mutations very similar to those of deformed marine life in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico after the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters, they are sounding an alarm.
And when that same person advises you that in order to understand the impact of petroleum pollution on freshwater and the aquatic life it supports, you must ditch your plans to close the ELA, they are offering a very rare thing — a second chance to get it right.
Unfortunately, the only second chance the prime minister believes in is his own re-election. Facts -- the kind the ELA uncovered, and which resulted in the Acid Rain Treaty -- must be denied, then sent down the memory hole. Ignorance is Strength.