DoubleThink

"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, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself-----that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."

-1984 George Orwell

We see examples of DoubleThink every day.

Homeland Security and the Patriot Act are two that instantly come to mind.

The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say.

Arrests without charges, incarceration without sentences, interrogations without representation, wiretaps without warrants and the indiscriminate evaluation of credit reports, library records and other personal information about private citizens has nothing to do with patriotism or our personal security. In fact, it's just the opposite... unless you happen to be a terrorist, and everyone is a terrorist if they use The Patriot Act on you.

And you thought "1984" was fiction. Man, it was just a primer.

I wonder if Orwell knew something and was trying to warn us or if the powers that be read his book and got some ideas.