And authoritarian American psychologists are eager to label anyone “taking a cynical stance toward politics, mistrusting authority, endorsing democratic practices, … and displaying an inquisitive, imaginative outlook” as worthy of a trip to the insane asylum. *** The [British] Government has established a shadowy new national anti-terrorist unit to protect VIPs, with the power to detain suspects […]

Now someone has noticed this anomaly, which means that working-class people are still living in posh areas of our cities. It’s a scandal, as a headline in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph pointed out: “No one has a right to live in Kensington at taxpayers’ expense.” A right-wing think-tank has tackled this injustice head-on with a report […]

The result of “austerity” and “adjustment” is a massive program of social genocide. If you want to see the effects of austerity and adjustment, look to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where the Western nations, banks, corporations, and international financial institutions – like the World Bank and IMF – have imposed neoliberalism, austerity, and adjustment […]

The effects of austerity are to increase poverty, unemployment, and misery. People are fired from the public sector, welfare and social benefits are reduced or lost, retirement ages are increased to keep people in the work force and off the pension system, which is also cut. Cuts to health care and education take a social […]

What happens to all those new security cameras and other surveillance technologies that were installed for the Games? Privacy experts fret that, as with Athens, Beijing and Vancouver, the Olympics means a steep ratcheting up of security that never really gets ratcheted down. “It would be a tragedy if the most visible legacy of the […]

Four buildings towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. They were startingly different from any other objects in sight. They were enormous pyramidical sructures of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of VICTORY MANSIONS you […]

The British Government deliberately overplayed the threat of a dissident IRA attack on London ahead of the Olympics, according to a leading security source. The source, on the frontline of counter-terrorism for over 30 years, told The Irish Post that British intelligence services know dissident Republicans are incapable of mounting attacks on mainland Britain, but […]

Fresh consideration is to be given to the introduction of airport-style mass security screening at mainline rail stations and across London’s tube network. The Home Office has launched a search for new and emerging technologies that are capable of rapidly screening huge numbers of passengers and which could be used in major train and tube […]

If there were a global George Orwell Award for the vastest city police surveillance apparatus, New York City, where I live and work, would win this tracking and databasing prize. In “Nowhere to hide from NYPD’s new computer system” (Rocco Parascandola and Tina Moore, nydailynews.com, Aug. 8), I discovered that I am subject to the […]

Download a PDF of the book for free here > George Orwell – 1984 (1949) (pdf document)  1984 – Book Summary The novel, published in 1949, takes place in 1984 and presents an imaginary future where a totalitarian state controls every aspect of life, even people’s thoughts. The state is called Oceania and is ruled by […]