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Gauge -> Revisionist History? (2/23/2006 10:40:08 PM)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/politics/21reclassify.html
Perhaps it is my own rampant paranoia or maybe I am merely fueled by the fact that I have recently finished George Orwell's 1984 but this article scared the hell out of me. It would seem that the US government is now in the process of reclassifying secret documents that have already been released for the consumption of the general public. With my understanding of what is happening, after 25 years the government declassifies certain top secret documents that are deemed to not contain anything that could compromise national security. Historians and others have seen these documents and in some instances published them. Now the government is going back and reclassifying certain documents.
The most disturbing part of this is that what was once freely available is now not available. What got my attention was this:
quote:
Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.
Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.
One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.
In the book 1984 Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth. His job there was to change history to fit the government's current agenda. He did this by rewriting articles and other publications. History became whatever the government wanted it to be.
I am being brief in my description of 1984 but I think I hit the important highlights at least as I see it to pertain to this news article. With the "Patriot Act" Big Brother can be watching you. With the recent government attempts to get Internet search records from Google, even what we do in the privacy of our own home is subject to being monitored. I really do not think that I am being paranoid. If you put the recent headlines about wiretaps and this headline and the Google headlines the picture that I am beginning to see is indeed a frightening one. Has the US government gotten to the point of being far to invasive into our private lives? Are they using 9-11-2001 as a launching point for a government not by the people and for the people but for their own power and control? Is it possible that we are seeing the beginning of the end of freedoms and civil liberties as we know them right now? Are the people of the US ready to allow this sort of thing to happen not because we want it to, but because we are powerless to change it?
One final thought and then I will leave you with something more to ponder. I am not calling for a revolution but, perhaps, a reevaluation of how our government operates. Do we need to haul in the reigns of the governing bodies and let them know who they are supposed to be working for? A few years ago a group of people got together and put some thoughts on paper... I leave you with their thoughts:
quote:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
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