How Did 6 Million Jews Die?

In 1993, Ernst Zundel wrote a pamphlet entitled: "Did 6 Million Jews Really Die?" For his pamphlet, the Canadian government deported the German-born national after allegedly holding him for months incommunicado, including time in isolation. He was allegedly denied access to a lawyer or to any exculpatory evidence for national security reasons.

His crime: denying that the Nazi Holocaust took place.

In many countries, including Canada, it is a crime to deny the "reality" of the Nazi Holocaust. After Zundel returned to Germany, charges were laid against him in Mannheim, where he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Since he was 65 years old at the time of his conviction, it is possible that he will die in prison, and for what? Because he didn't think that Hitler tried to kill all the Jews?

The Canadian governments cited anti-Semitism and Neo-Nazi sympathies in its decision to deport Zundel, but this writer finds it disturbing that a man should be held for months incommunicado without having charges laid against him for merely disagreeing with the consensus about the Nazi Holocaust. Are we so afraid that Zundel and other muddle-headed thinkers of his ilk might actually be right about the Holocaust? If we are that afraid, then what does that say about us?

I will say that I, too, am a revisionist when it comes to the Holocaust. It isn't because I don't believe that the Holocaust took place, but because I believe that each historian is, by the nature of his or her profession, a revisionist. The historian examines accepted "facts," questions those that need to be questioned, tosses out those that he finds to be incorrect, but — most importantly — affirms those that are true to be true.

The number one criterion of the historian should not be "political correctness" or any preconceived bias, but the evidence at hand. Scholarship must never allow itself to be at the mercy of prevailing trends but must rise above these trends for the sake of truth and clarity. The moment that scholars allow themselves to be the propagandists for any idea, however noble, then they have threatened the credibility of their entire profession. This is nothing less than a serious ethical breach, for we must tell the truth or say nothing at all.

I do not wish to debate the merits of Zundel's silly pamphlet, because the number of people who died in the Nazi Holocaust doesn't matter. If even one person was murdered by the Nazis for any reason — let alone for being Jewish — that in itself constitutes a crime against humanity. In all civilized countries, it is a crime to commit murder. It was even a crime to commit murder in Nazi Germany. Even in Berlin, circa 1933, you couldn't just walk up to your neighbour and shoot him. That would have resulted in charges being laid against you for murder.

When somebody publishes something like "Did 6 Million Jews Really Die?", it gives the real Holocaust scholars the occasion to refute the "revisionists" like Zundel and solidify their position. This writer would like to know not whether 6 million Jews really died, but how they died. This is important, because we owe it to the dead to learn as much about the Holocaust as we can. As well, it does not serve scholarship to maintain that 6 million Jews died at Auschwitz if only 1.5 million "at most" died there, as Zundel claims in his pamphlet.

But I would like to see Holocaust "revisionists" like Zundel dispute these facts:

— The Nazis did away with parliamentary democracy and imposed a one-man dictatorship under Hitler.

— The Nazis did away with habeas corpus and the right to a fair trial.

— The Nazis suppressed civil liberties like freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom of religion guaranteed under the constitution of the Weimar Republic, under which Hitler was elected chancellor.

— The Nazis did away with equal protection under the law and favoured Germans over all other races in the Third Reich, especially Jews.

— The Nazis punished political dissent by detaining people in concentration camps like the ones at Dachau and Buchenwald in Germany even before World War II.

— The Nazis practised collective reprisals against entire communities, like Lidice in Czechoslovakia, for example, for crimes that only one or a few persons may have committed.

— The Nazis forcibly segregated Jews in ghettoes like the ones in Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz, where thousands died of starvation, disease and exposure to the elements.

— The Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws that made German Jews non-persons in their own country.

— The death camps like the one at Auschwitz actually existed.

This writer is willing to concede that far less than 6 million Jews may have died in concentration camps. This is because people starved to death in ghettoes and were shot by SS Einsatzgruppen, or "special detachments." Jews were also murdered in camps in Romania, which was an ally of Nazi Germany. As well, Jews were executed in the commission of crimes like smuggling; some Jews were, in fact, bandits and thieves — racketeers who took advantage of the extreme situation brought about by the war.

The Nazis are not to be condemned because they punished crimes like rape, looting and murder. Rather, they are to be condemned for the way they punished these crimes. It is beyond dispute that the Nazis were a savage and barbarous lot. Hitler himself ordered that 100 civilians be executed for the death of a single German soldier in Nazi-occupied Europe. This was calculated not to bring about peace, order and good government, but to instill terror in the peoples that they ruled. The Nazis were terrorists.

While Leon Uris' Mila 18 is a work of fiction, the numbers of people who died in the Warsaw Ghetto in the autumn and winter of 1941 increased exponentially each month between September and March of that year, according to a breakdown of his statistics. From an estimated 600,000 people in the summer of 1941, there was a mere 54,000 people left in the Warsaw Ghetto when the Jewish Fighters' Organization revolted in the spring of 1944. After putting down the insurrection there, SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop stated in his report to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler that "the Warsaw Ghetto is no more." If Stroop didn't exterminate the inhabitants there, then what happened to them? They were abducted by aliens?

According to William Shirer in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, SS Colonel Otto Ohlendorf testified at his trial in 1954 that his unit, Einsatzgruppe D, executed over 100,000 Jews in the Ukraine. If the other three Einsatzgruppen killed at least that many apiece, then the Einsatzgruppen killed at least 400,000 people all together. At least 10 per cent of all Jews who died in the Holocaust died in the ghettoes of cities like Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz, as well as those in Riga, Vilna and Minsk. According to A.A . Anatoli's Babi Yar, one of the Einsatzgruppen wiped Kiev's Jewish population in just one day. That's about 30,000 people, according to Anatoli's figures.

We know from the KGB files that were made public in 1988 that the Soviets deliberately over-estimated the numbers of people killed at Auschwitz by 1 million in order to obscure the fact that the victims were mostly Jews. The Soviets had reasons of their own for denying the role of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust. We know that the Soviets persecuted Soviet Jews under Stalin in the 1920s, suppressing all Yiddish newspapers and banning the use of the Yiddish language. We know now that the Soviets massacred thousands of Polish prisoners-of-war at places like the Katyn forest. What's more, we know that the Soviets did not follow the Geneva Convention very strictly, vis-à-vis Polish, and later, German prisoners-of-war. They didn't repatriate the German soldiers that surrendered at Stalingrad until the middle of the 1950s. As for Polish prisoners-of-war captured by the Russians, men like future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin were given the choice of fighting for the Red Army against the Germans or languishing in Soviet Gulags.

This we know from the KGB files that were made public in 1988. What we don't know is what role, if any, that the Soviets may have played in the Nazi Holocaust. What is known is that both the Bolsheviks and their enemies, the tsarist counter-revolutionaries, massacred entire Jewish villages during the Russian civil war of the 1920s. Anti-Semitism was alive and well in Russia even under Lenin. If you add up the statistics in Nora Levin's Holocaust, more than 85 per cent of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust were from the Soviet Union and the other countries of the Warsaw Pact, with over 3 million from Poland alone, and another 2 million from the republics that made up the Soviet Union. The Holocaust was most successful in countries that already had a long tradition of anti-Semitism.

If you add up the numbers of people killed in the extermination camps at Belsec, Chelmno, Lublin, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka in the Government-General of Central Poland, the numbers add up to about 500,000 or 600,000. Probably only a minority of the victims of Hitler's "Final Solution" died in the extermination camps of the Government-General. Only a minority died at Auschwitz, maybe 1.5 million, which was a combination extermination facility like those of the Government-General, and a concentration, or labour, camp like Dachau.

However, it is accepted by most reputable Holocaust historians that a decision to exterminate the Jews was made at a Nazi party conference in Wannsee, Germany, in 1942. The Nazis simply lacked the means to carry out their plans, because they were involved in a war on two fronts against the Allies and the Soviets.

However, this writer does not want to see pamphlets like Ernst Zundel's suppressed, because there is no need. There are too many eye-witness accounts and too much documentation for naysayers like Zundel to be credible: there was a Holocaust. As well, it gives Holocaust historians the opportunity to answer the question: how did 6 million Jews die in the Holocaust.

This writer believes that the majority died in places like the Warsaw Ghetto — due to starvation, disease, and the cold of winter — as well as in places like Babi Yar in Kiev. Even without the concentration camps, there was still a Nazi holocaust. It could be that more than 6 million died in the Holocaust.

But if Canadians wish to remain a free and democratic people, they would do well to remember these words attributed to Voltaire: "I may disagree with everything that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

In a democracy, even people like Ernst Zundel have freedom of speech.

Tales of the Iraqi Reconstruction

The war in Iraq is over. I repeat: the war is over, and the United States and its coalition can declare victory and go home. The Iraqi army has been beaten and Saddam Hussein has been hung. What lingers now is the Iraqi reconstruction. It is this reconstruction that has claimed the vast majority of the 4,000 US troops and at least ten times that number of Iraqis killed in the five years since the war started and ended.

Of course, I have redefined the terms, but I have done so only in the historical context of war and reconstruction. After Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox and ended the US Civil War, the United States government began its reconstruction of the vanquished South. Similarly, the victorious Allies began their reconstruction of the prostrate Third Reich after Alfred Jodl surrendered to Dwight D. Eisenhower. The reconstruction of the old Confederacy was largely a failure, whereas the reconstruction of Nazi Germany allowed Germany to rise from the ashes like a phoenix and become the pre-eminent economic power of postwar Europe.

Will the reconstruction in Iraq be a failure? It depends on who handles the reconstruction after the US elections in November. The Democrats did better in Germany after World War II than the Republicans did in the South after the Civil War. Russia is still a mess because the Republicans under Reagan "won" the Cold War, then left the reconstruction to the first George Bush.

In the February 6, 2003 edition of Le Monde, columnist Thierry de Montbrial warned that, while the United States had a grand design for a postwar Iraq, it no plan on how to go about achieving it. Well, actually, the Department of Defence had a plan: to install Ahmed Chalabi as president. It didn't bother anybody that Chalabi hadn't lived in Iraq for more than 40 years, but when everybody found out that he was the primary source of "intelligence" about the weapons of mass destruction — that he probably lied about the weapons of mass destruction — the Bush administration couldn't very well present him as a candidate to be Iraq's new president. So the best laid plans of mice and men were out a Pentagon window.

Chalabi was Plan A. Unfortunately, there was no Plan B at the Pentagon. Sensing that there was a real vacuum, the Iraqis were soon looting and settling old scores in Baghdad. The toppling of Saddam's statue was just the beginning. How many miles to the gallon does a car in Iraq get? Enough to hit its target and explode. I don't know why the insurgents didn't think to buy as many Ford Pintos from the '70s as they could, because those cars exploded on impact too, if you hit them in the rear. I don't know, maybe they don't how to drive in reverse. But those guys at the DOD needn't have worried: the insurgents didn't have a Plan B either; you don't see very many Ford Pintos around Baghdad.

Remember, folks, this is the reconstruction, not the war. The US military marched into Iraq straight to its target — Baghdad — like parts on a fast conveyor belt. Nobody in his or her right mind wants to oppose a military on the battlefield that has enough fire power to blow up the moon, and Iraqi Revolutionary Guards were apparently in their right minds. No, they decided to blend in with the crowd that was toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi message has always been: "You respect us, we respect you." When the US High Commissioner in Iraq, Paul Bremer, tried to cut out all former Iraqi Baathists from the postwar government, the Baathists felt disrespected. That was the first insurgency, the Baathist insurgency. The first battle of Fallujah ended inconclusively (at least the Marines that fought it think it ended inconclusively). After the second battle of Fallujah, the Marines had the Baathists on the run (at least the Marines think they had them on the run), and the Baathists felt respected again.

The second insurgency was started by Al-Qaida In Iraq. These were Sunnis who looked at the struggle as one of Islam against the infidel, not just Iraq against the US. Of course, the AQI insurgency was really directed by Al-Qaida outside of Iraq, but after their leader, a Jordanian by the name of Al-Zarqawi, was killed, the members of Al-Qaida both in and outside of Iraq felt respected again.

To make sure that the Sunnis of Anbar Province that supported Al-Qaida continued to feel respected, the US military started its "surge" in January under General David Petraeus. Now you have the Army and the Marines out on patrol like police officers walking a beat. It doesn't hurt that Petraeus started making nice with the Sunni sheiks in Anbar Province after they become disenchanted with Al-Qaida.

But remember, folks, this is the reconstruction, not the war. When those tanks drove all the way to Baghdad practically unopposed, the palm trees in the desert made obeisance. Nobody in his or her right mind wants to oppose a military on the battlefield with the power to destroy all life on the planet and make it look like the moon (or Iraq). The palm trees were in their right minds.

Now Muqtada al-Sadra, the leading Shiite cleric, has been complaining about getting no respect and has turned his militia, the Mahdi Army, loose. Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Malaki decided to show him some respect by sending in the army and the police into Basra and "Sadra City" in Baghdad. It turns out that some of the police in Basra were members of the Mahdi Army, but the army and the police in Baghdad have Sadra City surrounded. Right now, everybody is waiting for Muqtada al-Sadra's "spiritual advisors" in Iran to tell him if he has gotten enough respect.

If that doesn't make Muqtada al-Sadra the agent of a foreign government, I don't know what does. If I was waiting for word from Cuba's Raul Castro (see "Obituary For Fidel Castro) on whether or not I should write this blog entry, everybody would think I was working for the Cubans.

Remember, folks, this is the reconstruction. When coalition troops made a stop in the Shiite south to get some gas for their tanks, the Shiite clerics greeted the US and British troops with arms folded across their chests, scowling. If looks could kill, US casualties in Iraq might be double or triple what they are today. If you believe the photographs in magazines like Newsweek, Muqtada al-Sadra has a look that could wipe out whole divisions.

The Shiites remember how the coalition did nothing when they rose up in revolt against Saddam Hussein during the war in Kuwait and got cut down. This writer remembers seeing the video of the inside of an Iraqi hospital under bombardment by the Revolutionary Guards. Just before the Baathists (apparently) destroyed their target, a woman waved her arms frantically in the air and screamed, "We can't cope!" But the video was in subtitles: this writer doesn't speak Arabic.

Face to face with an enemy having the ability to land beachheads at Normandy, Anzio and North Africa at the same, the Shiites in Basra knew that they couldn't cope very well with a full frontal assault by the Marines any better than they could against Saddam. They were in their right minds — at least then.

To quote an obscure song by Led Zeppelin, "The Battle of Evermore": "The pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath."

This is the reconstruction, and it has cost the US — and the entire world— more than both wars in Iraq combined. The US will have to declare victory and go home, eventually.

The war is over.

Goodbye, Poverty!

What happened to communism in Russia? Foreign companies are free to invest their money in the Russian economy now. The Russians are free to make money hand over fist. That's capitalism, isn't it? Its glasnost and perestroika, the end of the welfare state in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It is as if the Russians have lost a war against the West, the way the Russian economy is now a shambles. But things are really moving here.

Anna is a woman of a certain age, born in Baku, over forty, divorced, the mother of a teenage daughter who is not yet sixteen. She is a secondary school teacher, but she sees an ad in a newspaper: a foreign company is looking for a translator who speaks English and French. Anna fits the bill: she speaks English, French and German as well as Russian. What's more, the job pays more money than a teacher's job.

For the interview, she meets Mr. Chernier, who is the owner of the company. Born in Montreal, Mr. Chernier is over fifty, but he possesses a certain charm. After the interview, while holding her hand, he says to her in a low voice: "What beautiful eyes you have, Madame!" Then he plants a little kiss on her hand.

Anna blushes very much, but she manages to say thank you. Of course, she gets the job as translator for Mr. Chevrier. The moment that Mr. Chernier asks Anna to have dinner with her, to sleep with him, she says yes and kisses him on the mouth. She will spend many nights at his place, in a little dacha in the countryside. She will learn to speak French better, as well as English. While making love to her, he always says that he loves her entire body, which is pleasantly plump. She will bloom like a flower in the little dacha, because he knows how to treat a woman. As well, he knows that the only difference between age and youth is experience.

It isn't love, it isn't even sex that makes her do it. No, it's hunger. Although Anna has a college degree, she lives with her daughter in a little apartment without much to eat in the refrigerator. Her ex-husband neither sees nor supports their daughter; he's merely a drunk. At night then, Anna sleeps on a hard sofa in the little living room while Natasha sleeps in the little bedroom. Its rare that the water in the little bathroom and the little kitchen is hot. Every morning, nearly every day, they are hungry.

Ever the skeptic, the little cynic, Natasha doesn't like Mr. Chernier at first. The way she sees it, her mother is only fooling herself if she thinks that Mr. Chernier is going to marry her. However, she knows that her mother isn't going to listen to her advice. Besides, he's teaching her to drive his brand new car. When she needs an abortion, he gladly pays for it. Then he lets them live with him in his beautiful little dacha in the countryside. Maybe Mr. Chernier isn't such a bad guy: it seems that he and her mother are really hitting it off. But little Natasha gives her mother this advice: "Get some money from him!"

Now, Anna and Natasha are Jewish. Though Mr. Chernier isn't Jewish, Anna invites him to spend a Passover seder on the Sabbath with her parents; he accepts the invitation. It's an interesting experience. Everybody really gets drunk, including Natasha, who is only a teenager. Mr. Chernier seems to like Anna's family. Her family seems to like him. Maybe their relationship is getting serious. They even kiss under the mezuzah.

Alas, it will never happen: they will never get married. Mr. Chernier leaves Russia for good when his wife in Canada is stricken with a sudden illness. Of course, Anna is dumbstruck; she didn't know that he was married. He says that he's sorry, but she gives him a good slap in the face.

The hard reality is this: Anna and Natasha have to leave the beautiful little dacha in the countryside; somebody has been renting it to Mr. Chernier. Without jobs, without an apartment, Anna and Natasha have to live with some relatives until they find jobs and an apartment.

It's hello poverty again!

Another Look at 1984

Probably most people born after World War II are familiar with George Orwell's landmark 1948 novel 1984. In this novel, Orwell presents a world where the governments knows your innermost thoughts even before you do. The "wrong" facial expression caught on the "telescreen" can result in you being convicted of a "thought crime," which is the crime of thinking the "wrong" thoughts.

The protagonist, Winston Hill, is a lower-level civil servant in the service of Big Brother in the futuristic state of Oceana (which is Britain, Canada and the rest of the English-speaking world). His world is turned upside down when he falls in love with Julia, another civil servant. They have regular rendezvous and compare notes, but they are denounced by another civil servant, O'Brien, who pretends to be their friend. In the end, they realize that they cannot win and end up denouncing each other. Big Brother's victory is complete when Winston loves him again. After that, it is safe to liquidate him, because you can't liquidate someone until you have won him back to your side.

Thanks to Orwell, most of us have some concept of "thought crime." However, we still don't understand how a would-be führer invites himself over as a guest and makes himself master of the household. The answer, in part, is that the despot cleans up the mess that the politicians make, and the citizens allow the politicians to make. Things got so bad in the Weimar Republic that the Germans were willing to give Hitler and his stormtrooopers free rein. But that's only part of the answer.

What democracies have in common with totalitarian regimes is that the majority of the people in jail are criminals. This was true in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein as well as in the United States. Most of the "boat people" that Fidel Castro deported from Cuba in the 1970s — the Marielitos — were the kind that anybody would like to deport: hardened criminals. The largest branch of the SS in the Third Reich was the Kripo, or "criminal police." The Kripo not only included every beat cop in Germany, but every cop in Nazi-occupied Europe as well.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn mentions in his Gulag Archipelago that political prisoners were thrown in with hardened criminals. The dissidents were at the mercy of these felons because they were in the minority. Most of the people exiled to Siberia in the 1930s were rapists, murders and thieves, not political subversives. What's more, most of them didn't come from very far away from where they lived, maybe only a hundred miles or less. Most of the dissidents in Moscow were sent to Lubianka Prison, which was just outside the city.

In the totalitarian state, it is not a question of freedom but of crime and punishment. Most undesirables in dictatorships would be undesirables in democracies as well.

Unfortunately, we are not made cognizant of that in 1984. You would think that nobody shoplifts in Oceana or breaks into other people's homes while they are away. There's no mention of people arrested for loitering around London opium dens or trying to smuggle hashish through customs at Heathrow Airport. Nobody commits murder, except for the state. Big Brother only prosecutes people for wanting to overthrow the government, at least in the world according to Orwell.

If it was possible to read people's minds, the prosecutor with evidence that a man was contemplating rape, for example, would be obliged to prosecute, wouldn't he? This has nothing to do with civil liberties or "freedom of thought"; it is a question of public safety. It is one thing to contemplate voting for the opposition party in an election; it is another to think of harming a fellow citizen. With rights come responsibilities.

Invariably, dictators come to power through quasi-legal means; usually, there's a crisis that precipitates their takeover. In the "Kornilov Affair," Lenin and the Bolsheviks moved to prevent a tsarist general, Lavr Kornilov, from mounting a coup and emerged the strongest party in the Russian Duma just before the October Revolution. Mussolini overthrew the Italian government to "prevent" a communist takeover. The Nazis set fire to the Reichstag and blamed it on the communists. The list goes on and on.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Most dictators have been fiery demagogues who suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus in the name of values that the people hold most dear: God and country, law and order, life and liberty, whatever. They promise more police protection in order to deal with the "crisis" and throw the bad guys in jail. They don't go to the people and say: "I'm your new dictator, so get used to it."

In 1984, you get a bleak picture of life in a totalitarian dictatorship, but not of how things got to be the way they are now. There's a sense of permanence, like that's the way it's always been. There's no Reichstag fire or "July Days" preceding the coup d'état, just the mention of a clique of party apparachiks who have fallen out of favour trying to overthrow Big Brother after the fact of Big Brother's takeover. Sort of like the fallout between Stalin and Trotsky after Lenin's death in 1924.

George Orwell, who was born in Britain — one of the great democracies — hints at a perpetual war — like maybe World War II, which then proceded into the cold war with barely a pause. Other than the fact that Big Brother's image is every where, he seems to be a leader entirely without personality, like George W. Bush in the US, Stephen Harper in Canada, and Gordon Brown in Britain. Gone is the fiery demogoque like Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini. The world today is a corporate state run by faceless men in business suits who make their decisions in corporate board rooms in secret.

This runs entirely contrary to the theory of democracy, because in a democracy, power is at the base of the pyramid (at least in theory). In hierarchies like the corporation, the military or churches, shit rolls downhill.

The world today finds itself in the midst of a vague "war on terror," where the terrorists are not seen as criminals in the conventional sense, but certainly not seen as soldiers when captured in battle either. They are seen as outside both the Geneva Convention and the jurisdiction of the World Court, which means that nobody knows what to do with them. As well, most of the parties involved are nameless and faceless, leaders as well as followers.

In the aftermath of 9/11, it might be more useful to know how something arguably well-intentioned like the Patriot Act could be used to destroy civil liberties and impose totalitarianism on an unsuspecting populace — or a populace that knows what's going on but is afraid or feels powerless to act. It might be useful to know why we can't look past temporary crises and see what we might be throwing away, like our freedom. We already know that Big Brother is watching us.

What makes the cult of personality surrounding Big Brother possible in 1984 is technology. Just as we are surrounded by surveillance cameras everywhere today, sixty years after 1984 was published, there are telescreens everywhere in Orwell's Oceana. Neither Hitler nor Stalin had the means to watch the people ruled by them like George W. Bush does today; such powers was only the hands of a fictional dictator like Big Brother — only dreamed of by someone like Orwell back in 1948.

Of course, technology does not a tyrant make. Otherwise, the technology at Abraham Lincoln's disposal during the US Civil War would have made him, by definition, more of a despot than the mad Roman emperor, Caligula, in the first century BC. Besides, it is the market place that benefits most from new technology. New inventions like the iPod have resulted in the start-up of new industries that didn't exist only a short time ago, and this has created economic growth as a whole. However, technology has the potential to give somebody like Caligula the means by which to take an empire by the neck and sever the head. That's a lot of power.

The temptation surrounding 1984 has always been to accept it as immutable prophecy when it really reads more like a cautionary tale (along with Orwell's fable, Animal Farm.) If the stakes weren't so serious, one might be tempted to look at Winston and Julia's inevitable demise as something laughable, the well-deserved fate of the gullible. Today, we think that it takes a certain naïvité to ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. However, somebody will probably resurrect this quote someday and use it in a speech, just as John F. Kennedy borrowed it from Cicero for his inauguration speech in 1961.

And so I leave you with the words from Shakespeare that inspired another cautionary tale of creeping totalitarianism by Aldous Huxley:

"O wonder, what goodly creatures there are! O brave new world that has such people in't!"

Brave new world indeed! We must control technology rather than let it control us, or let our leaders control us through it.