Carnes 1

Jake Carnes

Period 4

ERWC

Oblivion

What do previous centurys governments, a work of science fiction and one of the

most respected and acknowledged intelligence agencies all have in common? As the

masquerade of OBrien told Winston at the beginning of 1984, Reality exists in the

human mind, and nowhere else. Keeping this perspective in the realm of thought and

governing power of a party or group allows them to achieve absolute control over their

citizens, and therefore can manipulate what each individual sees and believes as real or

not. Given this irrational perspective taking hold over the populous in 1984 and in Great

Depression-era Europe, it is therefore, impossible for scientific progress to exist as

there is no need or way to initiate it with this definition of truth. Given the famous quote

those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, having the nature of reality as

absolute control over individual thought by a governing entity as a certainty and

preventing scientific progress from shedding a glimmer of hope, present day governing

peoples such as the CIA are doomed to repeat it.

As a former director of the CIA, William Casey proclaimed: Well know our

disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is

false. This is a man who headed perhaps the most powerful and secret muscle of the

United States and the man who could influence the very way people think. As seen in

the late 1940s in Italy, a country that had just been ripped away from the Swastika and

dictatorship, and was about to be binded to the Hammer and Sickle. The Italian
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Communist Party (PCI) has in a life and death game of tug-of-war with the Western-

backed Christian Democrats over the future of one of the most progressive countries in

Europe prior to the twentieth century. As the PCI suddenly had more seats in

Constituent Assembly (the boost coming from the equally left Italian Socialist Party,

PSI), the Western Christian Democrats began to see the Italian people diverging away

from the free world, and into the one behind the curtain. After the PCI and the PSI joined

forces officially and became the Popular Democratic Front (FDP) to take on the

Christian Democrats and the forces of the right, the writing on the walls seemed to

become tattoos in the skin of every leftist-Italian: we will bathe in Russian Red. That

was until the CIA got involved and began issuing propaganda to Italians who emigrated

to the United States urging them to tell their loved ones back in Italy to vote to stay free.

Furthermore, CIA agents and collaborators throughout Italy and non-Soviet Southern

Europe began to hand out bribes to influential voters or persons to vote for the Christian

Democrats, and to carry out assassinations on those who wanted Italy to go backstage

behind the Iron Curtain.

In the end, Italy did not end up falling into Soviet hands, and as we can see with

its coastal neighbor Albania, that probably wasnt a bad thing (afterall Margaret

Thatcher was one to say that it was the most Marxist State in the World after 1991). The

fact remains however that the CIA did meddle with the Italian elections and has to this

day, controlled reality for the Italian people. But no matter, for every action, there is an

equal and opposite reaction, as Americans saw last year, the Russians pointed the

revenge gun at the US thus altering the prized free elections and allowed a certain

orange-faced and blonde-haired man to walk into the whitest house on Earth.
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The CIA for its part has done many terrible things just as the thought police did in

1984 to control the reality of its citizens. Just as Winston and Julia were being tortured

until their mind quite literally torn apart, the CIA back in the 1970s (and possibly is still

being done in some variation, but thats a different discussion) instituted a program

called Project MK Ultra. This program in the words of comedian John Lennon: We must

always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD- They invented LSD to control

people and what they did was give us freedom and prior to there being any media

probes that eventually stopped the study, the CIA did indeed invent Lysergic acid

diethylamide as a substance to perform the same role as unknown substances played a

role in OBrien eventually breaking Winston. The previous reference to the Army in Mr.

Lennons quote has to do with the Army bringing Prisoners of War (POWs) to the CIA to

be tested against their will, just as the Oceania army was hinted at doing with troops of

Eurasia. Furthermore, just as the Party did with citizens in London, the CIA tested

American citizens with substances through experimentation to achieve the way to break

free will.

Just as past governments have done, a futuristic novel written coincidentally

written just months after the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) changed its soul to that

of the CIA, and as the modern CIA of our generation continues to do in the words of

Josef Mengele (the Angel of Death), The more we do to you the less you seem to

believe that we are doing it: altering the perception of reality and truth. Its no secret

that 1984s perception of reality is an increasingly closer possibility (hence why people

are afraid of it), however, whos to say that we arent already in it? After all: Deception

is a state of mind and the mind of the state -James Angleton

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Works Cited:

Orwell, George. 1984. Secker & Warburg, 1949

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Robert T. Holt and Robert W. van de Velde, Strategic Psychological Operations

and American Foreign Policy. University of Chicago Press, 1960.

William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA. AbeBooks, 1978.

Blum, William. Killing Hope: US and CIA interventions since World War II.

Common Courage Press, 2004