They took down the first blog I wrote - which had over 400,000 followers and contained links to Youtube lessons on the old unabridged histories and thousands of essays written by people from all over the world on the old literature. Then they took the second blog which had about 40,000 followers and considerably less content but a great active forum. Then they took the third blog which had 1,500 hardcore followers and the little educative content I could salvage from elsewhere. I wouldn't give up though. So they took down the fourth blog which had about a hundred followers and simply my own opinions on the state of things. Then they took my son and I stopped blogging.
We have an opportunity to stop this. The Platform competition on Saturday. We could win the chance to spread our message to the world that it's our minds that set us free. But I need your help. Having found a way to the other side of the Authority's great firewall this will be my final blog...
I can’t really tell you why I stole that book. There wasn’t anything particularly attractive about it, and it bore absolutely no significance to my research interests. Yet for some reason I was drawn to it and found myself deliberately walking past and staring at it on the increasingly infrequent occasions that I was able to gain access to the old non-digital library. The passing of the new cultural purification act had made borrowing any book from the library extremely risky for even the most senior members of staff and I knew that with my reputation any attempt to carry out such a stunt would have be back in the Dean’s office faster than you can say Jerome de Groot. I suppose deep down I wanted this moldering little book because, because it was old, because it was a little piece of history, because it helped me - even if only for an instant - to forget about the compulsory e-learning, the dumbing down, the thinly veiled threats to my tenure. So one day I just took it, head down, heart pounding waiting for an alarm to sound, a shouting voice telling me to stop. No alarm sounded, no angry voice haltered my guilty walk home. Two weeks after I took the book the library was nothing more than a smoking ruin, a victim in the first wave of the great burnings. This little book became more significant than I could have ever anticipated. It has made me the most unlikely of renegades, a cultural criminal, an enemy of the state, a father who will never see his son again.
Now here is a question for all of you, who is the real criminal here? A man who has dedicated his life to nothing more than the peaceful pursuit of knowledge, to the preservation and dissemination of wisdom? Or a regime that burns books, that edits and re-writes the course of human history to hide its own atrocities. A regime that has taken the great literature - the very pinnacle of human cultural achievement - and mutilated it. The crude and offensive parodies that it has produced serve as the foot soldiers in a great war that is being waged in front of the eyes of an oblivious population. The authority is fighting a campaign to make us forget who we are, where we come from, what it is that makes us human. We must not allow this to happen - no matter how high the personal cost - we must fight to protect the knowledge of previous generations – it is our birthright.
That is why this weekend is so important. This Saturday we have a chance to put an end to the ongoing rape and pillaging of our culture. We have a chance to access the Platform, to speak to the nation, to shake people from their complacency and reconnect them with the thousands of years of human history that this ‘authority is seeking to destroy.’ We need your help though - if we are to win the Platform competition against the other Factions- so I hope to see you at the secret rendezvous (it’s my little undercover classroom).
Bring your favourite book, but keep it hidden, as you well know it’s an imprisonable offence to be caught with such an object - but holding it will show your solidarity. If we do not have words we are nothing and the Authority has already won.
Winston Smith.
We have an opportunity to stop this. The Platform competition on Saturday. We could win the chance to spread our message to the world that it's our minds that set us free. But I need your help. Having found a way to the other side of the Authority's great firewall this will be my final blog...
A FINAL POST
Before they closed the College, and after a particularly depressing meeting with the Dean I decided to take another little break from the official authority curriculum and pose my students an altogether different sort of problem. How does Romeo and Juliet actually end? Cue nervous laughter. Half of the students hadn’t even read the new ‘remastered’ digital version that was the only officially sanctioned version available. After a moments pause to see if I was really being serious, those that had read it dutifully regurgitated the following: “Juliet married Paris as he was the most socially and economically appropriate suitor for her hand” One little shit went even further adding that “this was in accordance with her father’s wishes.” I can remember him looking at me with this dumb grin, as if he was waiting for an extra credit mark or something. Not one of my students answered Romeo. I wonder if anybody in the English lit department would have even have known the answer, or had the courage to share it. Hell, the only reason why I know is because I sneaked that old Shakespeare compendium out of the library.I can’t really tell you why I stole that book. There wasn’t anything particularly attractive about it, and it bore absolutely no significance to my research interests. Yet for some reason I was drawn to it and found myself deliberately walking past and staring at it on the increasingly infrequent occasions that I was able to gain access to the old non-digital library. The passing of the new cultural purification act had made borrowing any book from the library extremely risky for even the most senior members of staff and I knew that with my reputation any attempt to carry out such a stunt would have be back in the Dean’s office faster than you can say Jerome de Groot. I suppose deep down I wanted this moldering little book because, because it was old, because it was a little piece of history, because it helped me - even if only for an instant - to forget about the compulsory e-learning, the dumbing down, the thinly veiled threats to my tenure. So one day I just took it, head down, heart pounding waiting for an alarm to sound, a shouting voice telling me to stop. No alarm sounded, no angry voice haltered my guilty walk home. Two weeks after I took the book the library was nothing more than a smoking ruin, a victim in the first wave of the great burnings. This little book became more significant than I could have ever anticipated. It has made me the most unlikely of renegades, a cultural criminal, an enemy of the state, a father who will never see his son again.
Now here is a question for all of you, who is the real criminal here? A man who has dedicated his life to nothing more than the peaceful pursuit of knowledge, to the preservation and dissemination of wisdom? Or a regime that burns books, that edits and re-writes the course of human history to hide its own atrocities. A regime that has taken the great literature - the very pinnacle of human cultural achievement - and mutilated it. The crude and offensive parodies that it has produced serve as the foot soldiers in a great war that is being waged in front of the eyes of an oblivious population. The authority is fighting a campaign to make us forget who we are, where we come from, what it is that makes us human. We must not allow this to happen - no matter how high the personal cost - we must fight to protect the knowledge of previous generations – it is our birthright.
That is why this weekend is so important. This Saturday we have a chance to put an end to the ongoing rape and pillaging of our culture. We have a chance to access the Platform, to speak to the nation, to shake people from their complacency and reconnect them with the thousands of years of human history that this ‘authority is seeking to destroy.’ We need your help though - if we are to win the Platform competition against the other Factions- so I hope to see you at the secret rendezvous (it’s my little undercover classroom).
Bring your favourite book, but keep it hidden, as you well know it’s an imprisonable offence to be caught with such an object - but holding it will show your solidarity. If we do not have words we are nothing and the Authority has already won.
Winston Smith.
