Oliver Stone: "1984 Is Here"

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right" — George Orwell

We've been keeping an eye on the insanity oozing out of the States over the last week. Not surprisingly, Oliver Stone has produced one of the most succinct, on-point commentaries about Charlottesville and the resulting madness. 

Sorry, but we just don't buy this idea that fighting (apparently to the death) over Confederate statues is a top priority for most Americans right now. No doubt it serves as a convenient and extremely lame ideological battle for weirdos on the far, far right and far, far left to salivate over. Meanwhile, the military-industrial security state is celebrating with hooker-and-champagne bubble baths as new excuses are created to gut the Bill of Rights and pit debt slaves who want to have a beer with Hillary Clinton against debt slaves who want to have a beer with Donald Trump. 

"So it goes".

Via Hollywood Reporter:

"You are all trying to get to Trump every day, but there is a bigger problem," the filmmaker said when asked what he thought of President Trump's initial failure to call out white supremacists in his response to the Charlottesville events.

"There is a system [in America], and that system existed before Trump," Stone said. "Putin said this is the fourth [U.S.] president where nothing has changed. There is a deep state, a military industrial security state. ... It is the system that has to be challenged. [Trump] is part of that system."

He reiterated: "It is the system that has to be challenged. That takes work and is never as exciting as talking about some lunatic president."

Visibly more comfortable taking questions on Snowden, a dramatization of the story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, than talking about current events, Stone added that the situation in the U.S. today was scarily close to the kind of world George Orwell wrote about in his futuristic novel 1984.

"1984 is here. We are there. The only thing they have not yet done is to erase history … there are still people who remember things," he said. "One week it is terrorism [that dominates the headlines], the next week Putin and the next Korea."

It was, Stone said, "just like Hate Week in 1984, where the name of the country and the face of the leader changes halfway through a rally. They are doing it now and getting away with it."

[...]

Stone added that he had learned a lot from the Russian leader about how the "geopolitical balance" works in the world.